Last fall, the State-Tribal Relations Committee asked the Legislature to push the Department of Homeland Security to establish a tribal police academy in South Dakota. The 2026 Legislature passed a resolution (HCR 6001) to that effect, over the objection of a few ICEy wingnuts who probably don’t want the thin blue line getting tinged with red.
But Kristi Noem, who as Secretary of Homeland Security showed was really good at speeding Department dollars to her chums, was apparently too distracted to notice her homeys’ cry for some pork pork (and given ICE’s fascism and local cops’ cash-induced collaboration, is it time to start calling cops “pigs” again?). And now that Kristi’s gone, another former governor turned Cabinet member who knows how to keep and use his position has tossed the Indian police academy to a facility in his home state:
Camp Grafton, a North Dakota National Guard base near Devils Lake, is currently the site of advanced law enforcement training for the BIA. It’s now set to host basic law enforcement training for BIA recruits, as well as for recruits from local tribal police departments, law enforcement communications and correctional agencies.
The news was tucked into a wider-reaching executive order from U.S. Interior Secretary and former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum to create an Indian Country Violent Crime Task Force.
…Burgum advocated to bring BIA basic training to Camp Grafton while serving as North Dakota governor.
During a U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs field hearing in 2019 in Bismarck, he said a Camp Grafton BIA academy would help recruit tribal officers across the region [link added; John Hult, “Tribal Law Enforcement Academy, Requested by South Dakota, Will Be Located in North Dakota,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2026.05.06].
Burgum’s order says basic training courses for Indian cops are to begin “in the second quarter of fiscal year 2026”, which Hult points out began in January. Hult couldn’t get an answer from Interior on when basic training will actually start.
Camp Grafton and Devil’s Lake are a shorter drive for South Dakota’s aspiring tribal cops than the national BIA cop school in Artesia, New Mexico. But we missed a chance to train our tribal police here and bring another steady stream of federal dollars to stimulate the economy in Pierre, Flandreau, or Pine Ridge.