Remaking Rapid City: Urban Space, Memory, and the 1972 Black Hills Flood

In 1972, a flood tore through Rapid City, South Dakota, killing nearly 250 people and devastating a large swath of downtown Rapid City. Many whose lives and homes were destroyed lived in a predominately Native American neighborhood known as “Osh Kosh Camp.” My dissertation, and my paper for this proposed panel, asks why those people lived in a neighborhood so vulnerable to rising flood waters in the mid-twentieth century. Restrictive housing laws and rampant discrimination forced Native Americans in Rapid City to live in some of the lowest-lying areas of Rapid Creek’s floodplain. This example of hydro-injustice directly contributed to many deaths and even more destruction of property and housing. Settler colonial racism suffused the public memory of the disaster as well. In the flood’s aftermath, Rapid Citians debated how best to rebuild and where Rapid Creek fit into the city’s new urban landscape. The construction of a new park, the Rapid City Greenway, as well as a civic center, was contentious. Left out of the discussion were Native American people displaced by the flood.

The 1972 disaster erased not just people’s lives and possessions, but also much of the memory of Osh Kosh Camp and indeed, of Rapid City’s urban native population among the city’s white inhabitants. The question of how best to memorialize the flood was rooted in the racial/spatial framework of Indian Country, itself a narrative which wrote Indians out of urban spaces entirely. My paper argues that histories of flooding do not end when the waters recede, and that water-borne and other disasters reshuffle urban spaces. Public memory of an event is shaped by this reshuffling and, in the case of Rapid City, can exclude large portions of the urban populace.