The Sioux Nation Shopping Center is the only grocery store on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, an area the size of Connecticut.
I was shocked last week to learn there are neighborhoods that routinely rely on outhouses because their homes have no running water and lack electricity.
If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.
I was not in Colorado Springs, but that doesn’t matter. To me it’s outrageous there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of American families who still rely on outhouses.
I reacted so strongly because I see outhouses as an ugly symbol of poverty. And poverty isn’t a condition routinely associated with the U.S. — the richest broke nation on the planet.
But that’s what I found when I drove onto the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
I came face-to-face with Third World poverty.
Volunteers for RE-MEMBER install an outhouse the group built at a home in 2010 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, S.D.
My family went to Pine Ridge to volunteer for RE-MEMBER, a nonprofit group devoted to providing housing and helping the elderly and disabled on the reservation, which is the size of Connecticut and home to about 25,000 Oglala Sioux known collectively as Lakota Indians.
The nonprofit group builds bunk beds, insulates and skirts mobile homes, installs roofs, builds wheelchair ramps and, yes, builds outhouses for the reservation’s poor, which describes just about everyone.
Colorado Springs resident Cary Vogrin helped dig a pit for an outhouse being in stalled in May 2012 by the RE-MEMBER nonprofit group on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, S.D.
In 15 years, it has installed 700 outhouses on Pine Ridge. Last week was no exception. My wife, Cary, was on a crew that installed one outhouse for a blind Vietnam veteran and his wife, who dug their own pit. Then the crew went to another trailer, dug a pit and installed a second outhouse.
Actually, outhouses rank among the less-serious problems on Pine Ridge, one of the poorest counties in the U.S.
The reservation is battling severe unemployment — 80 percent and higher — a plague of alcohol and drug addition among its residents and an alarming suicide rate even among its middle-school children.
I arrived ready to help. I left disillusioned by the magnitude of the problems.
Colorado Springs resident Ben Vogrin helps assemble bunk beds in May 2012 in a home on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
For example, I learned one-third of the dozen bunk beds we built last weekly likely will be burned to heat trailers next winter.
It felt like we were putting Band-Aids on a hemorrhaging amputation.
I don’t pretend to know how to solve the problems at Pine Ridge. I believe it is too remote and unstable to attract industry or businesses of enough size to help.
But I have a suggestion.
Every Lakota should pack up, put all the broken treaties behind them, and leave Pine Ridge.
Leave the Wounded Knee Massacre site. Forget reclaiming the Black Hills. Focus on overcoming all the poverty and addictions.
Just as I left my decaying, crime-ridden hometown of Kansas City, Kan., got a college education and pursued a life elsewhere, the Lakota need to leave Pine Ridge.
Education and a fresh beginning, I believe, are the Lakotas’ best hope.
The mass grave where U.S. Cavalry soldiers heaped the frozen corpses of Lakota men, women and children, many of the corpses mutilated, after the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, S.D.
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Interesting article and I’ve always know that Pine Ridge is a 3rd world country within our country, however, if they just pack up and leave where can/do they go? Is there assistance to help them receive housing and get a “fresh” start. It’s easy for someone like you or I, with jobs, already with our educations completed, already out in the “real” world to decide, “ok, i’m tired of living here I want something better/different, I think I’ll plan to move to Virginia” and then for us to begin that process. I’m not saying the Native’s on the reservation can’t do that but after generations of poverty, drug use and being accustomed to reservation life it’s not as easy as 1. 2. 3.. But I see your point and I didn’t realize that unemployment was that high. Sad state of affairs, I hope they can find a way out.
there is no oil,
they should be an annuity to pay for the stolen land
based on royalties from existing landowners
if Syrians had done this , the UN would be involved.
Kim, thanks for your comment. Actually, they can leave pretty easily and get an education for free at many universities, including Fort Lewis in Durango. They get government stipends and free health care at any reservation hospital in the nation. Of course, they’d probably qualify for EBT or food stamps where they relocate. So it shouldn’t be terribly hard to make a new start. I wish they would. It was heartbreaking to see the conditions. Especially for all the children living there.
Back in ’95-’96, a little girl rode the school bus (they stayed at the school Mon – Fri) and when the bus arrived at the school, her feet were frozen to the floor of the bus.
- A Grandmother used all her blankets to cover the children, then she laid down on the floor and froze to death.
- Check with One Nation (near the N. Nevada K-Mart) – their people work WITH the rez people – teaching them how to build, paint, garden, trying to teach the forgotten Indian ways – there’s a whole generation that has been forced to learn the White Man’s ways. And the Lakota language needs to be restored.
- If I remember correctly, Rapid City is built on Indian land.
What the government should do:
1. Give running water to the reservation.
2. Buy Wind turbines for the reservation every year.
3. Give grants to form businesses on the reservation.
4. Make it easier to start a business.
And lastly the reason why it’s so bad, a few people posting didn’t know this, the government made it policy for the purpose of genocide to get people on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation dependent on welfare since the 1800′s. To make the residents dependent and not self reliant. That aside from the government making it almost impossible for them to start a business. Our government started these policies with a WAR mentality in mind.
To get a once proud people to be dependent on government assistance.