Just as I am going over this manuscript with Richard for the last time for final proofreading, somebody hands me the New York Times from September 20, 1992. It has an article on the front page, headlined SAD DISTINCTION FOR THE SIOUX: HOMELAND IS NO. 1 IN POVERTY. The article is subtitled “Life at the bottom. America’s poorest county.” It describes our reservations as “mean and despairing places.” It says that Pine Ridge, our neighboring res, with which we have a common border, is the poorest of all the 3,141 counties in the USA. Well, if Pine Ridge is the poorest, then Rosebud must be a close second. The average income on our res is about $3,100 with 65 percent of our people living below the poverty line. We are the leftover, surplus folks.
Most people live on GA. You go out and apply for a job so that you have that on record. But there’s no jobs, so it’s automatic that you’ll qualify and get into the welfare system. You go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), to the social services. You tell them your situation—your income, what bills you pay, how many people are in your family. Even if you’re a single person you’ll qualify. You get very little—maybe a week’s worth of living expenses, after paying the bills. A lot of people do crafts, beadwork, or quillwork, which they sell privately or to the trading post. Sometimes you can hock something there, but there are so many people doing stuff that there aren’t enough places to sell them. You end up underselling yourself. If you’re on GA you can get food stamps too. You can get either commodities or food stamps, but not both. Commodities are still bad. It’s the same old stuff, government-issued staples—powdered milk, powdered eggs, dried meat, dried potatoes, and pork—which Sioux just don’t care for. You get some good stuff, rice, flour, and cereal, but there’s much too much cheese and butter. Many middle-aged or even young people are obese. But it’s not the healthy, muscular kind of obesity that comes from good, nourishing food. It’s just flab. It’s just not healthy. Also you don’t get everything I listed here. You must make choices. If they give you one thing, there’s another thing you can’t have.
I prefer food stamps because you can buy fresher food. In order to get food stamps or commodities you’ve got to go through a lot of red tape. You have to prove that you have a low income, or no income at all. That’s easy. It’s the general condition of almost everybody on the res, but processing is slow. By the time you get your food stamps your GA money has already run out. A few years ago I was on GA. They’ll allow you rent and utilities, and that’s it. Nothing for clothing, gas, phone, or a great number of other things you can’t do without. You get thirty dollars per person besides the food stamps, which doesn’t last very long. So what do you do? People are desperate for money, so they sell their food stamps for half price, or sell their commodities at a big discount. You have to make a choice whether to have decent meals or buy clothes so your children can go to school. Of course, it is illegal to sell food stamps or commodities, and people get busted for it. The authorities also try every way they can to cut your welfare. There is one lady bureaucrat who, if she sees someone win a couple of bucks at bingo, reports you right away and your welfare check is cut. When my sister Barb started a tiny burrito business, cooking up burritos and selling from house to house, the same woman immediately reported her. Every effort to start something, to invent some kind of tiny business to earn a little money on the side, results in a smaller GA check. Some people give up trying to work and just get drunk instead. The winos will sell their food stamps to get booze. They’d rather go hungry, or see their children starve, than go without their wine. And some women on ADC, when they get their checks it’s a joke—they’ll give their children some junk, some candy to keep them happy, and then, right away, they’ll start partying. But faced with such poverty people drink to forget their misery. Life is hard, and many people are just unable to get through the month without selling, or swapping food for something they must have. I wish we had food co-ops like they have in cities, but that’s just a dream. There is no money to translate dreams into reality. And it is the same in all the little hamlets and settlements that make up the res, places like He Dog, where my mom lives, or Black Pipe, Upper Cut Meat, Soldier Creek, Grass Mountain, Two Strikes, Ring Thunder, or Bad Nation.
Eighty percent of the people are unemployed. Tribal chairmen and politicians, mostly half-bloods, hand out the few jobs there are to their relatives. The others are out. The name of the game is nepotism. But can you blame them when they give a much-needed job to a brother or nephew?
