American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This paper demonstrates the utility of the concept of social class for understanding reservation politics, while suggesting the most theoretical models of and for class analysis are inadequate for such an enterprise. A relational model of class dynamics is used to interpret the effects of agrarian transformation on the Fort Berthold reservation in central North Dakota, where the first-person accounts presented above were recorded during 1990. At that time, the most recent ”farm crisis’’ had gripped much of rural America for a decade. Fort Berthold was one of several reservation communities in the agriculturally dependent northern Plains at risk of losing lands mortgaged by tribal members through loan foreclosures or voluntary conveyance. The deflation of the reservation’s livestock-based agrarian sector and the potential for land alienation generated a maelstrom of conflict between the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the Three Affiliated Tribes (TAT: Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara), tribal farm and ranch operators, Farmer’s Home Administration (FmHA), and others.