He ran for the US Congress from the East River region of South Dakota and was elected as the first Lakota to serve in the House of Representatives.

He was the son of Lucy Burning Breast, a Sicangu Lakota, and William Reifel, of German descent.

Reifel's duties included promoting the new programs of the Indian Reorganization Act, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934.

They were encouraged to write constitutions and to use models of elected government proposed by the BIA, rather than the life chiefs previously supported by the clans.

He was selected as a Tribal Relations Officer and later promoted to the position as Superintendent of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

[citation needed] In 1949 Reifel was awarded a scholarship to study public administration at Harvard University under a Civil Service Commission program for management development of career government officials.

[1] He received a John Hay Whitney Foundation Opportunity Fellowship and completed his Doctorate in Public Administration in 1952.

He worked briefly at its national headquarters in Washington, D.C. before returning to the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation as Superintendent.

[citation needed] In 1960, Reifel retired from the BIA and ran for Congress in South Dakota's 1st congressional district.

[4]) Reifel was elected by a substantial margin; he was the first person of Lakota or Sioux descent to serve in the US Congress.

Opposing segregation, he believed that the key to ending the isolation of the Native American people was in educational programs that enrolled American Indian and non-Indian students together in modern progressive facilities (as was recommended by the 1928 Merriam Report), rather than keeping children in Indian-only boarding schools.

Reifel was instrumental in getting the Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) of the US Geological Survey located in South Dakota.

While he intended to retire in 1971, he remained active, accepting an appointment by President Richard Nixon as chair of the National Capital Planning Commission, which has oversight over federal projects in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.

He next served as Special Assistant for Indian programs to the Director of the National Park Service in the Department of the Interior.

[citation needed] On December 26, 1933, Reifel married his college sweetheart, Alice Janet Johnson of Erwin, South Dakota.