History

Our organization was founded in 2017 to respond to racial discrimination and systemic oppression impacting the lives of Indigenous Peoples in Rapid City. Over the course of several years of police shootings, consolidation of the real estate and housing market and the deaths of unhoused relatives, racial oppression was often ignored and replaced with "poverty" or “violent trauma” as determinative factors in repeated community conservations directed by local systems and institutions. We decided to center this part of the conversation instead, acknowledging systemic oppression and harmful outcomes regardless of intent. Incorporated as One Rapid City in 2020, we changed our name to Community Organizing for Unified Power (COUP) Council in 2022.

We invoke an ancient Lakota non-violent warfare tactic known as “counting coup,” while the word Council places our woman led efforts alongside the male-dominated Treaty and Tribal Councils of Oceti Sakowin territory. Representing matriarchs and warriors, we count coup on the systems. Using strategies that include training, community education, collaborative partnership, relational organizing, advocacy, direct action and civic engagement, we count coup on the systems. After years of organizing and presence, the COUP Council has become known as the "grandmas and aunties who get stuff done” in our community.

Mission

In the Fall of 2022, we changed our name to Community Organizing for Unified Power (COUP) Council and mission statement:

To retain Lakota culture and build our collective power to bring justice and healing in the heart of Oceti Sakowin territory.

COUP Council focuses on empowering Oceti Sakowin people living in our homelands to fight back against systemic racism, discrimination, and other forms of oppression. Rapid City, and the state of South Dakota at large, has a long history of land dispossession, racial discrimination and violent policing against Native people. Our strategy is to engage in culturally meaningful community organizing and to build parallel and cooperative forms of economic development that targeted nonviolent direct and strategic actions to fight systemic oppression, tyranny and white supremacy.