NBC Nightly News' report "Tragedy at Pine Ridge" prompted angry reactions from Lakota people involved with the South Dakota Indian reservation that was the subject of the Thanksgiving week series. The three-part report, they contend, focused exclusively on the negative aspects of life at Pine Ridge and portrayed the reservation as being little more than a collection of garbage piles and run-down houses inhabited only by welfare mothers, alcoholics, and victims of fetal alcohol syndrome.
People at Pine Ridge are concerned that the series left viewers with the impression that the Lakota people themselves are not doing anything to fight these problems. The first part of the series gave an overview of the problems that come with 85 percent unemployment and 85 percent alcoholism. The second part focused on fetal alcohol syndrome, caused when women drink while they are pregnant. The last in the series profiled one Lakota youngster in order to show the effects of reservation problems on children.
NBC chose to leave out stories of people who are working and having success in solving some of the problems portrayed in the series. In phone interviews, M.L. Flynn, the producer, and Betty Rollin, the reporter, defended their series, saying limited air time gave them the opportunity to provide only "snapshots" of what life is like for the average reservation dweller. Flynn spent months, she says, researching the story by phone and in person and believes the three-part series is "fair and honest."
"There are a lot of good people there [at Pine Ridge]," Rollin said. "I understand their reaction. Nevertheless, I think it was journalistically responsible to go this way with the series." The few positive steps reservation people are taking, according to Rollin, were not enough to justify giving NBC viewers a sense that there is much hope for change at Pine Ridge.
Tim Giago, syndicated Lakota columnist and publisher of the South Dakota news-weekly The Lakota Times, disagrees and was angered by NBC's focus. "With blinders in place, the NBC news team came a-seeking every negative they had ever misconceived of about the Pine Ridge Reservation and proceeded to blow even these misconceptions out of proportion," Giago wrote in the weekly. "It would have taken a bit more journalistic integrity," he continued, "to report that for every negative there is also a positive."
IN "TRAGEDY AT PINE RIDGE," NBC portrayed the reservation as someplace where few people are doing anything to support the efforts of those who do not drink or who try to stop drinking. Yet, two weeks before NBC broadcast its report, more than 100 people marched in protest from Pine Ridge Village two miles to White Clay, Nebraska, the border town where most of the "dry" reservation's residents obtain their supply of alcohol. They were protesting against law enforcement agencies that do little to curb the amount of bootleg alcohol coming from White Clay and that rarely arrest drunk drivers on the two-mile stretch of highway that is famous on the reservation for its large number of fatal car accidents.
In the last two years, similar marches have taken place on the Rosebud and Cheyenne River reservations in South Dakota. These marches bring together groups of reservation people who are working on specific projects and proposals to bring an end to epidemic substance abuse and chronic economic impoverishment.
NBC's Flynn contends she was not trying to tell the whole story of Pine Ridge and did not include stories of positive action Lakota people are taking because attempts to change conditions are having minimal impact on the average person's life. Yet, to many American Indian activists, these stories are a major signal of the possibility of social change growing from the bottom up rather than from the top down.
This type of political activity has none of the glamour of American Indian activism of the 1960s and 70s, when a succession of news-making events—beginning with the takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1968 and ending with the siege of Wounded Knee in 1973—put the faces and concerns of Amer-ican Indian people in the major media. After Wounded Knee, big media events gave way to more localized activities, and recent protests have not captured the attention of national media unless they have carried with them the threat of violence.
In February 1987, two armed members of the Lumbee tribe took hostages at a local newspaper office in Robeson County, North Carolina. They hoped to draw attention to civil rights abuses and racism in the judicial system of the county. National and international media descended upon Robeson to cover the hostage-taking, but have done little reporting of the nonviolent community organizing that followed.
THOUGH IT ESCAPES THE ATTENTION of the media, non-glamourous, nonviolent community organizing by American Indian people has been successful. Young people at the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux reservation in South Dakota, concerned with high rates of teen suicide and substance abuse, opened a 24-hour crisis hotline and developed prevention and intervention programs. Students, tribal elders, and the town council in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, were successful, through a variety of protests, in keeping new bars from opening in their alcoholism-riddled community. And lobbying by women's advocacy groups was instrumental in tribal councils of several reservations passing mandatory arrest laws in cases of domestic violence.
Pam Afraid of Hawk, a Lakota woman in her early 30s, does community organizing with less media appeal than even the above examples. She works as a field worker for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in the isolated western end of the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation in South Dakota, where she lives with her husband, Ricky, and their four children. The west end, reachable only by gravel roads, offers only the barest of health, educational, and social services. The nearest hospital and shopping area are several hours away.
