Instead of driving south to Florida or California or Texas or flying to Mexico like so many others on spring break, I joined nine InterVarsity Christian Fellowship members from Winona and RCTC on a trek to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
If you drive westward into South Dakota, along the Nebraska border, you’ll eventually run into Pine Ridge. This 1.7 million acre reservation is the second biggest in the country, and home to the Oglala Lakota.
Winona freshmen may be familiar with this reservation— Kent Nerburn’s book Neither Wolf Nor Dog is set here and I’m sure many of you English 111 types read it.
The town of Pine Ridge, S.D. is different from Winona in just about every conceivable way. If you’re white, you’re a minority. If you’re Asian like I am, you’re… still a minority, but we knew that.
Walking down the street, you can probably make a living recycling the Budweiser and Hurricane malt liquor cans lying on the streets.
There is a strong sense of desperation in the town.
For one of the reasons why, travel two miles south to the town of Whiteclay, Nebraska, just off the reservation, home of 22 people and four liquor stores.
Alcohol is prohibited on the reservation, but the four Whiteclay liquor stores sell between 10,000 and 15,000 12 oz. cans of alcohol a day, most of it headed into Pine Ridge.
If that sounds cool to you, allow me to disabuse you of that notion.
Half of the adults on the Pine Ridge reservation are alcoholics or addicted to drugs. Most children do not grow up within a stable family; many grow up in abusive homes, largely due to alcohol.
People in Pine Ridge do not get drunk for the fun of it. They get drunk because drunken blurriness is easier to handle than daily life.
If you think it’s hard to get a job in Winona, try finding one in Pine Ridge, where half the people over 16 are unemployed and the average family income is half the national average.
The life expectancy on the reservation is the lowest of anywhere in the Western hemisphere except for Haiti, and the infant mortality rate is at least triple the national average.
But even with the despair, sadness, broken dreams, and broken hearts littering Pine Ridge, amid the ghosts of Wounded Knee and the hurting generations born into poverty and broken families, I think Pine Ridge is going to get better.
My reason is that on my first day there, I was approached by a grubby little girl with snot dripping from her nose. She looked like most of the other people I’d seen on the reservation. Her curly hair and dark eyes said nothing to me as she walked up.
But her face broke into an enormous, toothy smile and she reached out to me and smacked my arm as I stood there.
She only said two words. “You’re it!”
And that’s why I know Pine Ridge will recover.