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Concept
Ben Reifel
Summary
Benjamin Reifel (September 19, 1906 – January 2, 1990), also known as Lone Feather (Lakota: Wíyaka Waŋžíla), was a Lakota Sioux public administrator and politician. He had a career with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, retiring as area administrator. He ran for the US Congress from the East River region of South Dakota, and was elected as the first Lakota to serve in the House of Representatives. He served five terms as a Republican United States Congressman from the (now obsolete) First District.
Born on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Reifel graduated from South Dakota State University. During World War II he achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel. He worked for the Department of the Interior beginning in 1933, retiring as the Aberdeen, South Dakota area administrator of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in March 1960. Awarded a mid-career fellowship in public administration to Harvard University for a master's degree, he went on to earn his PhD in 1952. Elected to the Eighty-seventh Congress and to the four succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1961 – January 3, 1971), Reifel chose not to run in 1970.
Reifel was born in a log cabin near Parmelee, South Dakota, on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. He was the son of Lucy Burning Breast, a Lakota Sioux, and William Reifel, of German descent. Ben Reifel was enrolled in the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and his Lakota name means "Lone Feather" in English. He attended a Todd County school as well as the Rosebud Reservation boarding school as a child. He graduated at the age of sixteen from the eighth grade, speaking both English and Lakota.
For three years Reifel worked on his family's farm before entering the School of Agriculture, a vocational high school in Brookings, South Dakota. After finishing high school in 1928, Reifel enrolled at South Dakota State College. He paid his own tuition for his first four years of schooling. He took out one of the first loans offered to Native American students under a Merriam Report-recommended Indian education program. Reifel graduated with a B.S.
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