The bureaucrats give us vocational training—carpentry, shoe-making, and auto body repair. Both Leonard and I, at one time, were trained as car mechanics. That comes in handy, because our cars are so old and decrepit that we have to keep fixing them all the time. The old car cemeteries are always full of people trying to find a part that still works. It is one business that thrives on the res. But how many carpenters, shoemakers, or mechanics do you need on the res? Very few. In the Black Hills, some white entrepreneurs provide a few jobs—staging mock attacks upon phony stockades and forts, working in phony Indian villages along the main highway with billboards like: INDIANS AT WORK: SEE HOW THEY LIVE, OR SEE REAL SIOUX INDIANS MAKING MOCCASINS, OR GIANT REENACTMENT OF THE CUSTER BATTLE; REAL SIOUX BRAVES ON HORSEBACK EVERY AFTERNOON FROM MAY TO OCTOBER. This kind of work pays very little, is demeaning, and forces people to live all summer long some seventy or a hundred miles away from home. Ben Black Elk was a highly gifted and intelligent person, the son of the man about whom the book Black Elk Speaks was written. The only job Ben could find was sitting on a bench in Keystone, in full regalia, under the shadow of Mount Rushmore, posing for tourists, being photographed with his warbonnet and fringed buckskin shirt, his arm around a grinning tourist lady or with some white brat on his lap. He used to get twenty-five cents for posing and, after a few years, ended up charging a dollar—this a man who had it in him to become a scientist or doctor if given half a chance. Some people get jobs picking spuds or wrangling cattle on a ranch. This, too, is slave labor, usually at a good distance from home. The government tries to solve the modern “Indian problem” by relocation, which means dumping large numbers of Lakota men and women in faraway cities. There are sizable numbers of Sioux in L.A., Denver, Chicago, Rapid City, Cleveland, and St. Paul, where they form their own ghettos, as out of place as a crocodile in Manhattan’s Times Square. Relocation often means loss of identity. Here, far from the res, some people cease to be Indians without ever being accepted by whites. They sit, as one of my friends put it, with one ass between two chairs, a red and a white one. Then there is the problem of “itching feet.” People, particularly men, get sick of living on the res, where there is nothing for them and nothing goes on, so they start drifting from place to place in the hope of finding a better life, and when they do not find it, they go on the road again. That is why you find Lakotas in the strangest places—Seattle, Tacoma, Vancouver, Manhattan, Dallas, Santa Fe, Tucson. Wherever you go, you’ll find a Sioux.
On the res you have an ongoing feeling of helplessness and insecurity: Will I be able to pay next month’s rent? Will they turn the electricity off for nonpayment? Will I still have a phone? You never know from one moment to another where you stand. You live from day to day, and that affects your life-style. We live in a culture of poverty mixed up with our Indian ways. There is no orderly, predictable march of events. You can never plan ahead. You are totally dependent on your car for transportation, so when you run out of gas money you become like a prisoner. You can’t go anywhere. You can’t do errands. I see men becoming resentful of women. The man has no job. He can’t provide. In the Sioux way, you are supposed to be generous, to make gifts, but the guys have nothing to give. The woman becomes the “breadwinner” with ADC money and the little she might make on the side with beadwork. Sometimes the man can’t stand it anymore and he splits. Like my father used to say: “I’ve had enough of that baby shit.” There are emotional outbursts, explosions of anger. Every week somebody gets killed. And women fight over petty things, just like the
guys. They hold grudges over little incidents that happened years ago. I watched a fight between two ancient, doddering couples. They all looked as if they were eighty years old. They could hardly walk. They had been drinking. The men were accusing each other of making it with their old ladies, screeching at each other in feeble voices, trading feeble blows. And the old women were pulling hair, yelling: “You tried to take my man away!” It was grotesque. I doubt whether these great-grandfathers could still get it up. I used to be good at fighting when I was young, but I don’t fight anymore if I can help it. I have learned my lesson. Yet I do like to have a gun or numchucks around for self-protection, just in case.
Drugs are a problem on the res and in neighboring Pine Ridge. There’s a little bit of everything. People are being sent to prison for possession and distribution of all kinds of stuff, ranging from marijuana to cocaine. And there’s acid, speed, uppers, downers, and heroin. Not too much crack, so far. People like pej. The Sioux word for grass is pejin. So they call pot “pej” for short. It’s so expensive people smoke it as an extra treat. People grow it, too, but you have to do it in a safe place, because somebody will find it and make off with the pej. I knew a guy who had grown a huge plant of high-quality weed, but a friend of his stole it, ripped it out by the roots. He was running around Mission screaming: “That asshole stole my weed! I’ll kill him!” People are hungry for good pej and pay any price for it if they have the mazaska, the money. There are dealers everyone knows who have dealt for years but are never busted. Maybe they have friends in high places. Then again, one of the main dealers in Pine Ridge got busted this past winter. He was big-time and they were after him for years until they finally found a way to get him. His own cousin turned him in for a measly reward. He was facing years in prison but managed to plea-bargain it down. They found twelve Harley-Davidsons at his place, which they took away. Agents try to trap people. Two guys came to my place and knocked on the door. When Pedro opened it they told him: “Takoja, we hear you can get some good-quality pej here. We’ve got the money.” Pedro told them: “You got the wrong place. Look somewhere else.” He knew what they were about. The word is out that some people are wired, that the heat is on. I think that weed should be legalized and the government should concentrate on the hard stuff.
The young addicts on the res don’t have the money for pej or other expensive drugs. So they are “huffing gas,” that is, inhaling gasoline. Or they sniff Wite-Out, the white plastic stuff you use to correct typing errors. They put it, open, into a paper bag, stick their head into it, and sniff. One teenage girl was in a coma from this for weeks and then died. Then there’s hairspray. You puncture the can, depressurize it, shake it up into a foamy mass, and then drink or inhale it. It has a great kick, like a mule kicking you in the head, opening your skull. Shoe polish can be cooked up into a nice soup that gives you a great high and an everlasting hangover. People will drink anything if they can’t have regular boozt—perfume, cough medicine, hair conditioner—whatever. The big thing now is “Montana gin"—one bottle of Lysol to a gallon of water. It’s a mighty potent brew. One guy, who reversed the ratio, bloated up, turned black, and died. You can also strain Lysol through bread. It will get you blind drunk, but you don’t stagger, so they tell me. Whatever bad things go on in New York, Chicago, or L.A. eventually find their way to the res. Many people on the res are on drugs and alcohol at the same time—cruisin’ and boozin’. I was lucky and never got into hard drugs. I smoked a little pej once in a while, but that was all.
Housing is one of the biggest problems. There’s new housing, but rents start at $190 and go up to $500—depending on how many people there are in the family and how many rooms you need. If you are on GA or ADC you can’t afford it. Then you look for somebody to rent you an old shack or trailer. I went through a dozen “homes” during the last few years. You scrape together enough for the first month’s rent. Then you stop paying. You hang on for as long as you can while the owner tries to get rid of you. In the end he succeeds. Then the same circle of looking for a place you can afford starts all over again. When we had to camp out, with a tipi, a propane stove, and a brush shelter, the kids loved it. They had a large area to explore and play in, and a stream for swimming, but I had gotten too old for it. Whenever it rained you had to run and pack everything away. There was water in the tipi—it was dripping through the smoke hole on top—and outside, the mud was ankle-deep.
Last summer we stayed in a run-down trailer at Antelope. The plywood floor was so rotten you could stick a finger through it. As soon as you entered there was a big hole in the floor. I put a little ratty rug over the hole, praying nobody would step through it and break a leg. Electricity worked only in the living room. In one small bedroom was a red light, which made it look like a photographic darkroom being used. You had to be an Einstein to make the toilet flush, which posed a highly technical challenge. Over the front door I nailed a sign: THIS PROPERTY INSURED BY SMITH AND WESSON. This seemed to help, as nobody ever tried to break in. As usual we failed to keep up paying the rent and had to move again.
We got another trailer house in Antelope from an Indian lady. It had a phone, and even cable TV, but it didn’t have hot water and the kids had to bathe in a little tin tub filled with water heated on the stove. Also, the trailer was located in a “too friendly” neighborhood, meaning that we were overrun with people coming in with one or two twelve-packs, guzzling beer into the wee hours, so that we got nothing done.
