RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – Science, the Legend-200, dark matter, and more science.

Tuesday, South Dakota Mines hosted the 5th Annual Conference on Science at the Sanford Underground Research Facility.

Lectures on science echoed throughout the halls of the Classroom Building at the School of Mines campus.

A mix of undergraduate and graduate students were in attendance to learn about the variety of research and experiments that take place at the SURF underground facility.

“This conference very unique because they bring different researchers from different fields. We don’t always have this kind of conference in other places,” says Mines Physics Assistant Professor Dr. Jingbo Wang.

He added the National Science Foundation awards a conference grant to support young researchers at Mines. Wang says the conference provides students a chance for their work to get noticed.

“They can get in touch in-person with the most interesting, the most compelling researchers in the field. And they have the opportunity to present their own work and make themselves exposed to the wider community,” says Wang.

During lectures, attendees learned about the Legend-200 experiment created by Mines students and faculty.

“That’s an outgrowth of the Majorana demonstrator technology. They needed the world’s purest copper to in order to reduce the backgrounds to see the possibility of seeing a rare nuclear decay,” says SURF Science Director Jaret Heise.

A questions and answers session took place after lectures to provide students a chance to better their understanding of recent progress in underground physics and other fields.

Wang says the conference is a beneficial experience for everyone involved.

“I can see the most advanced developments of the field, and for our students, they can apply the knowledge that they learn from our graduate or end of graduate programming to those presentations,” says Wang.

The Conference on Science at SURF will run through Thursday.

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Gov. Kristi Noem appointed a former Oglala Sioux Tribe Department of Public Safety chief to a post in the state’s Department of Tribal Relations on Tuesday, alleging he “found himself without a job” for speaking up about drug cartels on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

The appointment of Algin Young as tribal law enforcement liaison came as another tribe voted to ban the governor from its lands, and as questions arose about the impact of a ban voted on by another South Dakota tribe.

Sixth tribal nation bans Noem for comments on cartels, Native children

The Crow Creek Sioux Tribe voted to ban Noem from its lands Tuesday morning, Chairman Peter Lengkeek told South Dakota Public Broadcasting. The Yankton Sioux Tribe’s Business and Claims Committee, the highest-level elected body for that nation, voted to support a ban last week, though it’s since been pointed out that such a ban would not be final and enforceable without a vote of tribal members. The tribes were the sixth and seventh of the nine tribes in the state to vote in favor of banning the governor so far this year.

The recent spate of conflicts with the state’s tribes began on Jan. 31, when the governor delivered a speech on U.S. border policy to a joint session of the South Dakota Legislature. In it, she described the southern border of the U.S. as a “warzone,” language she repeated in her Tuesday press release on Young’s appointment. 

Her speech included language calling out the impact of Mexican drug cartels on the reservations. 

Noem has suggested that responses from tribal leaders to her cartel comments, as well as the bans, have come because some of them are “personally benefiting” from a cartel presence on reservations.

She’s also drawn fire for telling audiences in Winner and Mitchell that Native children lack hope, and that “they don’t have parents who show up and help them.”

Young appointment implies firing 

Noem has argued that the federal government is failing tribes through a lack of law enforcement funding. The Oglala Sioux Tribe has sued the federal government over that issue, and Noem pledged to support that lawsuit during her Jan. 31 speech.

The governor’s office has not intervened as a party in the tribe’s most recent federal lawsuit, but she has moved to support tribal law enforcement in other ways. Last month, she pledged to fund a special session of the state’s police academy specifically for tribal trainees. Most tribal police train for 13 weeks in New Mexico, and South Dakota’s congressional delegation has lobbied for a regional training facility to encourage recruitment. 

In February, Noem penned a letter to the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs urging more funding for tribal law enforcement in South Dakota.

In Noem’s press release on his appointment, Young said that he looks forward “to serving as an ambassador for the State of South Dakota at the federal level and with the State’s nine tribal nations to facilitate solutions for tribal law enforcement and understand and navigate jurisdictional challenges.”

The release also includes a thinly veiled reference to tribal resistance to Noem’s comments. 

The release says that Young “found himself without a job” after “bravely testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on the cartel presence on tribal lands.”

Noem slings accusations about tribes while signing education bills

Young testified before that committee during a listening session about public safety in Indian Country on March 20. His testimony came minutes after the testimony of Oglala Sioux Tribal President Frank Star Comes Out. 

Neither mentioned cartels in their verbal comments, which can be viewed in full on the committee’s website. 

The Senate committee did collect written testimony until April 12, and that testimony is not available online. There was no immediate response Tuesday to an email to the committee’s press officers asking for any written testimony that may have been submitted by Young or Star Comes Out.

The tribe’s director of public safety job was advertised on the tribe’s Facebook page on April 15. There were no Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearings between March 20 and that date. 

Indian Country Today reported that Young’s contract expired on April 20.

Star Comes Out did not return a Searchlight message seeking comment on Young’s appointment.

Representatives with Noem’s office and the Office of Tribal Relations did not offer a date for the “cartel presence” testimony.

Yankton Sioux Tribe ban vote not binding

So far, seven tribes have voted to ban Noem from their lands. The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe have yet to pass such a resolution. Lower Brule voted down such a ban earlier this year, but Chairman Clyde Estes told SDPB that it might consider one again in June based on Noem’s comments about Native children.

Noem to lawmakers: Be ready to take action on southern border ‘invasion’

“The children should be left out of any political discussion,” Estes told SDPB’s Lee Strubinger. “To say that they have no hope is wrong and she should not have said that.”

