Ben Reifel

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.

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.

In 1931, he had been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army Reserve.

Reifel graduated with a B.S. in agriculture in 1932.

He was elected the President of the Students' Association during his senior year.

Following his graduation in 1932, Reifel was hired by Hare's School in Mission, South Dakota as an adviser for boys.

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.

He began working at the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in 1933; he was assigned to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation as a farm agent to the Oglala Lakota.

After a year, he was promoted to field agent at the Pierre, South Dakota regional headquarters.

Reifel's duties included promoting the new programs of the Indian Reorganization Act, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934.

Allotment of reservation lands was ended, to enable tribes to hold communal lands and better preserve their territories.

Under the new law, tribes could reorganize self governments.

They were encouraged to write constitutions and to use models of elected government proposed by the BIA, rather than the life chiefs previously supported by the clans.

The American Indian people had endured hard times during the Great Depression, as well as the drought that caused Dust Bowl conditions in some parts of the Great Plains.

Reifel was largely successful in garnering support for the Act.

He started at Pine Ridge and later made his way to other reservations in South Dakota, ensuring that the programs of the Bureau were effective in the South Dakota reservations.

Reifel's BIA career was interrupted by World War II.

In March 1942, the Army ordered Reifel to active duty, and he served until July 1946.

He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

After being discharged, Reifel continued working for the BIA.

He was selected as a Tribal Relations Officer and later promoted to the position as Superintendent of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

In 1949 Reifel was awarded a scholarship to study public administration at Harvard University under a Civil Service Commission program for management development of career government officials.

He earned his master's degree in 1949.

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.

He received a John Hay Whitney Foundation Opportunity Fellowship and completed his Doctorate in Public Administration in 1952.

Following his graduation, Reifel returned to the BIA.

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.