The Real Legacy of Crazy Horse
It’s not our fault,” Jacob Rosales said. I had asked the recent high-school graduate what he wants people to know about life on the reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. “There’s a liquor store right across from the border,” he continued after a pause, pointing off into the distance. “Right over there.”
The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is a striking 3,469-square-mile expanse of sprawling grasslands and craggy badlands that sits in the southwest corner of South Dakota, touching Nebraska’s northern edge. Traversing the reservation by car, along its rugged matrix of two-lane highways and unmarked roads, reveals just how vast it is.
Park the car and wander around the softly bustling community hub of Pine Ridge town, and it’s clear there’s also a lot going on beyond the bluffs and tree groves and decaying trailer homes. There are the men in braids and jeans waving at each other from across the street, there are the teen girls drinking frappés at the colorful Christian coffee shop, and there are the “rez dogs” scouring piles of trash. There are also the young people, like Rosales, who are on a mission to make the world understand that it’s not their fault that this reservation—home to an estimated 20,000 Oglala Lakota Nation members—is one of the poorest, and most underdeveloped, places in the country.
Pine Ridge doesn’t get much national attention except when the news is sad. Unemployment and gang violence are rampant. The life expectancy for men is just 48. A youth-suicide epidemic has plagued the reservation in recent years, with a cluster of nearly 200 teens killing or attempting to kill themselves in the span of a few months starting in late 2014. And even though Pine Ridge remains a “dry” reservation, alcoholism is widespread; until recently, residents could, as Rosales pointed out, easily drive just a few miles south into Whiteclay, Nebraska, to buy booze. Mary Frances Berry, the former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, once remarked, “Whiteclay can be said to exist only to sell beer to the Oglala Lakota.”
When Rosales spoke about culpability, he was referring to both present-day realities—the liquor stores in Whiteclay, for example—and historical ones: the legacy of centuries of oppression at the hands of European settlers and their ancestors. It’s not our fault that one-third of us drop out of school. That we participate in the labor force at a lower rate than any other racial group. That our men are incarcerated at four times the rate of their white peers.
Those realities help explain why, as Rosales explained, “it’s kind of unheard of for Native kids to go far and be successful.”
But it’s becoming less unheard of, and that’s largely because of students like Rosales who see educational attainment as key to reclaiming Native identity and culture. He is spending the summer in the Washington, D.C., area for an internship at the National Institutes of Health, after which he’ll be heading up north to start college at Yale University. Rosales has long been on a mission to attend a prestigious university, but if he hadn’t gotten in to Yale, he had plenty of backups: He was accepted to six other Ivy League schools.
Rosales, who plans on going to medical school after college and eventually working as a primary-care doctor, can achieve despite growing up in one of the most destitute places in the country. A Jesuit K-12 institution at the end of a pine-tree-lined driveway in the town of Pine Ridge, Red Cloud boasts an ever-growing who are leaders in fields ranging from medicine to the arts and with elite-college degrees. Red Cloud also has a record-high 72 , more than any other school its size in the nation.
