“They Wanted Indians Out of Sight”: Native Segregation and the Urban Environment in Rapid City

On June 9^th, 1972, Rapid Creek in the Black Hills flooded, killing 238 people primarily in Rapid City, South Dakota. Of those killed, around half were Native Americans, a population which made up 4% of the city’s overall population. Urban planning policies, rental practices and other factors had created what white residents called an “Indian slum” along Rapid Creek’s floodplain in the decades leading up to the flood. The 1972 Black Hills Flood and its aftermath underscore the consequences of settler colonial legacies and de facto segregation in the urban American West.