We speak to you from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the Oglala Lakota nation, with contributions from our relatives in Rosebud, Standing Rock and Cheyenne River. The realities we face on the Oglala Lakota nation are not only replicated amongst the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota nations, but throughout numerous communities within sovereign Indian nations. Pine Ridge is bereft of investment or infrastructure and the possibility of one, so that the other could follow, appears remote. Shannon County, located on the reservation, is consistently the poorest area in the United States according to official sources. Ours is a reservation where even those statistics deteriorate.
Some people exist in broken down cars.
Levels of disease can be five and six times the national average without adequate or readily accessible health care facilities to counter and control. Our people have the lowest life expectancy, the highest rate of teen suicide, and the highest infant mortality rate of any ethnic group in the United States. Alcohol remains the scourge it has been since the Europeans introduced it to our people and it's purpose and their intent, to debilitate, placate and destroy us, also remains unchanged. Liquor stores litter reservation border towns and the revenue from alcohol is the lifeblood of those communities which are kept alive by the addiction, despondency and deaths of our people, young and old, who succumb to colonial power. On Pine Ridge we have children of kindergarten age inhaling glue and gasoline.