Pine Ridge Leader Faces Battle Over Abortion Ban

Cecelia Fire Thunder, the first woman elected president of the Oglala Sioux Nation, faces impeachment Thursday because of her plan to open an abortion clinic on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the southwest corner of South Dakota.

A year and a half ago, Fire Thunder, a 59-year-old nurse, swept into office, beating famed American Indian Movement leader Russell Means, whose arguments against her included that she is a woman.

Last spring South Dakota's Governor Mike Rounds signed into law the most sweeping abortion ban in the nation, which permitted abortion only to save the life of a woman. Only last week pro-choice advocates learned they'd collected enough signatures to put the ban on the November ballot, thus halting a July 1 start date.

"I got really angry about a bunch of white guys making decisions about my body," Fire Thunder said in an interview last week.

Yet in the days when the ban seemed imminent, Fire Thunder told a newspaper columnist of her plan to open a clinic on the reservation, which operates under U.S. federal law rather than state law.

The news spread like wild fire over the Internet -- those journalists who couldn't reach Fire Thunder relied on other reports and even bloggers for information -- about the president who vowed to open an abortion clinic. Little attention was paid to the tribal government, which had grave doubts about Fire Thunder's pro-choice efforts.

Fire Thunder said that a group of Oglala women had been talking for some time about opening a reproductive health clinic where abortion and other health services could be available locally.

From Pine Ridge, it's a 300-mile drive across South Dakota to Sioux Falls and the nearest abortion clinic. After the ban became law, Fire Thunder realized that the clinic could operate independently of South Dakota laws on the reservation and serve all women.

Yet she didn't anticipate the strength of the anti-abortion sentiment on the reservation. Members of Reservation churches marched against her; others called for her ouster and for an abortion ban as strict as the state's.

"She put her presidency in jeopardy because she is so committed to helping Native American women," said Charon Asetoyer, director of the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center, a nonprofit organization located on Yankton Sioux Reservation.

Raucous Tribal Politics

In the raucous world of Oglala Sioux politics it's not unusual for tribal councils to reprimand presidents, who seem to diverge too far from the council's interests, with suspension and impeachment.

Still, Fire Thunder's year and a half in office has been one for the record books. She's been suspended three times and threatened with impeachment twice. Even her critics say the earlier attacks on her presidency were aimed at management problems that predated Fire Thunder's administration.

The underlying fact of life in Shannon County, which is dominated by the Pine Ridge Reservation, is economic poverty. The county is consistently ranked each decade by the U.S. Census as the poorest in the nation, while the reservation endures 85 percent unemployment. "You can't control poverty," Fire Thunder said, "until you can control population."

Legal abortion, Fire Thunder said, is particularly important for Native American women, who lack access to birth control, who tend to live in poverty and who face epidemic sexual violence.

Native American women are raped three times more often than women of all other races in the United States, according to 1999 U.S. Department of Justice data.

Abortion, Fire Thunder said, is part of the aboriginal right of tribal women throughout North America. Until the advent of missionaries and their boarding schools a century ago, the knowledge of terminating pregnancies, both physically and spiritually, was passed down through women's societies.