The semi-arid plains of the Pine Ridge reservation are dotted with hundreds of mobile homes and meager shacks, housing the Oglala Lakota nation – a population who have long been engaged in a fight for running water, electricity, sewage systems and adequate housing. Faced with soaring unemployment, extensive drug and alcohol abuse, and stifling poverty, the Oglala Lakota people quantify the hardship of the modern world with an enduringly painful history – the emotional remnants of which, lie at the Wounded Knee creek in the heart of the reservation.
The Pine Ridge reservation remains untouched by development and exempt from the economic lifeline of the wider state. Its reliance on the federal government for treaty-guaranteed services limits its ability to effectively self-govern. Tribal governments are essentially powerless to effect change on their public services. Many inhabitants of the Pine Ridge reservation feel abandoned by mainstream society and withdrawn from the public consciousness.
The collective experience of the Oglala Lakota nation is testament to a wider issue, grounded in colonial history and inadequate federal support.
Of the 9.7 million Native Americans in the United States, a quarter live on reservations. On average, these communities are subject to twice the poverty rate of the US average with estimated half the per capita income. Poor living standards, high school dropout rates and drastically insufficient civic institutions have established a near inescapable cycle of poverty and neglect on reservations.
The failure of the Federal government to honor centuries-long treaty agreements, the prolonged persecution and subjugation of native peoples and the settler-colonist structure itself, have all served as a precondition for the impoverishment which persists on reservations today.
The 19th century saw the establishment of brutal federally-backed Native American boarding schools, which served as abusive institutions of child assimilation. With this came the forcible removal of hundreds of thousands of Native American children from their homes. This dark era of American history, the facts of which are still being uncovered, has contributed to the profound intergenerational trauma and social stagnation on reservations.
Today, Native American reservation schools are frequently underfunded and understaffed. Local teacher, Cheryl Locke, who teaches 5th grade in Pine Ridge claims that many students own no study equipment, and dread the arrival of the weekend on account of the neglect they face at home and the alcoholism which remains rampant in reservation households, impacting up to two thirds of adults in the Pine Ridge reservation.
With the poor standard of education on these reservations, and the neglectful household conditions for many young people, employment opportunities remain small. Many indigenous people rely on blue collar work, traditional practices such as sand painting, basket and rug weaving, jewelry making and unique medicinal remedies for income.
Certain reservations benefit from casino revenues, however this has equally led to a rise in gambling addictions amongst Native Americans. Some reservations resort to selling land to the government for building casinos. Currently, many reservations lack a sustainable job market.
Devoid of supportive institutions and economic opportunity, impoverished reservations have served as the backdrop for the proliferation of alcohol and substance abuse.
While many tribal governments have outlawed alcohol consumption, vast quantities of alcohol -on the Pine Ridge reservation an estimated 11 000 cans of beer a day- are smuggled into reservations from local towns. These towns (an example being Whiteclay, just three kilometers from the Pine Ridge border) are frequently set up with the sole objective of selling alcohol to these communities – and profiting immensely off the rife addictions of native peoples.
“Alcohol was used as a tool of manipulation to take our lands, take our resources – they needed to keep us drunk and deluded,” said Olowan Martinez, a 43 year-old mother of three, an inhabitant of the Oglala Lakota Nation, during an interview with Aljazeera. As Martinez suggests, in establishing a cycle of impoverishment on reservations, federal and state governments have essentially neutralized the ‘threat’ of indigenous populations – preventing them from politicizing. Restricting the growth of an educated population that could rise up in defiance of American control.
These factors have produced an environment of neglect and impoverishment on many reservations. Native Americans have not failed at civilization. In providing inadequate civic institutions, civilization has failed them.
The dire reality of the Native American experience remains rooted in colonial history. The multitude of massacres committed through colonial conquest, the systematic ethnic cleansing of these communities, the theft of tribal lands and the breaking of treaty agreements has perpetuated the Indigenous struggle within a political system which does not represent them.
The Federal government has a profound responsibility to work to reverse the intense damage inflicted on indigenous peoples over the course of the past 500 years. And to immediately address the humanitarian and economic crises faced by this largely forgotten population – the true owners of this great land.
