Kelsey
Ducheneaux Scott has alert eyes that give telltale signs to what’s on
her mind. That’s all right, though, as she has a habit of speaking
candidly.
“I don’t remember a time in my life where I didn’t anticipate being
involved in the family operation,” Scott says. Before her, Scott’s
great-grandfather, grandfather and father held the title of “ranch
manager.” Today, she is the first woman in her family to claim it —
overseeing daily operations on the 7,200-acre DX Ranch on the Cheyenne
River Reservation in South Dakota.
Looking back, it was Scott’s Grandma Regina who made the biggest
impact on her when she was growing up on the ranch. “Granny,” Scott
fondly remembers, “always had a pot of coffee on, and no matter how long
it had been since she’d been grocery shopping, you better believe that
she was going to cook you a meal, even if you said you weren’t hungry.”
The Lakota are one of several tribes making up the Sioux Nation, and in
their culture, “matriarchs are really the rock and the center of the
family,” she says.
Because of the example her Granny set, Scott embraces her role as a
rancher and her identity as a woman — despite the lack of female
representation in the ag sector. According to the U.S. Department of
Agriculture’s latest census, only 36% of U.S. farmers identify as
female.
But this issue goes deeper than simple gender representation.
Research indicates that when women manage land, they are more likely to
employ conservation strategies and consider the long-term effects of
agricultural practices such as human and soil health.
Historically,
Native American women are responsible for inventing some of the most
innovative practices and tools in Western agriculture. The latest
research indicates that the number of women in agriculture at Native
American operations hovers around 50% — much higher than in non-Native
operations. In these communities, there exists a nearly equal division
of labor in food-producing activities — telling a vastly different story
than the dominant narrative of white male ranchers in the West.
From Scott’s experience, being a woman on the ranch isn’t so much
radical as a return to normal. “I feel that women resonate in a stronger
way with the living system that is agriculture,” she says, “We have
this unique heartstring that gets pulled on a little stronger.”
She is part of a groundswell, not only shifting how ranching happens
on the prairies she is from, but also shifting who will come after her,
and why.
Here,
in the Missouri Valley of South Dakota, Scott’s ancestors lived along
the river’s rich and abundant forested bottomlands and its tributaries.
The people moved across the prairies alongside herds of bison, gathering
herbs and plants.
Today, the herds of bison are
gone, but Scott is part of a growing movement to return the rangeland to
its former regenerative state, using cattle in place of bison. “We’re
still stewarding the land, we just have to do it differently, because
we’re place-bound,” she explains. Scott’s holistic approach includes
rotational grazing, prairie monitoring and the replanting of native
grasses. She and her family learned to do it differently because history
forced them to.
Her ancestors’ relocation to the Cheyenne River Reservation is the
story of their entire tribe’s relocation: As the influx of white
settlers onto traditionally native lands led to increasingly violent
conflicts, Native American territory was whittled down to tiny
inholdings throughout the Western states. From the 1850s through the
20th century, the federal government repeatedly reneged on promises and
the federal policy of relegating Natives onto reservations spelled the
end of the Sioux’s semi-nomadic lifestyle, their bison hunting days and
much of their Indigenous culture.
However diminished, their tribe
managed to retain a small portion of their original lands, bordered on
the east by the Missouri River and on the south by the Cheyenne River.
This is where you will find the Cheyenne River Reservation today.
Once
confined to life on the reservation, Scott’s family had another
obstacle to face. In the 1940s, an ill-conceived damming project on the
upper Missouri River promising flood control, hydroelectric power,
irrigation and water supply for municipal purposes flooded the Sioux’s
most productive land and resources without tribal consultation or
environmental assessment. Scott’s great-grandpa described the dam and
the resulting Lake Oahe as the “gutting of our reservation.”
With the loss of quality farmland to grow crops, cattle ranching soon
became the most promising economic venture, but even that required more
land than most tribal members could obtain. Scott’s great-grandpa,
Frank Ducheneaux, had his allotment relocated from the fertile (now
flooded) valley to arid highlands, named “the Great American Desert” by
Stephen Long, a government surveyor on an 1820s scientific expedition,
due to its extreme temperatures, cyclical droughts and poor soil
quality. Compensation rates for the land that was flooded were so low
that Ducheneaux’s 1,400 acres of formerly verdant farmland bought only
160 acres in the parched highlands — the starting plot of the DX Ranch.
The
ranch still occupies this land on a tribal lease, but it looks less
arid than it did when Ducheneaux acquired it back in the 1960s. That’s
because of years of implementing traditional Native practices with
modern technology to bring the land to life.
“I say
I’m the fourth-generation rancher in my family, but I’m of the 125th
generation to help steward the Great Plains,” Scott says. “Some of my
ancestors helped to evolve this landscape to what it is now. We were a
part of the ecosystem ourselves.”
It’s not perfect. The land is still arid and difficult to work.
Tornadoes, hail the size of tennis balls, 110-degree days in the summer
and minus-60-degree nights in the winter are just a handful of seasonal
woes that can plague the land. “One thing you can count on: It’s always
windy,” laughs Scott.
But she’s quick to acknowledge that you can’t have one extreme without
the other. “The only reason our Great Plains can be so productive is
because of the dormant season.” Without rest, there wouldn’t be robust
growth. Today Scott and her family have grown their operation into
something sustainable — and aspirational.
While Scott dipped her toes into solutions surrounding agricultural
resource management issues in the academic world (she has a master’s
degree in integrated resource management), she states that she wasn’t
fully exposed to the boots-on-the-ground concepts of regenerative
agriculture until she attended a Quivira Coalition Conference in 2017.
Through the conservation organization, she connected with Nicole
Masters, an agroecologist who studies the interrelationships of soil
microbes, structure and plant health, to learn how to rebuild the
fertility of grazing land. That led Scott to become a self-proclaimed
“soil nerd.”
“Above ground is less than half of the picture,” she says. “The soil
microbiome, the interconnectedness of the fungi, the nematodes, the
microbes, the plant roots, the chemistry — that only exists because we
have soil as the main host.”
This has shifted what Scott’s idea of success on a ranch actually
looks like. She focuses less on productivity — as is often discussed in
agricultural circles — and more on the integrity of the ecosystem. Now,
the soil is key to all operations at DX. “We use the land as an
indication of how we will continue to adapt our management.”
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