PINE RIDGE (AP) — A longtime tennis coach in England has been offering free tennis classes on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
Leigh Owen, 50, has been visiting Pine Ridge regularly since 1997 and has been enamored with the people and their culture since he was an 8-year-old boy, when he asked his mom to write to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, he told the Rapid City Journal.
“I don’t know exactly why,” Owen said by phone, “but I was interested in the Native-American culture since childhood.”
Owen began coaching at Red Cloud Indian School in February, spending one day a week at the school. Although Red Cloud does not have a formal tennis court, the school’s gym is perfect for what Owen calls “mini-tennis,” allowing his students to work on technique.
“The kids really liked it,” he said.
Patrick Welch, a physical education teacher at Red Cloud Elementary and assistant athletic director at the middle school, said Owen is doing an amazing job. Welch said kids on the reservation know basketball, football and cross country running, but tennis was foreign to them.
“Leigh got the kids interested; he grabbed their attention right off the bat,” Welch said.
Owen said the United States Tennis Association has been generous in providing equipment for the fledgling tennis players.
Tony Stingley, director of training and outreach for USTA’s northern district, estimated that the organization has donated more than $1,200 worth of equipment.
Owen said he is determined to turn the reservation he loves into a mecca for the sport he loves, and he and Welch are thinking big. They want to renovate some outdoor courts for what could become a tennis center.
Owen is back in Liverpool but will return to the United States in early September.
In this July 10, 2014 photo, Denise Mesteth poses outside the powwow grounds in Pine Ridge, S.D. Mesteth is a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, born and raised on the Pine Ridge reservation. She has signed up for health insurance through the federal marketplace. (AP Photo/Nora Hertel)
By NORA HERTEL Associated Press
PINE RIDGE, South Dakota — Denise Mesteth signed up for new health insurance through the federal Affordable Care Act, despite concerns that it may not be worth the money for her and other Native Americans who otherwise rely on free government coverage.
Mesteth, who has a heart murmur and requires medication and regular blood work, said she’s cautiously optimistic that the federal insurance will be superior to what she has now. Many other American Indians have been more reluctant to enroll, choosing instead to continue relying on the Indian Health Service for their coverage and taking advantage of a clause in the federal health reform law that allows them to be exempt from the insurance mandate if they meet certain requirements.
“If it’s better services, then I’m OK,” Masteth said of ACA. “But it better be better.”
Mesteth and other American Indians in South Dakota account for 2.5 percent of the people in the state who have signed up for insurance under the federal health care law, according to the latest signup numbers. The state, with nearly 9 percent of its overall population Native American, ranks third for the percentage of enrollees who are American Indian among U.S. states using the federal marketplace.
The Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Health Board, which provides support and health care advocacy to tribes, received $264,000 to help Native Americans in South Dakota navigate the new insurance marketplace.
Tinka Duran, program coordinator for the board, said people are primarily concerned about the costs of enrolling. Insurance is a new concept to most because health care has always been free, she said.
“There’s a learning curve for figuring out co-pays and deductibles,” she said.
During a U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing in May, tribal leaders chastised IHS as a bloated bureaucracy unable to fulfill its core duty of providing health care for more than 2 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives. IHS acting director Yvette Roubideaux said changes were underway but that more money will be needed than the $4.4 billion the agency receives each year.
She noted that federal health care spending on Native Americans lags far behind spending on other groups such as federal employees, who receive almost twice as much on a per-capita basis. Meanwhile, American Indians suffer from higher rates of substance abuse, assault, diabetes and a slew of other ailments compared to most of the population.
Native Americans and Alaska Natives are exempt from the health insurance mandate if they meet certain requirements. ACA also permanently reauthorized the Indian Health Care Improvement Act and authorized new programs for IHS, which also is starting to get funds from the Veterans Affairs Department to help native veterans.
When American Indians do obtain insurance, it means fewer people are tapping the IHS budget, said Raho Ortiz, director of the IHS Division of Business Office Enhancement.
“If more of our patients have health insurance or are enrolled in Medicaid, this means that more resources are available locally for all of our patients,” Ortiz said in an emailed statement. “This, in turn, allows scarce resources to be stretched further.”
Those who sign up for federal health care can still use IHS facilities but have the option of seeking health care elsewhere, Ortiz said.
State Democratic Sen. Jim Bradford is among the skeptics. The Oglala Sioux member lives on the Pine Ridge reservation, home to two of the poorest counties in the nation.
The U.S. government provides health care to Native Americans as part of its trust responsibility to tribes that gave up their land when the country was being formed. Bradford and others object to the shift in health care providers on the principle that IHS is obligated by treaty to supply that care.
Harriett Jennesse, a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe who lives in Rapid City, said she already has seen the benefits of the new health insurance and doesn’t mind paying a little out of pocket.
