By Peter Carlson
Sunday, February 23, 1997; Page W06
The Washington Post

The old woman in the wheelchair says something in Lakota and Milo Yellow Hair nods his head. He's on the phone with the power company, making some kind of arrangement to keep her electricity on.

She's a tiny, wizened, gray-haired woman in a blue sweater with a black- and beige-striped blanket wrapped around her torso. From the bottom of the blanket sticks one foot, clad in a blue sneaker. The other foot is gone, lost to diabetes, a common fate here on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. A teenage boy walks in, carrying a tiny 2-month-old baby wrapped tightly in a blanket. He hands the infant to the old woman, who cradles it in her lap, and then he pushes her wheelchair out of this room in the Oglala Sioux tribal headquarters.

Yellow Hair, the tribal vice president, turns to the next person waiting beside his cluttered desk -- a thin, haggard, middle-aged man with long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. Like the old woman, he's clutching a tattered envelope full of folded papers. They are bills, and he hands them to Yellow Hair, who thumbs through them.

"Cable?" Yellow Hair says. "What do you have cable for? Buy a book! An old lady on a respirator needs to pay her electric bill -- fine. But cable TV -- that's a luxury, man."

The man hangs his head contritely but doesn't say a word.

Yellow Hair relents. This guy is an old acquaintance with a long history of troubles. "I'll give you $20," Yellow Hair says, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet. "That's all I got."

It goes on all day, day after day, a steady flow of supplicants coming into the tribal offices at Pine Ridge, which is in Shannon County, S.D., the poorest county in America, a place where unemployment hovers around 80 percent, where the per capita income is $3,417 a year, the lowest in the nation, where two out of three people live below the federal poverty level.

"They need money for electric bills, food bills, propane for heating," Yellow Hair says. "They've got somebody in the hospital and they need $30 for gas money to go up to Rapid City and back . . . I know the people and I try to help. This is a Band-Aid approach, but it's the best I can do."

The tribe has a fund for these little emergencies, $10,000 every quarter, but that's usually gone in a few weeks. Yellow Hair also sells T-shirts -- one of them, celebrating the Sioux's 1876 victory over Custer, hangs on his wall -- and he uses the profits for these emergencies.

"If I don't have T-shirt money, it comes out of my pocket," he says. "I have a salary of $40,000 a year. That's an ungodly amount for people around here."

He's 46, a big man with a thick, pockmarked face and black hair that hangs past his shoulders. As he talks, he keeps fiddling nervously with his Bic pen, pulling the cap off, then slamming it back on with his palm. "When the next cold spell hits, we better have money for propane," he says. "We get a two-week cold spell, people freeze to death -- literally."

He stops, then exhales a long, sad sigh. "You do what you can," he says softly.

Eileen Janis wanders into the office and listens for a while. "This is like a Third World country," she says. She's a 33-year-old hospital technician who represents the town of Pine Ridge on the tribal council. She climbs into her van, drives about half a mile and parks on a street lined with rusted-out cars and tiny, weather-beaten homes. It's Army surplus housing, two-bedroom wooden boxes that were moved to Pine Ridge from a base back in the 1960s.

Geraldine Blue Bird, 41, is sitting on the battered porch of the house she shares with seven relatives. An extension cord runs out one window, weaves past empty Busch and Pennzoil cans, follows a crack in the road and ends up in the house across the street.

"That house don't have no electricity," Blue Bird explains. "The electricity gave out in it. The electrician, he said, `If I put a meter in there, it'll burn.' So we improvised, ran a cord. They got little ones in there; they've got to run the heater."

Janis drives around the corner, stops in front of a white house with an old basketball backboard covering a hole over one window. "The little girl was on the toilet in there and the whole thing just fell through the floor," she says.

Eleven people live in that house. They have nowhere else to go: On a reservation with a population of about 23,000, there are 1,200 families on the 10-year-long waiting list for subsidized federal housing.

Janis looks around. A dead pickup truck filled with uncollected trash sits next to a silver trailer that houses three families. Across the street, there's a weed-infested graveyard. A pack of mangy dogs prance past like conquerors.

It's a street with no name, like all the roads on the reservation, Janis says, but it's known informally as Sesame Street because so many kids live there, maybe 40 of them in half a dozen houses.

