life on the rez

Today was our field trip to the Pine Ridge reservation to observe K-8 schools in that area. One was a private, Catholic school, one was a public school, and the other was a contract school. There was one more school we were supposed to go to, but their was recently a death in the community, so there was no school for the day, as they were holding a wake in the building for the community.

Getting up at the butt crack of dawn is not my favorite thing to do. Especially when coupled with only two hours of sleep after working for 9.5 hours in the casino and making crappy tips because the Canadians don't know how to tip. But their money sure is silly! Actually, I like their money more than ours, color-scheme-wise, and think we should adopt that idea. Or steal it, I guess. We've already made our new 20s green and our new 50s red, just like theirs.

Anyway, back to my original story: the reservation. Driving through the reservation was probably one of the most depressing things I've seen. Now, I live out in the country, 10 miles from town, and I've seen a few weird things. Cars piled up in backyards, dogs running amok, you know. Well, each house we drove by had between five and 10 cars in their yard. Some were wrecked, some were burned beyond recognition, some were older than dirt, and I'm sure one or two of them worked. There was stuff all over the yards, there were animals everywhere, and the houses looked dilapidated and in disrepair. There was graffiti all over the buildings and cars.

It honest to God made me sad. I know that we, currently, are not the direct cause of their living conditions. We, in 2005, did not force the Indians off their land and create the Allottment Act, where men were awarded 160 acres of land, and women 80 acres of land, and anything that wasn't claimed by an Indian was sold to the white man. The Indians lost 90 million acres of land. And the land they did get was crappy land. Part of what we drove through looked like the Badlands. It was sandy, dry soil, with prairie grass and not a lot of trees.

And the reason they have to live the way they do right now is because of what happend back in the 1900s and earlier. We thought we were doing them a favor, making them less reliant on the government for their food and provisions by making them self-sufficient and forcing them to be farmers and ranchers, which is not what they were. By taking their children away from them and putting them in boarding schools, where they couldn't learn to function in a White society, but when they got back home, couldn't learn to function in their native society. It's sad.

I guess in elementary school, you really just get the fairy tale version of everything, don't you? I mean, I knew the Indians got the fuzzy end of the lollypop, but still...being from Wyoming, I didn't grow up with any of that, really. So yeah, a depressing day, all in all. The first and third school we saw were in bad condition, and the private school was really nice, but that's because they have benefactors and the students have a tuition to pay.

Not to mention the ride in the van sucked 'cause the roads were bumpy and it was hard to sleep on them...