Jennesse said she put off treatment for a painful bone chip in her elbow after IHS denied a doctor’s referral to a specialist on grounds that it wasn’t an urgent enough need. She’s now seeing a specialist for dislocation in her other elbow and will also try to get the bone chip fixed when the other arm heals.
Students leave class and wait for the bus on the last day of classes at the Wounded Knee District School in Manderson, South Dakota. Photo by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum for MSNBC
MANDERSON, South Dakota — In almost any other context it would be a given, an expectation as simple as a dark cloud spitting rain. But when 12-year-old Carleigh Campbell tested proficient on the South Dakota achievement test last year, it was a rather astonishing feat.
Campbell is a student at a school where four students have attempted suicide this year alone. Roughly four out of five of her neighbors are unemployed and well over half live in deep poverty. About 70% of the students in her community will eventually drop out of school.
It’s against this backdrop that Carleigh met expectations on the state’s mandated exam, the only student out of about 150 in her school to do so. To state the obvious, Carleigh’s academic achievement is a bright spot in an epically dark place.
Carleigh is a Native American sixth grader at the Wounded Knee School located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where a well-documented plague of poverty and violence has festered since the Oglala Sioux were forced onto the reservation more than a century ago. There is virtually no infrastructure, few jobs and no major economic engines. Families are destabilized by substance abuse and want. Children often go hungry and adults die young.
These realities wash onto the schoolyards here with little runoff or relief, trapping generations of young people in hopelessness and despair.
“We’re in an urgent situation, an emergency state,” said Alice Phelps, principal at the Wounded Knee School. “But underneath all the baggage is intelligence, potential, and these children all have that.”
Few communities in America are as eager for a silver lining as the Lakota of the Pine Ridge reservation, situated on more than 2 million rambling acres, nudged up against the Black Hills and Badlands National Park. Nowhere is it more palpable than in the reservation’s schools, a jumble of public, private and federal systems that often overlap but rarely ever bolster the academic prospects of the most forgotten children in America.
Carleigh Campbell, 6th grader at Wounded Knee school. She was the only student of 150 students who tested proficient on last year’s state exams. Photo by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum for MSNBC
While the 565 Native American tribes recognized by the U.S. government enjoy sovereign status as separate nations, nearly all Indian education funding is tied up with federal strings. Unlike most public schools that rely largely on local tax money, there are virtually no private land owners on the reservations, so no taxpayers to tax. The government often pays as much as 60% of a reservation school’s budget compared to just 10% of the budget of a typical public school. When last year’s federal sequestration cuts kicked in, Indian country was hit first.
The government is starting to own up to its failures. In a startling new draft report released in April by the federal Bureau of Indian Education, which oversees 183 schools on 64 reservations in 23 states, the agency draws attention to its own inability to deliver a quality education to Native students. BIE-funded schools are chronically failing and “one of the lowest-performing set of schools in the country,” according to the report.
“BIE has never faced more urgent challenges,” the report said. “Each of these challenges has contributed to poor outcomes for BIE students.”
During the 2012-2013 school year, only one out of four BIE-funded schools met state-defined proficiency standards, and one out of three are under restructuring due to chronic academic failure, according to the report. BIE students performed lower on national assessment tests than every other major urban school district other than Detroit Public Schools, the report says.
BIE students also perform worse than American Indian students attending regular public schools. In 2011, 4th graders in the BIE scored 22 points lower in reading and 14 points lower in math on national proficiency tests than their Indian counterparts attending public schools.
BIE schools are typically located in some of the poorest, most geographically isolated regions of the country. Four of the five poorest counties in America are located on reservations. Shannon County, where Pine Ridge is located, is the second poorest with a per capita income of just $6,000-$8,000 a year. It’s also extremely difficult to attract quality teachers willing to relocate to remote outposts with limited quality housing and extreme quality of life issues.
The BIE blames its failures on “an inconsistent commitment from political leadership,” institutional, budgetary and legal barriers as well as bureaucratic red tape among federal agencies. Those systemic issues have produced a disjointed system that has even clogged up the delivery of required materials, including textbooks.
The BIE has had 33 leaders in 35 years, making a chaotic system that has not operated efficiently for decades even worse.
Dr. Charles Roessel, director of the BIE, told msnbc that the agency is actively consulting with tribes across the country to identify ways the bureau can help tribes bolster the academic outcomes of their students. The draft report was the product of those consultations.
Some challenges are obvious. “How do you get a quality teaching staff at a very remote part of the country where you don’t have a city to support or you don’t have the infrastructure and the salaries are lower?” Roessel said, adding, “The greatest impact in a classroom is the teacher and we need to improve the quality of that instruction. And we have to do it with our hands tied behind our back and our feet tied together, too.”