"I could condemn these houses in one day," she adds. "But I can't do it because they have nowhere to go."

'A National Disgrace'
Half a millennium after Columbus misnamed them, American Indians are the poorest people in the United States.

The country's 2.1 million Indians, about 400,000 of whom live on reservations, have the highest rates of poverty, unemployment and disease of any ethnic group in America. That might surprise Americans who have consumed countless cheery feature stories about Indians making big bucks on casino gambling. Some tribes -- like the Mashantucket Pequots of Connecticut, who own Foxwoods, the country's largest casino -- have indeed gotten very rich. But less than a quarter of America's 557 Indian tribes own casinos, and only 48 tribes earn more than $10 million a year on gaming. Far more typical than Foxwoods is Prairie Wind, the casino on the Pine Ridge reservation -- a gambling hall made of three trailers, located far from any urban market, earning barely $1 million a year for the Oglala Sioux.

It is impossible to generalize about 2 million people who belong to more than 500 different tribes, each with its own history, each living in different circumstances -- peoples as varied as the Navajo of the Southwestern desert and the Lummi of Puget Sound. But all Indian tribes do share one thing: a relationship with the United States government that is unique. They are "domestic dependent nations," as Chief Justice John Marshall termed them in a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1832 -- "distinct independent political communities retaining their original natural rights as the undisputed possessors of the soil." As such, they constitute the only minority group in America that has signed peace treaties with the U.S. government, the only ethnic group with a government agency -- the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- specifically devoted to its well-being.

Of course, this special relationship has seldom worked out well for the Indians. Over the last 150 years, the government has tried a series of conflicting ways of dealing with the natives of this continent -- making war on them, making treaties with them, breaking treaties with them, sending them to Oklahoma, forcing them onto reservations, forcing them off reservations, permitting them to own land collectively, forcing them to divide the land into individual plots, dispatching their children to boarding schools hundreds of miles from home, closing the boarding schools and sending the children home, outlawing practice of their religions, legalizing practice of those religions, discriminating against them in employment at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, discriminating in favor of them in employment with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, permitting them to run gambling operations under certain circumstances, increasing funding for the BIA and, in fiscal 1996, cutting funding for the BIA by $160 million, or 9 percent.

Now, Native Americans remain at the bottom in almost every measurable economic category. Indians earn only a little more than half as much money as the average American -- less money per capita than whites, blacks, Asian Americans and Hispanics. Nearly a third of Native Americans live in poverty, which is more than twice the rate for Americans in general. And Indians are far more liable to succumb to diseases associated with the poor -- four times as likely to die of alcoholism, three times as likely to die of tuberculosis, nearly twice as likely to die of diabetes.

"It's a national disgrace," says Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who until last month, chaired the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. "Any objective observer would say that our treatment of Native Americans is a national disgrace."

Over the years, the government's policies have come and gone like fads, each billed as a humanitarian reform, each accompanied by its own buzzwords -- "removal," "allotment," "termination," "relocation," "assimilation." Today, the buzzword is "self-determination." Everyone -- tribal leaders, BIA officials, members of Congress -- talks about the need for greater "self-determination" for tribes, greater Indian control of reservations, less dependence on the BIA. Now, on reservations and on Capitol Hill, the debate is over exactly what "self-determination" is and what it could mean.

'Back to the Blanket'
"We need more Indians or none," says Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, "but one is the wrong number to have in Congress."

Campbell, a Colorado Republican, is the one Indian in Congress. He is also, as of last month, the chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, the first Indian ever to chair it. He's a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, and on the wall of his Senate office is a knife once owned by his great-grandfather, Black Horse, who fought on the winning side of the Battle of Little Bighorn.

"It's a funny kind of thing you feel up there," Campbell says, talking about the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana. His long hair is pulled back in a ponytail and his neckerchief is clasped at the throat by a piece of jewelry decorated with a picture of a buffalo. "They talk about Indian pride all the time. They talk about cultural values and ancient traditions and the Indian way, but the daily existence is almost a tragic kind of existence. Too many people, their only form of sustenance is food stamps and commodities. Commodities are tin cans with the generic white labels with black print, surplus government butter and cheese and so on. Because of that, many of them have a very high-starch, low-protein diet, which leads to diabetes, which leads to gangrene, so you see a lot of the old people with missing legs because they have to cut them off. I think in any society, if you have a lack of jobs, low self-esteem, all that stuff -- I don't care if it's Indian or black or white -- you're probably going to have the same problems."