In 1987, when two Cheyenne River teenagers took their own lives in the space of two months, Afraid of Hawk and another woman decided they "wanted their kids to have a reason to live" and started a support group for young people. They brought tribal elders to the meetings to discuss traditional Lakota values in hopes of giving Cheyenne River young people an alternative to a life of alcohol, drugs, and hopelessness. Afraid of Hawk and many others believe the self-destructive lifestyle of reservation Indians is a product of the U.S. government's systematic destruction of traditional Lakota values.
As part of the graduation ceremonies at the local high school, the group sponsored a powwow where elders presented graduates with traditional tribal symbols of honor: eagle plumes for the young women and eagle feathers for the young men. "We wanted them to be proud of being Lakota," she says. "The elders told me that nothing like the powwow had ever happened before."
The support group is the first of many projects with which Afraid of Hawk has become involved. She has started a parenting group and established a youth center "in a pitiful trailer" that the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) had abandoned. This past year, she focused her attention on keeping the BIA from closing the local high school and on lobbying the town council to pass a resolution to declare the west end's main village, Cherry Creek, a drug-and alcohol-free zone.
Though some members of the community complained that such a resolution would violate their civil rights, the resolution received strong support. One man, who Afraid of Hawk said is well-known for his heavy drinking, told the council, "We are all sick. We all live with alcohol, and we all need help." He told those who gathered at the meeting, "I am going to try [to stop drinking], for my grandchildren."
The council passed the resolution and posted signs at the city limits threatening arrest and incarceration for drinking, drug use, and displays of public intoxication. Town councils in several communities have passed similar resolutions and have made them the first steps in a commitment to be free of alcoholism and drug addiction by the year 2000.
WITHOUT THE FINANCIAL SUPPORT OF AFSC, Afraid of Hawk would not have the freedom to do much of what she is doing. She is not, however, a Christian. Rather, she considers herself a "survivor" of Christianity since she made it through a reservation mission school and was able to maintain a sense of traditional Lakota values. These traditional values and religious ceremonial life are the keys, according to Afraid of Hawk, to her work.
"If you want to change, you have to start in your own community," she says, "but we need help. We need resources. We need training."
Afraid of Hawk sees her work with AFSC as a positive way for Christian churches and organizations to involve themselves in the struggle of American Indians. The churches of Cheyenne River, she believes, are overly concerned with evangelism and don't do much for the social good of the reservation. "If they are Christians," she said, "they should help people whether they are Christians or not. But they aren't doing anything."
AFSC recognizes this resentment many American Indian activists have toward churches and their historical and contemporary involvement in the creation of reservation problems. By identifying people who can make a difference and giving them the resources to work in the ways they think best, AFSC is doing something new in its work with American Indians.
Meanwhile, to the frustration of many American Indian organizers, the United States continues to spend millions of dollars keeping alive a bureaucracy—the BIA—that people at every level of the government agree is not meeting the needs of Indian people.
Only The Lakota Times, Akwesasne Notes, and a handful of other publications report regularly on this positive, indigenous, political activism of people in reservation communities. "The media doomsayers have been condemning the American Indian to extinction for the past 200 years," Giago writes. "It's too bad that NBC News chose to lend its credibility to this misbegotten procession of news reports that would turn the eternal hope of the Indian people into hopelessness."
As long as negative reporting by major media helps perpetuate the idea that reservation people are helpless in confronting their own problems, potential sources of support may not be quick to follow the lead of AFSC in providing resources to people such as Pam Afraid of Hawk.
People in the government and many other organizations do not see the possibility for positive change, says Melvin "Dick" Brewer, director of the Pine Ridge Mental Health Center, because they "go to the border towns and see Indians with wine bottles. That is the public perception. But, there is a lot of depth to Indian culture that non-Indians do not understand. They only know what their parents taught them." Brewer encourages people to "see more than the wine bottle. See the culture behind—the giveaways, the sun dances, the sweat lodges. There's a whole culture back here."
Once journalists and others do that, Brewer and many Indians believe that American Indians will be acknowledged as the people most capable of addressing the enormous social and economic problems of reservation life. Indeed, they contend, it is the people from outside—believing they know what is best for American Indian people—who created the "tragedy" of places such as Pine Ridge in the first place.
Robert Warrior, a member of the Osage Nation and a doctoral candidate at Union Theological Seminary in New York City when this article appeared, spent the summer of 1989 studying drug-and alcohol-treatment programs in several American Indian communities.
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