Question about the Pine Ridge reservation
I've seen several documentaries and read several articles about the poverty at Pine Ridge. The fact that so many people are living without basic services like running water is shameful.
I have a question, though, and I hope it's not culturally insensitive.
Pine Ridge has a population of about 40,000 people, but it looks like many if not most people live outside town and miles from their nearest neighbors.
It seems to me like providing jobs, public services, community support, and basic utilities would be much easier with a more consolidated population, but there must be some reason why the population is so scattered. Native Americans back in the day lived in communities, and most people in the US today live in communities too. 40,000 people is a good-sized town, and it would be enough to get some economic cross-pollination going. Even two towns of 20,000 would be more economically viable. According to a report I worked on last year, white people in Nebraska are moving out of the tiny towns into slightly larger towns for the economic opportunities that are available.
Why is the population so dispersed? And is that changing, or are there cultural forces that keep people apart from each other?
= new reply since forum marked as read
... but I really haven't lived it, so it's not mine to say.
My short answer is the way their cultures and communities were systematically destroyed. All the good stuff of their own culture was stripped away, including their land, and all the rotten stuff of white racist English speaking culture was imposed upon them without any of the positive aspects.
African American communities are disrupted in a similar fashion. Drugs and alcohol are a large part of it, but it goes much deeper than that. The dominant racist culture in the USA has centuries of experience suppressing communities that don't accept their white "Christian" values and a lower class status.
My family is wild west white. Most of them skipped the normal 18th and 19th century immigration paths. Many branches of my family tree end in fabrications. They simply appear in California or other Western states. The family histories they told their kids are not true. You don't tell your kid you were an impressed sailor who jumped ship in San Francisco, you tell 'em their esteemed ancestors came over on the Mayflower.
Dear old dad was not the guy on the wrong end of the stick:
My best documented ancestor was a "mail order" bride from Scandinavia to Salt Lake city. She didn't like sharing a husband so she ran off with a U.S. government surveyor with a sketchy background. If you read the history of the Mormons in the west, you see the U.S. government trying to disrupt the Mormon community in most every way possible. My wife-stealing ancestor may have been part of that plan. The U.S. government had ulterior motives when they sent guys like him into Mormon territory.
I've got some personal experience how this racism and suppression of non-white cultures was expressed. People of my grandparents' generation would have sworn up and down they were not racist. They had Black friends, American Indian friends, Asian friends, heck, even gay and Jewish friends.
But when they found out I was marrying a "Mexican girl" many of them were distraught. My generation was the first to marry "outside our race."
My mom and dad have cousins who still think that way. I've one niece, largely American Indian, who has a black boyfriend. She has not introduced him to this racist branch of the family even though she lives nearby.
Here's where I find it difficult to make my point because I'm just another clueless white guy who has never personally experienced this sort of discrimination.
My wife's dad is largely Southwestern Native American, on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border. Culturally his family is Mexican. When he was a kid his U.S. schools taught kids like him they were second class. The dominant white culture reinforced these "values" on television and everywhere else. His high school counselors encouraged white kids to go to college, but kids like my father-in-law were expected to work as farmworkers, in the packing houses, maybe go to a trade school. That's the work his parents did, that's what his white high school counselors and teachers expected of him, some of them telling him explicitly he should set "realistic goals" for himself.
My father-in-law didn't accept that and joined the Navy to escape. The Navy discovered he was very bright. They made him a medic, and he worked up from there.
Here's the sad thing -- many kids in his situation do not escape. The dominant society provides them with far more opportunities for failure than it does for success and thus communities are destroyed.
