Riding through on a hot day 20 years ago, seeing 50 people drunk beneath the sun — some passed out, some fighting, some peeing in the street — Frank LaMere formed his first definitive conclusions about Whiteclay.
He turned to his driver that day, an elder and fellow visitor from Winnebago country in northeast Nebraska.
"I said, 'Fred, someone needs to do something about this shit,'" LaMere recalls.
The reply: If LaMere wanted something done, he'd need to do it himself.
Two years later, when protesters marched in response to the deaths of Wilson Black Elk Jr. and Ronald Hard Heart just outside Whiteclay, and state and federal lawmen blocked the highway in their path, LaMere and a friend were the first to cross the barricade.
Nine people were arrested that day, including LaMere: "That's the beginning of it."
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In the decades since, LaMere has become the most outspoken, persistent opponent of Whiteclay beer sales.
"We did not let it go," he says. "I had resolved that I would never go away, and I have not.”
