Fatima Ogdie and the Impact of Syrian Immigration on Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Fatima Ogdie was one of many Syrian immigrants living in South Dakota in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her story illustrates the trials and tribulations of an important but little known immigrant group to Sioux Falls.
Fatima Juma Hajj was born in Syria in 1873. There is not much documented information about her life before she moved to the United States with her husband Alex Ogdie. Alex and Fatima were married in Syria in 1887, but Fatima hesitated to join him in the United States until many years later.
Finally, in 1904, Fatima Ogdie left Syria for the United States to live with her husband on their 120-acre homestead nine miles northwest of Kadoka, South Dakota. The Ogdies were not alone in their move, as there were about one hundred thousand people moving into western South Dakota during the same time. Many of these moving into the area were Syrians who had been, as historian Edward Curtis wrote, “the victims of uncontrollable forces that had taken away local political control of their villages and limited their abilities to resist their absorption into an international labor market.” The Ogdie homestead was located near the Pine Ridge Reservation on land that had been recognized as belonging to the Lakota Nation in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Fatima reportedly had fond memories of her interactions with the Lakota people living near the Ogdie homestead. Almost every other aspect of homesteading, however, was not enjoyable for her.
Alex left Fatima to run the farmstead herself for months while he went to peddle goods in rural South Dakota. A close call with a rattlesnake - which bit the family dog and was headed for her two babies before she killed it - led Fatima to tell her husband that if he did not move the family into town, she would go back home to Syria. According to her grandson, Sam Ogdie, Fatima never let anyone tell her what to do. As was the case with many immigrants, Sam remembers his grandmother never speaking English.
When the Ogdie family moved to Sioux Falls, there were already several Syrian residents living within city limits. Fatima and Alex worked to keep their Syrian heritage and community alive. They kept a traditional Syrian home in which they did not wear shoes, had pillows on the floor, did not have chairs, read the Quran, and made sure children behaved as proper Syrian children would.
Despite Syrian immigrants in South Dakota being considered “white” by their neighbors, they still faced discrimination. One Christian pastor – Dr. Frank Fox – from First Congregational Church in Sioux Falls is quoted as having “faulted Islam for assigning ‘a degraded place to womanhood,’ which evidenced how much the religion was ‘a failure and a curse to the human race.’” Anti-Islam remarks such as this led to increased violence against Syrian immigrants both in Sioux Falls and across South Dakota in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Fatima Ogdie died in 1957 in a hospital due to a year and a half long illness. She was buried next to Alex in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The Ogdies' gravestone (see image) says their names in both Arabic and English. The words “There is no god but God; Muhammad is the Messenger of God” are printed on the gravestone in Arabic alongside the Islamic Crescent and the Seal of Solomon.
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