The Yankton Sioux Tribe’s Business and Claims Committee voted to support a ban that would bar the governor from its lands on Friday, but that vote lacks the authority of law, the committee’s secretary said Tuesday. 

Such a ban would not be official without a vote from the tribe’s general council, meaning a vote of tribal members at a meeting called by either the committee leadership or a petition from tribal members.

“We don’t have anything scheduled,” said Secretary Courtney Sully. “We don’t even have a resolution.”

The Yankton Sioux Tribe is the only one of the nine tribes in South Dakota that lacks a tribal council-style government with elected representatives to vote on all tribal affairs. Such governments are known as “IRA” governments, named for the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which encouraged tribal nations to adopt city council-style authority structures.

The Yankton Sioux Tribe’s Business and Claims Committee, Sully said, aligns more closely with pre-colonial decision-making. The committee is empowered to manage the tribe’s day-to-day affairs, Sully said, but cannot take larger actions without a vote of the people. 

“Banning someone isn’t part of our daily business,” said Sully, who said she abstained from the Friday vote. She doesn’t like the governor’s comments, she said, but doesn’t believe they rise to the level of something requiring a ban. 

The majority of the committee did vote to endorse a ban, however. A statement from Vice Chair Jason Cooke, sent to Searchlight on Tuesday, reiterated the earlier words of committee member Ryan Cournoyer, who said the vote was a sign of solidarity with other tribes.

The statement calls the governor “anti-tribe.” It references pre-2024 conflicts over pipeline protests, COVID checkpoints, education, and Noem’s lack of response to discrimination against Native Americans by a Rapid City hotel owner. The statement says the governor “now blames tribes for crime in her own cities.”

“Governor Noem, stop the political pandering and get serious about working on these issues with Tribes,” Cooke wrote. “It has been six years of inaction, ineptness, and ignorance from your office on serious policy issues impacting our shared citizens.”

WASHINGTON — Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins and Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick were the most bipartisan members of Congress last year, according to a newly released analysis from the Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

The least bipartisan House lawmaker was Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, while Alabama’s Katie Britt, a Republican freshman, placed last among senators.

No member of South Dakota’s all-Republican, three-member congressional delegation ranked in the top 10 of either chamber, but all three were in the top half of the rankings. Sen. Mike Rounds ranked 20th in the 100-member Senate, and Sen. John Thune ranked 42nd. Rep. Dusty Johnson ranked 106th in the 435-member House.

The latest ranking of the most bipartisan lawmakers comes amid one of the least productive Congresses in the nation’s history and just months before nearly all House lawmakers and about one-third of the Senate face voters at the polls in November.

Maria Cancian, dean of the McCourt School of Public Policy, wrote in a statement announcing the new rankings that “while there is much room for improvement, I am encouraged to see some progress on cross-party collaboration.”

“In these deeply divided times, and with an increasing amount of misleading information online, we need tools like the Bipartisan Index more than ever — an evidence-based and nonpartisan approach for measuring how well policymakers work across the aisle to get things done,” Cancian wrote.

Lugar Center Policy Director Dan Diller wrote that it was “especially disheartening that all eight new Senators who took office in January 2023 ranked in the bottom 30 percent of Senate scores.”

“Bipartisan cooperation on legislation in 2023 was deficient by historical standards, though there were some marginal improvements in scores from the previous Congress,” Diller wrote.

The website with the rankings states that the “Bipartisan Index is intended to fill a hole in the information available to the public about the performance of Members of Congress.”

The Lugar Center, founded by the late U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, “is a platform for informed debate and analysis of global issues, including nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, global food security, foreign assistance effectiveness and global development, energy security, and enhancing bipartisan governance,” according to its website.

The rankings take into consideration “the frequency with which a member of Congress sponsors bills that are co-sponsored by at least one member of the opposing party” and “the frequency with which a member co-sponsors bills introduced by members of the opposite Party.”

Who is the most bipartisan?

The top 10 senators were:

• Collins
• Michigan Democrat Gary Peters
• New Hampshire Democrat Maggie Hassan
• West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin
• Texas Republican John Cornyn
• Nevada Democrat Jacky Rosen
• Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski
• Kansas Republican Jerry Moran
• Indiana Republican Todd Young
• Montana Democrat Jon Tester

The top 10 House lawmakers were:

• Fitzpatrick
• New York Republican Marcus Molinaro
• New Hampshire Democrat Chris Pappas
• New York Republican Mike Lawler
• North Carolina Democrat Don Davis
• Puerto Rico Republican Delegate Jenniffer González-Colón
• Nevada Democrat Susie Lee
• Nebraska Republican Don Bacon
• New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer
• Iowa Republican Zach Nunn

The Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University wrote on their website that their “aim in publishing this Index is not to promote a specific legislative agenda, as is the case for many indexes, but solely the promotion of a bipartisan approach to governance.”

“The credibility of the Index is derived from the objectivity of its methodology; Index scores are computed formulaically from publically available data,” it states. “The Index requires no subjective assessment of specific legislative items.”

The least bipartisan House lawmakers following Jordan were New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Missouri Democrat Cori Bush, New York Democrat Jamaal Bowman and Missouri Republican Eric Burlison.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, ranked 423, but will likely be excluded from future scores since he has now occupied one of the top two leadership posts for at least six months.

The least bipartisan senators following Britt were Missouri Republican Eric Schmitt, Washington state Democrat Patty Murray, Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson and Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton.