Education

Pember: Native students graduate to prison

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

"Nearly all the motels in Winner, South Dakota, are booked solid as folks make the annual trek back for the high school homecoming celebration. Businesses are festooned with banners lauding the 'Warriors' football team. The little main street seems to shiver in anticipation of the big parade. On this weekend, all the restaurants and fraternal halls will be filled to capacity with revelers.

Everyone is coming home. Everyone except the Indians. Most of them are already home, and if they're not, they seldom return for homecoming. This celebration is for the conquerors, not the conquered.

Birdie Ward is a nicely dressed woman with a warm smile who talks easily with strangers in the lobby of a fine Winner motel. A former homecoming 'Indian princess,' she graduated in 1950 from Winner High School and currently lives in Rapid City.

Ward and her friends sigh. 'We've tried to help the Indians over the years, but you can't get them to get an education, and it just breaks your heart to see how they live,' Ward says. While she acknowledges some discrimination, she adds: 'I blame the Indians for much of what happens to them; they refuse to blend in. They insist on keeping to their old ways. After all, they are a conquered people.'

Ward also expresses disgust at the numerous government handouts she believes Indian people get. 'They all receive checks, you know. Every Indian who has at least 1/8 degree of Indian blood receives a monthly check from the government,' she says.

She seems genuinely shocked and a bit embarrassed when I tell her I have 50 percent Ojibwe tribal blood quantum, and I receive no payments whatsoever from the government. She quickly responds, 'Yes, well, you Ojibwe are so much more industrious.'

The racial rift between the Indian and non-Indian communities here in this town bordering the Rosebud Sioux (Lakota) reservation recently emerged in the form of a class action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of the Dakotas and the attorney general of the Rosebud Sioux tribe against the Winner, South Dakota, school district. The suit charges the district with discriminatory disciplinary practices and policies designed to result in unfair criminal prosecution of Native American students."

Get the Story:
Mary Annette Pember: Graduating to Prison: Native Americans Sue School District (The Progressive February 2007)