5/16/2023 0 Comments Pine ridge reservationThe tribal government puts the unemployment rate at around 80 percent, and Shannon County-which lies entirely within the boundaries of the reservation-has a per-capita income of less than $8,000 a year. Most adults on Pine Ridge don’t have paid work. That isolation can make travel to school a major challenge, especially during extreme South Dakota weather, when heavy snowfall can bring buses to a halt and persistent rainstorms turn hundreds of miles of dirt roads into mudslides. Long school bus rides like Legend’s-30 miles round trip-are typical. Many families, like the Tobaccos, live outside the main population centers of Pine Ridge, Kyle, and Oglala, in remote communities with names like Slim Butte, Calico, and Red Shirt Table. Rumpled grasslands unfold for miles, offering unbroken views of hills crowned with rocks and scoured-out badlands. Spanning nearly 3,500 square miles, Pine Ridge is bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. ![]() Painfully, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the southwest corner of South Dakota showcases those educational struggles. “What we see are declines not only in measures of achievement, but declines in the overall quality of educational programs.” Department of Education from 1997 to 2001. Beaulieu, who was the director of the office of Indian education in the U.S. “It’s been almost 12 years since No Child Left Behind was implemented, and we essentially have no appreciable results to show for it,” said Mr. “The state of American Indian education is a disaster,” says David Beaulieu, a professor of educational policy and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe-White Earth.Īll Students American Indian Asian Black Hispanic White Over the past decade, as the high-stakes school accountability era saw every other racial and ethnic subgroup of students make steady, if small, improvements in education outcomes, Native American youths, on the whole, stalled or lost ground. Outrunning those odds for Legend and other American Indian youths living on and off reservations is perpetually challenging. government forced tribes onto reservations more than 120 years ago see few prospects for breaking out of seven or eight generations of profound poverty. Families that have been poor since the U.S. On the 2.8 million-acre Pine Ridge Indian Reservation-home to nearly 40,000 members of the Oglala Lakota Sioux nation-alcoholism and suicide, especially among young people, occur at alarmingly high rates. But I don’t know if I can completely protect him from ending up on a path that so many other youth on this reservation take.” “The two most important things I want for Legend,” she says, “are for him to get his education and for him not to drink. More urgently, she prays she’ll get a call from Red Cloud, the private Jesuit school where she believes Legend would get the best shot at succeeding. Tobacco, a college graduate, prays this nagging and nurturing will keep her nephew on a course to high school graduation, a college degree, and a decent job. “Be back at six for dinner,” she tells him firmly, as he darts off to play in the horse corral. “I don’t have any,” he says quietly, stubbing his silver sneakers into the dirt. ![]() But his aunt, Mary Tobacco, asks about homework. He likes math, too, especially multiplication.Īfter a long day at Isna Wica Owayawa, the Lakota name for Loneman School, the laughing shrieks of his cousins beckon. Legend grins widely when announcing that he reads the same “chapter books” as 7th and 8th graders. ![]() Legend just turned 10 and is in the 4th grade, and yet, he must constantly confront obstacles that could cause him to stumble into one of the grim statistical categories for which Pine Ridge-like much of the nation’s Indian Country-is well known: ![]() He slows to a trudge when the rutted road rises steeply to reach his house on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a place where the promise of youth is often stifled by the probabilities of failure.Ī starkly beautiful place, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is home to the Oglala Lakota Nation where education for most remains a yet-to-be fulfilled promise for moving families out of profound poverty. He takes off in a full sprint, black hair flopping, down Tobacco Road, a half-mile-long stretch of dirt named for his family. Ten hours after leaving in the dark for the 15-mile ride to Loneman School, Legend Tell Tobacco bounds down the steps of the yellow school bus and runs back home.
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