Never Gave Up Sovereignty
Poor academic performance plagues American Indian students both on and off federal lands.
Even as other historically oppressed minority groups like African Americans and Hispanics have made steady academic progress over the last decade, achievement among American Indian youth has stalled. Huge spikes in black and Hispanic high school graduation rates have pushed the country’s overall graduation rate to an all-time high, while the rate for Native American students is trending in the opposite direction.
Compounding the poor academic outcomes is what advocates in Indian country describe as a history of broken treatises, lingering racism and chicanery.
While tribes operate some of the BIE schools, the funding comes with various restrictions and benchmarks. And in the case of traditional public schools that operate near reservations and have a large number Indian students, funding goes directly to states and does not provide culturally relevant Indian education.
“The central offices, they take their big cut out and they have everything, so by the time it gets to our children there’s very little money left and that’s one of the big problems,” Bryan Brewer, president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, said on a recent afternoon during a town-hall style meeting between tribal members and BIE officials. “We don’t have enough money for facilities. If we need to buy something, a furnace, something like that, we have to cut out a teacher. It’s that bad.”
The economic and political implications are worst in states with the largest populations of American Indians, including New Mexico, Montana, Oklahoma and South Dakota.
“There are challenging state and tribal dynamics. There’s history involved here and the reality of sometimes incompatible bureaucracies, the lack of capacity and understanding of one another and even alternative goals,” said William Mendoza, the executive director of the White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education. “The experience has been one of a history of tragedy where the effort, both real and perceived, was to assimilate American Indians.”
South Dakota’s nine Indian reservations exist as sovereign nations. But what does that mean? KSFY News talked with tribal, state and federal leaders about what it means to lead a nation within a nation.
Sovereignty may seem easy to define on paper, but in practice, it’s complicated. To some, it’s a feeling. A way of life.
“Sovereignty, to me, is something our grandfathers gave us. That we need to respect, because it’s a tool that protects us here in Indian Country,” said Rosebud Sioux Tribe President Cyril Scott.
It’s a way of life that involves an ongoing power struggle, colored by a history of eradication.
“The states, the government, they want to take that sovereignty away from us. They don’t want to acknowledge that Adolf Hitler got his ideas from the United States,” said Crow Creek Sioux Tribe Chairman Brandon Sazue.
For tribal governments, sovereignty comes with a limited autonomy.
“When you look at South Dakota, we’re unique in a sense that we have nine different tribes that through treaties and congressional action enjoy a level of tribal sovereignty. That means they have the ability – while they are certainly South Dakotans – that they have the ability to vote in our elections, but they also have a separate sovereignty that allows them to control certain matters within their borders,” said South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley.
“We have control of our schools, our courts, our police, so those do make us sovereign, but there’s a lot of things where we are not sovereign. We are still dependent. We are still dependent on the federal government because they have not met their trust responsibility in meeting our needs through economic development,” said Oglala Sioux Tribe President Bryan Brewer.
“They gave us the treaties 200 years ago, 100 years ago, however long ago. Did that give us our sovereignty? In a way, it should have. But today, we don’t have sovereignty,” said Sazue.
Tribes must follow state and federal laws, which can mean problems when those limits are tested.
“For any community in the United States, there are limits. The constitution still needs to be followed and respected. The federal laws still need to be followed and respected,” said South Dakota U.S. Attorney Brendan Johnson.
For example, Pine Ridge is looking into the legalization of marijuana within its borders. Jackley says while he respects tribal sovereignty, pot still is illegal.
“He said he’s going to come to Pine Ridge and arrest us if we did do that,” said Brewer, “And we realize that we have to follow federal law and that. But again, we need to exercise our sovereignty. Pine Ridge has already passed an ordinance years ago legalizing hemp – to grow hemp on our reservation. Yet when a person did, they were arrested.”
Another limit to tribal sovereignty is who can and cannot be prosecuted in tribal courts.
“There are further limitations if there is a non-Indian committing a crime against a non-Indian within the reservation boundaries, the state or the state’s attorney would have jurisdiction over that,” said Jackley.
“I believe we’re going to start arresting everybody. Non-Indians. If they commit a crime on a reservation, we’re going to arrest him, take them through our courts and see what happens. We know it will go to the Supreme Court, but we want to test it, we want to test our sovereignty and we talk about our sovereignty. We’re going to test it through the judicial system,” said Brewer.
“We’re seeing tribal courts strengthened. We’re seeing police departments growing and I think that’s very good, because I think the future of tribal sovereignty means more local control for the tribes, less involvement from federal government,” said Johnson.
According to Brewer, many families living in reservation communities depend on the federal government as well, because job opportunities are few and the cost of utilities like propane and electricity are high.
