by CHRIS MCGREAL
The US president has pledged to improve the lives of the country’s one million Native Americans. But he faces an enormous challenge. Chris McGreal reports from Pine Ridge Indian reservation
Indian country begins where the prairie of Custer county gives way to the formidable rock spires marking out South Dakota’s Badlands. The road runs straight until the indistinguishable clapboard homesteads fade from view and the path climbs into a landscape sharpened by an eternity of wind and water.
The first marker that this may be a part of the United States, but is also apart from it, comes as the road descends to the plains of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Here an abandoned mobile home, daubed with the name of a Sioux rebel who led the tribe’s last armed showdown with the US authorities nearly 40 years ago, stands as a monument to defiance and despair.
The reservation’s own station struggles through on the radio: the tribe’s president, Theresa Two Bulls, is on air lamenting the death of a schoolboy, Joshua Kills Enemy, who hanged himself the day before. His funeral will be the second of the week, coming days after a 14-year-old girl took her own life in the same way. They are not the first.
Two Bulls wonders how it can be that the Oglala Sioux tribe’s children are killing themselves. “We must hug our children, we must tell them we love them. A lot of these youth don’t get a hug a day. They’re never told that they’re loved. We need to start being parents and grandparents to them,” she says.
Two days later, Two Bulls declared a “suicide state of emergency” in response to the deaths and a spate of attempts by others to kill themselves, such as Delia Big Boy, who was 15 when she put a rope around her neck. “It had a lot to do with my parents and alcohol abuse and what they say to you. The things they say make you think they don’t love you,” says the high school student, now 17.
“I hear the same thing from my friends. There’s hopelessness on the reservation. There’s no sense of belonging, of a future. There’s alcoholism. The parents drink. A lot of the children drink.”
Two Bulls sees the children’s deaths as a symptom of a wider crisis that has gripped generations of Oglala Sioux. More than 100 people, mostly adults, attempted suicide or took their own lives on Pine Ridge Reservation last year.
“This is about how defeated our people feel,” Two Bulls tells me later. “People across the US don’t realise we could be identified as the Third World, our living conditions. People think we’re living high off the hog on welfare and casinos. I’ve asked them — US congressional people, US secretaries of these departments who deal with us — to come out to our reservation, see first-hand how we live, why we live that way. Find out why our children are killing themselves. Learn who we are.”
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