Robert E. Wright's economic history of South Dakota, Little Business on the Prairie: Entrepreneurship, Prosperity, and Challenge in South Dakota, examines the history and politics that make the prairie state a business magnet. The recipe for prosperity and happiness requires strong state institutions, economic freedom, and an innate entrepreneurial spirit, all of which South Dakota and its citizens possess (well, at least its white, European settlers). Wright's central argument is that the state's “saviors” are its entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial enterprise it cultivates and promotes. The entrepreneurship growth model generates a political economy that fosters innovations at all scales, large and small, to efficiently fill consumer needs, create new markets, and retool old ones. Solid economic and personal freedoms, secure property rights, and the rule of law, Wright argues citing a 2013 CNBC report, are the hallmarks of what today makes South Dakota “America's Top State for Business” (p. 9). These conditions produce and attract the replicative and innovative entrepreneurs necessary for economic growth and development. Without this social infrastructure, exploitative entrepreneurs take advantage, slowing economic growth and development.

Wright evokes the image of the settler, idealized as homesteader, as the agent of South Dakota's economic history. This image is coupled with the state's political institutions, which have been, he argues, “remarkably democratic since its inception” (p. 83). Leaving aside the outright exclusion of and utter disdain for the Lakota and Dakota peoples—the original owners of the lands, from whom the state appropriated its name—Wright's narrative is one of triumph. South Dakota's entrepreneurs have throughout history mastered, conquered, and tamed the land and harsh environment. They have forged their destiny through farming, ranching, food processing, mining, entertainment, tourism, recreation, education, health, and finance. In all areas, wealth generation is the result of this “remarkably democratic” local and libertarian ethos (p. 83). Overcoming the lean and trying times of the Depression, for example, the wheat separated from the chaff: “quitters” left, “stickers” stayed. Those who stayed, Wright observes, “were the toughest of the tough and also the most innovative” (p. 70).

Social evolutionary theory rears its head in Wright's regional economic theory, leading him to speculate that the entrepreneurial spirit predated the state's formation by some ten thousand years in indigenous societies. In Lockean fashion, the apotheosis of this historical progress narrative cannot be achieved by those who do not possess secure property rights or who exist in the proverbial “state of nature,” or savagery, the opposite of civilization. Civilization, democracy, and freedom arrive with settlement, private property, and the elimination of common lands and Native peoples. After all, Wright reminds us, repeating the tragedy of the commons thesis, Native peoples without private property protecting bison herds (or other natural resources) would have destroyed them anyway. Most American Indian scholars agree that these teleological theories of progress and “terminal narratives” are either outdated and wrong, at best, or racist, at worst. Wright's reliance on them speaks to a fundamental flaw in his overall argument and an inability to grasp why South Dakota's Native communities are some of the poorest, most disenfranchised places and people in the nation.

What is lacking in explanation, however, is made up by sheer documentary evidence. In nine chapters, ample use of archival and historical records and accessible language provides readers with a robust bibliography and index on everything ranging from the history of pheasant hunting to the history of the Homestake gold mine. Perhaps most striking is Wright's account of the state's understudied financial turn in the 1980s under the governorship of Bill Janklow, who, the author notes, was a well-known racist. Amid great national inflation, Janklow saved the state's economy through state interventions and deregulations that initially attracted Citibank business. Low interstate and bank franchise taxes later drew debt collection agencies in the form of call centers that seized upon South Dakotans’ celebrated “accentless” dialect and work ethic. Also noteworthy is Wright's appraisal of the state's agricultural sector. Often prided as the industry of the state, large corporate farming has over the years eaten up and absorbed the highly idealized small family farm, casting small producers—who depend on federal subsidies—into perpetual economic uncertainty. Superseding agriculture in recent years is the service industry. The state's greatest wealth producers are not farmers, but service workers in areas such as health, fast food, and retail.

The last chapter of the book offers ten policy recommendations, the most salient and pressing of which address the state's dismal treatment of Native peoples, its social conservatism and xenophobia, and its energy dependence. Among them, the biggest burden on the state's morality, which haunts the pages of this book, is the treatment of the original owners of the land, the Lakota and Dakota peoples. Wright is partially correct in his assessment of South Dakota's perennial “Indian problem” as being primarily the fault of federal oversight and intervention. Current federal policy greatly limits and actively disrupts tribal economic growth and development. But the state also bears responsibility. From its inception, South Dakota has always worked against the tribes, desiring access to Native lands and resources while aggressively working to abolish tribes as political entities. The problem is that tribes never signed treaties with South Dakota, yet are often beholden to state policy and laws without their consent. For example, the state arbitrarily regulates tribal gaming enterprises—one of the few economic avenues available to reservations—under the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. Tribes, however, have little or no say in state economic activities or policymaking. South Dakota's political and economic chauvinism centers on a state's rights approach, which is responsible for South Dakota's own economic prosperity at the expense of Native livelihoods. If state institutions were serious about improving the lives of American Indians, they would relinquish arbitrary control of certain tribal enterprises and work towards the restoration of tribal territories and economies. With this in mind, Little Business on the Prairie, despite Wright's sincere attempts at creating something otherwise, cannot escape the fact that it is primarily a white, European settler history of South Dakota, written with that intended readership in mind.