On the seventh day after the end of my sophomore year, I was dropped into the foreign nation in our backyard where the majority of its citizens live impoverished in subsidized houses mandated by a government that has all but abandoned them. My mission: do whatever I could do to improve the situation of the Lakota in South Dakota. I went in with a hundred others just like me, young adolescents blissfully unaware of what the situation was, accustomed to the blessings of Northeastern suburbia. I knew the data; I knew that the crime and suicide rates were exponentially higher than the rest of the United States, but statistics are deceiving. No cold, impersonal numbers can prepare someone so naïve to the hardship of life – the real hardship countless humans around the world have to face everyday – for a world where abject poverty is the norm.
On the fourth day of our mission, my group split from the hundred and travelled miles of isolated highway to a spattering of dried hills where we set up traditional tipis and built amphitheaters with the locals. On the birthday of the “sweet land of liberty,” I watched six children light off fireworks from the peak of the tallest hill, bought with the little money their parents possessed, to entertain us. Just like the children, the woman in charge was a force to be reckoned with despite how little she had. She described her life as an average Native American childhood, having been raised by a grandmother far below the poverty line. As a young girl, all she had wanted was to participate in a powwow and to wear the traditional handmade regalia, but she could never afford the supplies. She admitted that she had been angry and nihilistic for a long time, but in her words, she “grew up.” Now she makes regalia for girls in the predicament she was in.
On the seventh day of our time spent on Rosebud Reservation’s Milks Camp, we travelled into the town. We slept on concrete in a windowless, cockroach-infested bomb shelter amongst feral dogs, getting a poignant glimpse of the extreme poverty forced onto the remaining Sicangu Lakota. There I met one of the sixteen percent of Native American adolescents who attempt suicide. She could not have been any more than fifteen years old, and yet she had suffered through far more than I could ever imagine. She was just like everyone else on the reservation too: trapped in a system that had abandoned her.
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