All the problems of urban ghettos are found on the reservation, he says -- drug abuse, alcoholism, dropouts, suicide, teenage pregnancy. "Some of the kids have such low self-esteem that the only thing they think they can succeed at is having babies -- and do they ever. There's a huge population explosion among young kids."

On the reservation, as elsewhere, teenage parenthood and a lack of jobs combine to create a cycle of welfare dependency. "Indians don't want to be dependent, but when it's either that or starve, the choice is clear," he says. "Most Indian people, particularly the Sioux, are very, very proud people. But they can't go back to the old way. It's gone. The buffalo are gone. The free-roaming days are gone. And there hasn't been anything that's been able to be a good substitute for it."

He didn't grow up on the reservation but his father did, and Campbell still considers it home. "I belong up there," he says. Like many Indians who make their living in the city, he returns to "the rez" a couple of times a year for spiritual sustenance. "We call it going back to the blanket," he says. "It means turning into an Indian. It means going back to your culture. So when I'm up there, I just do Indian stuff -- go to the powwows and the society meetings and the sweats and that kind of stuff. Then I put on my suit and tie and go back to the city and be a senator again." He laughs. "It's like recharging for me. It's wonderful."

The Cheyenne were migratory hunters until whites exterminated the buffalo and herded the Indians onto reservations. Now, in their impoverished little corner of Montana, Campbell's tribe maintains a herd of about 280 buffalo. "To an Indian, the buffalo have a spiritual presence, and they treat them different than a cow," he says. "When they're going to kill a cow, they send it to the butcher shop. But when they butcher a buffalo, they do it the old way. They shoot him on the spot and butcher him right on top of his hide. Everybody lines up with a bucket and they chop off a chunk of meat and they put them in the buckets until there's nothing left but guts and bones. And they bleach the bones and use them for utensils." He smiles. "I think that's nice. I remember the first time I took my son home and he saw an Indian buffalo-butchering. He never forgot that."

Equally unforgettable, he says, is the sun dance, an ancient religious ritual of fasting, dancing and, sometimes, body piercing. It's an annual summer rite of purification and thanksgiving, but it was banned for decades by the white Christians who ran the reservations. Now, in a renaissance of traditional Native American religion, it is increasingly popular among the Cheyenne and the Sioux.

"I go to sun dances just to watch, to support them," Campbell says. "You really have to be mentally prepared for it. It's four days, no food, no water. A lot of them pass out. It's so physically exhausting that they can't get through it. If you pass out and you come to, you get back in it. I admire that dedication to their religion, because the physical demands of the sun dance are unreal. I guarantee it's like no other church you've been to. It's not like eating a wafer."

'Far More Important Than Money'
As soon as the Sioux arrive at Fort Laramie, they erect three teepees made of long pine poles and canvas skins. It's a raw, cold fall day and they quickly build a bonfire, then pitch a big square white tent and fill it with rows of gray folding chairs.

The Indians file into the tent and sit down. There are only a few dozen at first, most of them wearing bluejeans and windbreakers, baseball caps or cowboy hats. Four drummers lay down a slow, steady beat while chanting. Everybody stands with head bowed as half a dozen men march slowly into the tent, carrying ceremonial staffs decorated with fur and feathers. One of the men ignites a small bundle of sage, and the smoke perfumes the air with a spicy incense.

Outside, gusting winds pelt the tent with pellets of hail. Inside, a group of male elders stand in a circle, solemnly passing around a long, ceremonial pipe and exhaling sweet smoke. When they finish, they shake hands, the audience sits down and Milo Yellow Hair, who organized this conference, rises to speak.

"Welcome to this land that was made sacred many, many years ago," he says. "We want to reaffirm and rebless the ideals that were set here 128 years ago."

