No Hope on the Reservations
Nick Kristoff is usually bopping around war-torn nations, reporting on the most marginalized people in the world. But this week, he stayed home and found much of the same! Four things he taught me about the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in South Dakota:
1. The life expectancy on the reservation is the same as the life expectancy in Afghanistan.
2. Two-thirds of adults on the reservation are alcoholics. One-quarter of babies are born with fetal alcohol syndrome.
3. Unemployment is at 70%.
4. America is the best country in the world.
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Previously on The Billfold
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I gew up around a reservation here in Ontario, and it’s not much better there. They were even a well off band because there is a casino, but most kids just spent their money on cars and stuff as soon as they got it.
I spent a week on the Pine Ridge Reservation and it was pretty terrible. I spent most of my time in elementary and middle schools. The bathrooms in the schools didn’t have any soap and I don’t remember seeing any houses, just trailers. I think the Reservation is legally alcohol free but people just go to the bars that are right on the boarder on the other side. On the lighter side, there was a Mexican restaurant right in town which was pretty bizarre to see and wasn’t that bad for Mexican food in South Dakota.
@Alexa Villaume@facebook haha I should read the article before I comment.
“One nifty solution, proposed by former Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota, would be for the Obama administration to extend Pine Ridge reservation lines to include Whiteclay. No land titles would change hands, but reservation laws would apply and liquor sales would become illegal.”
Would this actually help? I doubt it. By shifting the boarder they’ll just make a new “Whiteclay” where people can go to drink.
@Alexa Villaume@facebook And then everyone who lives in Whiteclay will be incredibly pissed about it.
the most terrifying stat i’ve heard about reservations is that 1 in 6 teens living on them have attempted suicide.
My parents were doctors with the IHS, so I lived on a reservation (Fort Apache) for the first five years of my life, and near to another (Mescalero) from 5-8. Being a little white kid in a Southern Baptist family, I was pretty oblivious at the time. It wasn’t until later that my parents explained it more to me, like that people would make homebrew in their living rooms, and they’d wind up in the hospital not from alcohol poisoning, but water poisoning because the proof was so low you had to drink a ton of it to get drunk. Now my dad works in Sells with with O’odham; it’s my understanding that reservation has the highest per capita incidence of diabetes in the world. As @dotcommie mentions, high suicide rates, especially for young people. Just stuff like that.
Now I’m all depressed. I still miss my friends and neighbors and church people from back in Whiteriver. And it was beautiful there, too.