Off the Rez: It's time to close the Indian reservations

'If you want to start a business on the reservation, here's what you have to do," says Mark St. Pierre, executive director of the Pine Ridge Chamber of Commerce, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. "First you have to go to the tribal government to see if there's an appropriate piece of land for you. Nothing's been set aside for business development, so this is harder than it sounds. If you do identify a piece of land, you apply for a five-year lease, which won't help you with the banks because they prefer 25-year leases. Next, your application goes before the tribal land committee, which often doesn't have a single businessperson on it. This part can get very political, and it matters who's in your family. If the committee approves your application, then it must go before the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This is usually a rubber stamp, except that it can take months or more than a year before you actually receive it. If the BIA signs off, you're finally done. And what does it give you? A short-term lease on a bare piece of prairie."

It's no wonder, then, that few businesses get started on the Pine Ridge reservation. The reservation's boundaries box in an area about the size of Rhode Island, just south of the desolate Badlands. Nowhere in its rolling spaces is there a store to buy shoes. There's not a single bank, hotel, or movie theater within its borders, either. Many of its tiny towns don't even have a barbershop. Yet the place is home to about 41,000 Lakota Indians (also known as the Oglala Sioux). They are the direct descendants of Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, and Sitting Bull -- some of the fiercest fighters to roam the Great Plains. Yet none of them can walk into a store on their own reservation and purchase a pair of pants, because nobody sells them.

Most communities of any size have a chamber of commerce building. St. Pierre makes do in just a single room, with two desks, a table, and a dry-erase chalkboard. Sometimes there's nobody around to answer the phone, which isn't a big problem because there aren't too many incoming calls. St. Pierre works hard at what he does -- his chamber has grown to nearly a hundred members since it was founded three years ago -- but it's tough to get recognition. "If there's a chamber of commerce at Pine Ridge, I haven't heard about it," says David Owen, president of the state chamber.

While there may be a chamber at Pine Ridge, there isn't much in the way of commerce. The rez itself is a grab bag of mortifying statistics. In the 1990s, the poorest county in America, as determined by the Census Bureau, was wholly contained within its boundaries. Unemployment is currently at 88 percent. About one-third of its households don't have electricity or indoor plumbing. The place is supposedly dry -- it's against tribal law even to possess a can of Budweiser -- but alcoholism is rampant. The town of Whiteclay, just across the border in Nebraska, isn't really a town at all; it's a glorified liquor stand catering to carloads of thirsty Indians. Traffic accidents are a leading cause of death at Pine Ridge, because of all the drunk driving. The typical Lakota male can expect to live a few months shy of his 57th birthday; women get about a decade longer. In the Western Hemisphere, only Haitians fare worse.

What may be most depressing about Pine Ridge, however, is that it's not unique in Indian country. It's the second-biggest reservation in the nation, and many of its problems afflict other tribes as well. To be sure, a handful of reservations seem to succeed, even among those that don't cash in on lucrative casino operations (and most don't). On the whole, however, reservations are rural slums -- demographic disaster areas in which the economy shows few signs of life. Through a suffocating combination of government meddling, political incompetence, and cultural suspicion, they have let down the very people they're supposed to serve. The problem is so severe, in fact, that the time has come to rethink the whole concept of reservations.

There's certainly no shortage of explanations for reservation failure, and among the most popular is the old grievance of stolen land. When Bill Clinton set foot in Pine Ridge on his 1999 tour of poverty- stricken areas, someone displayed a sign: "Stop Lakota Ethnic Cleansing." It's not entirely clear what the message meant. The most recent example of what might be called Lakota ethnic cleansing occurred more than a century ago, at the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. That event was certainly reprehensible -- U.S. soldiers were trying to disarm a band of Lakota, fighting broke out, and some 300 Indians, including women and children, were slaughtered. What this sorry incident has to do with economic development in Pine Ridge nowadays isn't obvious, except that the site has become a minor tourist attraction where locals sell their handicrafts to visitors during the warm months. Modern-day Indian activists have done an amazing job of deflecting attention from the real problems of reservation life in favor of turning the events of the past into a morbid fetish. Writing on the most famous locale in the nearby Black Hills, in a University of Nebraska publication called American Indian Quarterly, Lilian Friedberg had this to say: "Mount Rushmore is [our] Bitburg." Listening to other tribal spokesmen, it would seem that the most pressing concern for Indians today isn't a lousy reservation economy that can barely support more than a handful of private-sector jobs, but Atlanta Braves fans performing the "tomahawk chop" during late-inning rallies.