‘We’re in constant crisis’: cyclone-hit reservation forced to recover on its own

Native Americans on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota are struggling after a winter hurricane, with no disaster relief from Trump

Michael Sainato Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota

The canyons and hills of South Dakota’s Badlands National Park fade south into the nearly 3,500-sq-mile Pine Ridge Reservation. About 20,000 members of the Oglala Lakota nation live on the reservation in sparsely populated towns and ranches with small trailers often housing multiple families, loosely connected by miles of dirt roads.

Home to the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre, where US soldiers massacred 150 to 300 Native Americans in 1890, including women and children, the reservation is wracked by rampant poverty, lack of resources and poor infrastructure. Pine Ridge encompasses some of the poorest counties in the United States, with unemployment around 75% and the lowest life expectancy in the country.

Now it faces another devastating challenge – extreme weather and a government that seems unwilling to help those it hits.

On the Pine Ridge Reservation, Virgil Poafpybitty makes peace pipes and jewelry for a living, in between volunteering the use of his carpentry skills to neighbors for house repairs when materials are available. His wife, Toni, works in the Oglala Lakota nation tribal office, one of the few on the reservation with the steady income of a job. Their home was one of hundreds on Pine Ridge recently damaged due to flooding induced by a bomb cyclone, essentially a winter hurricane, in March. The event displaced an estimated1,500 tribal members from their homes and uprooted the lives of hundreds more.

Donald Trump approved a national disaster declaration for Nebraska and Iowa in March after the cyclone hit the region, providing federal funding to impacted individuals and communities in those states. But in South Dakota, Native Americans on the Pine Ridge Reservation hit by the same storm have been forced to try to recover on their own.

“Imagine 1,000 families stranded. Imagine families subsisting on $10,000 to $20,000 a year. We’re living in a constant crisis,” said Chase Iron Eyes, public relations director for the Oglala Lakota nation who resides on the Pine Ridge Reservation. “We’re survivors. We’re surviving these circumstances meant to bring about our extinction. If you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘poverty is violence’, you just have to come to Pine Ridge to see what that means.”

More than a month after the bomb cyclone hit, many roads remain unusable and dozens of homes are still inaccessible from main roads. The Oglala Lakota nation is currently circulating a petition for Trump to provide federal disaster relief to the Pine Ridge Reservation.

This is the second storm within a year that badly damaged the Poafpybitty’s home. Last July, their home was one of hundreds of houses on Pine Ridge badly damaged by a storm that included baseball-sized hail, his roof, windows and house siding still scarred from the damage. Fema (Federal Emergency Management Agency) denied requested assistance to the Oglala Lakota nation after that storm, leaving residents to live with the damage to their homes and gradually make repairs as they can.

“The latest storm shut everything down. A lot of people’s livestock starved. Our whole basement was flooded. We’re just now coming out of it.,” said Poafpybitty.

Nearly a year after the July 2018 hailstorm, about half of the damaged homes are still not repaired. Many residents lived in darkness for months, with just plastic wrap and blankets used to cover broken windows to try to keep out South Dakota’s brutally cold winter air in homes where heating, electricity and access to clean water are already substandard or nonexistent.

Now the residents of Pine Ridge are recovering without any federal support again.

“When the storm hit, we couldn’t leave for a week,” said Poafpybitty. “For about two weeks, the water was off. Now they’re finally pumping it through, but they have to treat it. We can’t drink it. I had to buy a filter the other day to take a bath because it’s treated with chemicals. We live on bottled water.”Advertisement

His wife, Toni , explained people at Pine Ridge need building materials and able-bodied volunteers to help rebuild, but have grown accustomed to being denied help or ignored. “We’ve been so used to lip service and we’re not going to get our hopes up until we see action,” she said. 

The Oglala Lakota nation is in the process of assessing the extent of the damages in order to file a formal request for funding to Fema. The South Dakota state legislature passed a resolution urging South Dakota senators and the state’s lone congressional representative to seek an emergency declaration from Trump, but no action has been taken by the Trump administration.

“We’re trying to get our preliminary damage assessments done by May 10,” said tribal member Del Brewer, a former hazard specialist with Fema for 16 years who is helping the tribe’s emergency management team. “Right now, we can’t get to some of these families without burying our vehicles in the mud.” Brewer noted at least one person has died so far from the flooding due to being unable to get out to their dialysis treatment.

Hundreds of miles of dirt roads throughout the reservation have been completely destroyed. Food, water and medical supplies still have to be delivered to many homes by foot, horseback or air-dropped.

Federal funding for Native American tribes has significantly decreased across the board under the Trump administration. In March 2019, Trump released a 2020 budget proposal that would cut the budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs from $2.4bn in 2019 to $1.9bn in 2020, and a reduction in staffing at the agency from 6,873 full-time employees in 2019 to 4,569. The agency has gradually been cut since Trump took office; in 2017 its budget was $2.9bn and staffed 7,431 full-time employees before Trump proposed his administration’s first budget in 2018.

“We should have highways and infrastructure. The federal government, they’re obligated to provide us certain things by treaties,” said Calvin Ghostbear. The road to his home was washed away and his barn was flooded with water, killing several of his cattle. His wife had to be rescued by boat from their home during the flooding.

Ghostbear noted no one on the reservation has ever experienced flooding of this magnitude. “Climate change, its clear to me, I see it,” he said. “We try to protect mother earth. She’s mad and this is a perfect example of what we’re dealing with.”

A Fema spokesperson told the Guardian in an email in regards to Fema’s denial of assistance to the reservation after the July 2018 storm, “requests for major disaster declarations are decided by the president, and the region is not always informed of how or why decisions are reached”. The spokesperson added the South Dakota governor has not yet formally requested a disaster declaration from Trump.

As the disaster continues to take it toll, locals seem almost resigned to government inaction. “We do everything on our own. We don’t rely on anyone anymore, but we’re poor. We make do with what we have,” Poafpybitty said.

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This post first appeared in The Guardian HERE