South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation covers 5,400 square miles. The size of Connecticut. Thirty-three officers patrol it. They field more than 100,000 emergency calls a year. Response times run thirty minutes to an hour. For weapons calls, longer. Sometimes nobody comes at all. By federal standards, Pine Ridge should have 113 officers. It has 33. In 2023, the Oglala Sioux Tribe sued the federal government over it.

Nationally, fewer than 3,000 Bureau of Indian Affairs officers patrol more than 56 million acres of Indian land. The BIA’s own numbers say it needs an additional 2,800 officers — just to reach the average staffing levels of comparable non-Indian communities. That’s not a goal. That’s a confession of how far below average the current number sits.

Recruits who want to serve these communities train at a federal facility in Artesia, New Mexico. Thousands of miles from the land they’re trying to protect.

In January 2026, the South Dakota legislature passed HCR 6001 — a bipartisan resolution urging the establishment of a tribal law enforcement training academy in South Dakota. The final House vote was 69-0. The state has nine reservations. The need is not theoretical.

The resolution was addressed to the Department of Homeland Security.

The Secretary of Homeland Security is Kristi Noem. Former governor of South Dakota. In 2024, all nine of the state’s tribes voted to ban her from their reservations after she accused tribal leaders of personally benefiting from drug cartel activity. Tribal leaders called the allegations baseless. She was banned from nearly 20 percent of her own state.

HCR 6001 landed on her desk. She did not act on it.

The legislature had seen something coming. They added an amendment: the academy could not be used to train ICE officers or serve as an ICE detention facility. They wrote it down because they knew what might happen if they didn’t.

On May 5 — Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples Awareness Day — Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued Secretary’s Order 3450, titled “Honoring Our Commitment to Protecting Indian Country Communities.” The order establishes an Indian Country Violent Crime Task Force, a Predatory Crimes Unit targeting crimes against children, and expanded law enforcement training.

The training will happen at Camp Grafton. A National Guard base near Devils Lake, North Dakota. Burgum’s home state. He first advocated for BIA training at Camp Grafton while serving as North Dakota’s governor, raising the issue in a 2019 Senate committee hearing.

South Dakota asked. North Dakota received.

Camp Grafton is closer to the Dakotas than Artesia, New Mexico. That part is real. The training, if it materializes, will help. South Dakota’s Attorney General Marty Jackley called it “a step in the right direction” but said he’d keep pushing for a South Dakota facility because of “travel and accessibility challenges.” The timeline is unclear. Burgum’s order directs curriculum development “beginning in the second quarter of fiscal year 2026.” Interior has not confirmed whether training has actually started.

So: a state with nine reservations and a tribal policing crisis passed a unanimous resolution asking for help. The request went to a cabinet secretary who was banned from every reservation in that state. She didn’t answer. A different cabinet secretary answered — by putting the academy in his own state. The order was announced on MMIP Awareness Day, by the same administration that classified the Not Invisible Act’s 212-page MMIP report as DEI and deleted it from public access.

The task force may do good work. The Predatory Crimes Unit may protect children. Camp Grafton may graduate officers who serve Indian Country with honor. None of that is the point.

The point is that 33 officers answer 100,000 calls across 5,400 square miles, and when the state those officers serve asked for a training academy, the answer was not “yes.” The answer was “yes, but somewhere else, for someone else’s résumé.”

The order is called “Honoring Our Commitment to Protecting Indian Country Communities.”

The commitment sounds beautiful. You could almost tap your foot to it.

// NEON BLOOD

Sources: South Dakota Searchlight, Dakota Free Press, U.S. Department of the Interior, KOTA TV, Al Jazeera, NPR, LegiScan