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Left Behind

By AAN Staff
september 29, 2003  04:37 pm
Left Behind
While the rest of America frets over an unemployment rate of 6 percent, unemployment on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, home to the Oglala Sioux Tribe of the Lakota Nation, is estimated to be between 60 percent and 80 percent. A century and a half of mistreatment and neglect by the federal government has left Pine Ridge and other Lakota reservations with staggering rates of poverty, homelessness, alcoholism, diabetes, teenage pregnancy, murder, suicide and infant mortality. Some Lakota tell Terje Langeland that their tribes need to wean themselves off government assistance, through education and the formation of small businesses. "We're more or less sitting here expecting handouts," says Homer Whirlwind Soldier, an elder from the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. "We need to teach our kids to be self-sufficient."
View full article at Colorado Springs Independent