“We’re all wishing and praying one day that we can be completely sovereign, but as long as we’re within the confines of the United States government, we will probably never be truly sovereign.”
A recent emphasis on economic development and inter-tribal trade aims to change that.
“The future of tribal sovereignty, I think, is about creating alliances. Sovereignty is strongest when you’re using it to create alliances, and I think in South Dakota we’re starting to see that now,” said Johnson.
“We all have something to offer. We can trade with each other. So this is something we’re really looking at,” said Brewer, “We’ve talked to tribes in the northwest. They said ‘Bryan, we’d like to have your buffalo. We have so much diabetes out there. Send us buffalo meat. We’ll send you lumber, we’ll send you salmon.’ The Seminoles out of Florida – ‘We’ll send you oranges. You can use those for your people or you can sell them to communities.’”
South Dakota’s tribes are working on many fronts to become more independent.
Wind energy will help cut down on the high cost of electricity. Several tribes have projects in the works.
The launch of dozens of tribe-operated businesses – like Lakota Popcorn on Lower Brule and Tanka Bars on Pine Ridge – are helping to alleviate the unemployment problem.
Many tribes are also putting an increased emphasis on tourism. For example, the Oglala Sioux will likely become the first tribe to operate a national park in the Badlands’ South Unit.
While tribes are using the increasing connectedness of our world for the betterment of their people, assimilation and eventual obscurity aren’t part of the plan.
“What we are telling the people of the United States and the state of South Dakota – we are a nation. The first nation of this country,” said Scott.
NEAH BAY –– The U.S. Department of the Interior will soon offer to buy land from individual property owners on the Makah reservation under a new federal program aimed at helping tribes consolidate ownership.
The Makah reservation is the second in the nation to be part of Interior’s Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations.
Over the next 10 years, Interior will use $1.9 billion to buy land once allotted to tribal members that has ownership that has become “fractionated” among heirs of the original owners — meaning some plots are owned by hundreds of people.
The land will then be put into a trust for the tribes.
Dale Denney, Realty officer for the Makah, said the tribe has been allocated $2.55 million to buy fractionated lots within the tribe’s 30,000-acre reservation.
The tribe now has 14 allotments it has appraised to buy under the program.
Under the Dawes Act of 1887, tribal members were given allotments of land by the federal government, Denney said.
As those original owners died, the land was often split among heirs who over time have taken ownership of mere fractions of property.
One particular piece of allotment land now is now owned by 353 owners, Denney said.
“We’re talking places where people own just a few square feet now,” Denney said.
Genevieve Giaccardo, tribal relations adviser for Interior, said the first purchase offers under the program were made late last month to members of the Oglala Sioux tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southern South Dakota.
“It’s exciting to see the numbers with the Makah and Pine Ridge and seeing how things are beginning to work out,” Giaccardo said.
“We have a lot of work to do and a lot of logistics to work out. But these tribes have done a great job of finding ways to make this work.”
Tribal and U.S. officials are hosting a pair of meetings in the Makah Marina conference room, 1321 Bayview Ave. in Neah Bay, on Monday and Tuesday.
Monday’s meeting runs from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday’s runs from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
The program eventually will be expanded and offered to 150 tribes across the nation, including others on the North Olympic Peninsula.
Meetings to explain the program to tribes in Washington will be Thursday and Friday, Jan. 16 and 17, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Philip Starr Building at the Muckleshoot Wellness Center, 39015 172nd Ave. S.E. in Auburn.
Giaccardo said convoluted ownership complicates decisions about use of land and resources as thousands of owners have to be consulted before decisions can be made.
“This has all been going on for 125 years,” she said. “So there’s a lot of heirs to get in contact with. That’s where the tribes are going to have a lot of work to do.”
The buyback stems from the $3.4 billion class-action settlement in 2012 of a suit brought by Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet woman who brought suit against the U.S. government for mismanaging royalties from oil, gas, grazing and timber rights on tribal lands.
The Makah previously received $25 million from that settlement.
Makah Tribal Chairman T.J. Greene testified to the U.S. Senate last month about the tribe’s buyback plans.
Greene said 1,158 letters were sent to owners of the most fractionated allotments to inquire about buying the land.
Through meetings with various interest groups, he said, the tribe decided to focus its purchase on lands that will provide opportunity through timber and other economic development, as well as trying to purchase sacred grounds at Tsooes, a coastal village south of Cape Flattery.
Greene said the 14 lots ready for the buyback were appraised at a total value of $1.5 million.
The tribe has another 12 or 13 allotments prioritized for appraisal.
The BIE blames its failures on “an inconsistent commitment from political leadership,” institutional, budgetary and legal barriers as well as bureaucratic red tape among federal agencies. Those systemic issues have produced a disjointed system that has even clogged up the delivery of required materials, including textbooks.
