Brandon Ecoffey
A note from the editor’s desk
By Brandon Ecoffey
Lakota Country Times Editor Throughout the past year or so there has been a movement to help fight hunger on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The work being done by Conscious Alliance and Loneman school that provides backpacks of healthy food for children to take home is only one example of efforts like this being made. Recently Little Wound School began serving dinner meals to the community for a small fee and I’ve heard that a number of other schools are preparing to follow suit. The importance of making healthy meals available to our community is as important as it is urgent. A report from Congress by the USDA estimated that across Indian Country nearly a quarter of all home in Indian Country were classified as food insecure. Amongst home with children, reservation residences were twice as likely to be food insecure compared to the rest of the population. The results of the lack of healthy foods for Native people have led researchers to estimate that on the high end nearly half of all Native American children will be affected by diabetes. For the most part when I write my columns the focus has always been on our audience that lives on the reservation. We are a local paper and we try to keep our content focused on the issues that face the people living in these communities in western South Dakota. Still, we are one of the largest reservation based newspapers in the country and our audience consists of people who are interested in Lakota news and are from all over the world. One thing about news coming out of Indian Country is that Lakota news is often worthy of national coverage. Our political issues are always closely examined as we have held our status as nations closely and the issues impacting our communities often have policy impacts on other tribal nations across the country.
Students at the Loneman School on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota have benefited from a partnership with the non-profit group Conscious Alliance. Photo from Facebook
With such a wide base of readers it is possible to reach enough of the right people to begin to make a difference on many of the issues we cover. As many people know Pine Ridge has had far too many suicides. While many have paid note to these happenings nobody knows for sure why they have been happening. What can be identified however is that are factors within or society that have been shown that when they are present the mental health of our young people are affected. Developing a broad plan in how address society as a whole is work reserved for far smarter and capable people than me but identifying the things that we know contribute to depression, learning disabilities, and other contributors to increased likelihood of suicide is a must. Malnutrition is a silent killer of our people. Lack of proper nutrition contributes to our children’s struggles in school as genetically modified foods and the artificial substances in many of cheap food products lack any significant amount of nutrients that our bodies and brains need to function properly. For many people on the reservation it isn’t their decision to eat this way but a requirement of sustaining life.
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In a perfect world the existence of organic farming on the reservation would be the answer but, the immediacy of many people’s struggles with food requires that other step forward to help. Currently on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation there are a number of organizations that are doing real work to help our people on a daily basis. These include groups like One Spirit, Conscious Alliance, Wounded Knee District School, Little Wound District School and many others. So as the Holiday shopping season begins to get underway it wouldn’t hurt to lend a hand to those in need. Brandon Ecoffey is the editor of LCT and an award winning journalist who was born and raised on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He can be reached at editor@lakotacountrytimes.com Find the award-winning Lakota Country Times on the Internet, Facebook and Twitter.
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