MICKI’S CAFE IS, IN ITS MODEST WAY, A bulwark against the encroachment of modern history and a symbol, amid the declining fortunes of prairie America, of the kind of gritty (and perhaps foolhardy) determination that in more self-confident times used to be called the frontier spirit. To Micki Hutchinson, the problem in the winter of 1991 seemed as plain as the grid of streets that white homesteaders had optimistically laid out in 1910, on the naked South Dakota prairie, to create the town of Isabel in the middle of what they were told was no longer the reservation of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. It was not difficult for Hutchinson to decide what to do when the leaders of the tribal government ordered her to purchase a $250 tribal liquor license: She ignored them.

“They have no right to tell me what to do. I’m not Indian!” Hutchinson told me a year and a half later. She and other white businesspeople had by then challenged the tribe’s right to tax them in both tribal court and federal district court and had lost. The marks of prolonged tension showed on her tanned, angular, wary face. “If this were Indian land, it would make sense. But we’re a non-Indian town. This is all homestead land, and the tribe was paid for it. I can’t vote in tribal elections or on anything else that happens on the reservation. What they’re talking about is taxation without representation.”

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