Rapid City hotel owner gets big backlash after banning all Native Americans in the wake of a recent shooting

Hundreds of protesters marched in Rapid City, South Dakota, on March 23, angered at the Grand Gateway Hotel's ban on Native Americans after a recent shooting. (Rapid City Journal photo by Matt Gade)

 A hotel owner in Rapid City, South Dakota, is seeing widespread backlash after barring all Native American customers in the wake of a shooting two weeks ago.

It started March 19 when a Native American teen was seriously injured in a shooting at the Grand Gateway Hotel. The next day, owner Connie Uhre posted on Facebook that Native Americans would no longer be allowed in the hotel or the bar and casino attached to it, Sindhara Bonnet reports for the Rapid City Journal. Native Americans are 10 percent of the city's population.

Within days, the indigenous advocacy group NDN Collective sent two members to attempt to book rooms at the hotel. Both were denied service. The group then filed a federal civil rights class action lawsuit against the Retsel Corp., the hotel's parent company which Uhre owns, saying the company had violated the members' legal rights, Bonnet reports.

Meanwhile, the entire staff of the bar and many of the hotel's employees quit after word got out about the ban, Arielle Zionts reports for South Dakota Public Radio.

Connie Uhre's now-deleted Facebook comments,
as tweeted by Mayor Steve Allender

A little over a week after the shooting, several Sioux tribes collaborated in posting what they called a trespassing notice and a cease-and-desist order on the front window of the hotel. The notice, signed by the leaders of the Oglala Lakota, Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Rosebud, and Standing Rock Sioux, "states the Great Sioux Nation made an investigation that showed the hotel and Uhre are in violation of the April 29, 1868 Treaty with the Sioux," Bonnet reports. "The notice further states the Great Sioux Nation can, without further notice and liability, take possession, destroy, or remove the property at the owners' expense."

The tribal leaders weren't done. In a statement, they said the tribes "are prepared to boycott the entirety of Rapid City, boycott the hotel and its subsidiaries, pressure the Rapid City Council to revoke the hotel's business license, discuss moving the Lakota Nation Invitational elsewhere, move the Black Hills Pow Wow to another location, file hate-crime charges against the owner, push ordinance tax for mental health, address the open-carry law, create a rating system on businesses to track quality of service to Indians and serve the notice of trespassing," Bonnet reports.

Nick Uhre, Connie Uhre's son and the hotel's manager, told SDPR that the hotel isn't accepting any new bookings right now because they're receiving threats of violence, Zionts reports. Nick Uhre is also in hot water with the public after sending an email out to area hospitality managers alerting them about the shooting, encouraging them to stop paying taxes, and blaming a rise in crime on a MacArthur Foundation-funded program that aims to reduce jail misuse and overuse in Pennington County. His mother responded with an email proposing a ban on all Native Americans since "We do not know the nice ones from the bad natives . . . so we just have to say no to them!!"

Other hoteliers responded to the email chain with horror, calling the email "disgusting" and "racist." Mayor Steve Allender also distanced himself from the Uhres in a tweet, saying that "neither the shooting or Grand Gateway’s response to it reflect our community values." 

Nick Uhre got no warmer a reception after appealing to Gov. Kristi Noem, asking her in an email to remove the mayor from office, Nathan Thompson reports for the Journal. Noem's communications chief said the office can't comment on the issue because of the civil suit, but said Noem "is opposed to all racial discrimination – there is no room for racial discrimination in South Dakota."