Yellow Hair is referring to the Fort Laramie Treaty -- a peace accord signed by the United States and the Sioux on this spot in eastern Wyoming in 1868. "From this day forward," it began, "all war between the parties to this agreement shall forever cease." The treaty established a Great Sioux Reservation that encompassed most of what is now the Dakotas and Nebraska, plus large chunks of Montana and Wyoming, "for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians." Six years later, however, gold was discovered in the Black Hills, the sacred mountains of the Sioux, which lay in the middle of the reservation. White prospectors flocked in, followed by the 7th Cavalry, commanded by Gen. George Armstrong Custer. In 1876, the Sioux and Cheyenne killed Custer and all of his 266 soldiers. It was a great victory, but a brief one. Within a few years, the Indians had been defeated, and the Great Sioux Reservation was broken up into half a dozen far smaller ones, little Indian islands in an ocean of white-owned land that now included the Black Hills.

Half a century later, the Sioux filed a lawsuit demanding the return of the Black Hills. For decades, the case inched through the federal court system. Finally, in 1980, it reached the Supreme Court. The high court called the theft of the Black Hills a "ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealing," and awarded the aggrieved Indians the sum of $122 million in compensation for their losses.

But the Sioux did the unthinkable: They refused to take the money. They didn't want it, they wanted the Black Hills. So the money has sat in a bank, gathering interest, growing ever larger. Now there's more than $300 million there, but the Sioux, who are among the poorest people in America, refuse to touch it.

"We cannot take that money for the land that we love," Yellow Hair explains. "We are ultimately saying that there are some things in the world that are far more important than money. We say that our history is important and the land where our grandfathers visioned their dreams is important. How can you ask money for those things? That's what keeps us together as a group of people -- we continue to talk about the 1868 treaty."

And now, in this windblown tent at Fort Laramie, Yellow Hair is talking about the 1868 treaty and about his efforts to take the Sioux's case to the United Nations.

For more than a decade, he and a handful of other Sioux activists have been traveling to Geneva, as part of the official United Nations committee that wrote the U.N.'s Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The declaration, now working its way through the tortuous U.N. bureaucracy, asserts many rights for indigenous peoples, including "the right to the restitution of the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied" and "the right to the recognition, observance and enforcement of treaties."

The Sioux are thrilled with the draft declaration. The U.S. government is not. The State Department, which has lobbied for changes in the document, was concerned enough to dispatch a representative to the conference at Fort Laramie -- Gare Smith, a boyish 39-year-old deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

"My job is to listen carefully," Smith tells the Indians, "and take back what you say to Washington."

It's the third day of the conference. The hailstorm has long since passed and the day is sunny and warm. The tent is overflowing with Indians, many of them wearing T-shirts bearing a map of the original Great Sioux Reservation and the slogan "The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty: It's the Law." As is the custom at Indian gatherings, anyone can get up and speak about any subject for as long as he or she wants. For six hours, Smith takes notes while Indians rise to speak. Some cite history. Some cite law. Some quote from the treaty. Some tell stories of suffering at the hands of white people. Some are angry. Some are bitter. Some crack jokes, several of them about Custer. One man gives a lecture on Lakota spirituality and ends by pulling a feather from the band of his cowboy hat and presenting it to Smith.

At one point, an old man clad in a sparkling white buckskin shirt and a headdress made of huge yellow-tipped feathers walks slowly to the front of the tent. "My name is Joe American Horse, grandson of American Horse, who signed the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868," he says, reading from a typed statement. "I am a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation and I live in the poorest county in America . . . Since 1868, as the people lost their land, we began a socioeconomic collapse that continues to this day. Circumstances of history have brought us to a welfare state that perpetuates dependency and despair . . ."

He keeps reading -- one page, two pages, three pages. When he finishes, he ceremoniously signs the speech and solemnly presents it to Smith. But he keeps speaking, off-the-cuff now. "My main concern is myself," he says. "I don't have a job. I'm barely making it from day to day. I'm really pitiful . . ."

At the end of the long day, Smith sits with his hosts and picks at a communal dinner of beef stew and buffalo tripe. He says he's learned a great deal. He says he will report what he's heard to his bosses. He says that the government's position on the draft declaration is still in flux. But, he acknowledges, the State Department is unlikely ever to agree to the provision that calls for the "restitution" of traditional Indian lands.

"That would be most of the United States," he says. "That's not something the government is likely to change its position on."

Go to Part Two.

&COPY Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Co.