For two months last summer I lived in what I called “my little home on the prairie,” a hundred-year-old log cabin with an earth floor and no electricity. There was a pump outside, at some distance. It also had the standard outdoor privy with a million buzzing flies, and a big wood stove inside. And that was it. As long as it was warm, it was not a bad place to live. We were out in the rolling hills. The only thing you could hear were two magpies who came around during the day. We ate commodities and I baked my own bread. Of course, if the car broke down, which happened all the time, I was marooned, cut off from the world. As soon as it started getting cold, I had to move again. You could not live in that place during a South Dakota winter.
Things are going from bad to worse. Nowadays, if you want to get a place you have to apply to the housing board in your old community. Then they’ll look at your finance records, and if you have any bad credit with the board, you won’t get the place until you pay up. Most people owe so much back rent that they’ll never be able to pay it all. So some folks live in abandoned car wrecks or even prehistoric-style earth lodges.
When things get absolutely desperate we move in with Mom. She has a “normal,” that is a white-style, lower-middle-class, home, very nicely kept. She has a steady job at the elementary school in He Dog and my stepfather is a retired teacher with a pension. They are part of the minority that has a steady income. As a result, everybody is hitting them up for money and a place to stay. Recently everybody was camping out at Mom’s—myself with Rudi and the four children, my sister Sandra with her baby, another relative with one more baby, and one of my brothers. My brother is a computer technician with a bachelor’s degree, but there’s no job for him. He is overqualified. If there is a position to be filled, you’re always overqualified or underqualified, unless you are a relative of one of our big shot politicians. There’s only one bathroom at my Mom’s place. Well, use your imagination. We all try to have our own places and not drive my mother crazy, but sometimes we are still like little chicks crawling under the wings of the mother hen for a little warmth.
At the moment we have a trailer for ourselves. Everything in it breaks down—the fridge one day, the stove another—but Rudi is a good fixer.
The health service is not too good either. A lot of people don’t trust doctors and would rather go to a medicine man for help. A lot of infants die of something called “infant diarrhea.” You have to have a 106-degree fever before they’ll admit you to the hospital and anything really serious they refuse to handle. When I had my major c
ar wreck they flew me to Sioux Falls. The same thing happened to Bobby Leader Charge when a white drunk ventilated him with an AK-47.
Then there’s the problem of race relations. A lot of people try to forget about it, but there are a few who have been hurt by the eternal wrangle of how much Indian blood you have—one-half, one-fourth, one-eighth—or whether you are tribally enrolled or not. I was often put down because I am an iyeska, a half-breed. I felt at home in AIM because they just identified themselves as red people, not as full-bloods or breeds. They accepted you for your attitude, not for your bloodline. When I moved to the Paradise, some of Crow Dog’s relations gave me a hard time. Sometimes, when I disagreed with Leonard, he’d say I had an “iyeska attitude.” On the other hand, I think that the ikche wichasha, the full-bloods, have some reason to be prejudiced against the breeds, because they and the whites control everything. It is hard for a full-blood to get a job or a loan. The iyeska call the full-bloods “stupid, uneducated back numbers,” while the full-bloods retaliate by calling them people who identify with the white man, money grubbers who’ve forgotten what it means to be an Indian. There are many good iyeska who are grass-roots people, keeping the old tradition, but both sides often stereotype each other. And there’s the land problem. Years ago a tribal chairman started the TLE—Tribal Lands Enterprises—which made it legal to lease reservation land to white ranchers. Once a year the people get their lease money, often their only income. But some haven’t gotten any money for years because it is caught up in the usual red tape connected with everything having to do with government. The res is now like a checkerboard with half the squares owned or leased by whites. Relations between full- and half-bloods, however, are improving. Our little local Sinte Gleska College (Spotted Tail College in English) has helped a lot and done some good things, such as getting the two sides together and reviving the use of the Lakota language. Once a person speaks Lakota he or she is accepted by the full-bloods as one of theirs. At that college they learn to help each other instead of working against each other. Lionel Bordeaux started this program and deserves the credit.
Ohitika Woman Page 17