Pine Ridge: Poverty as Policy Outcome

Shannon County, South Dakota, contains most of the Pine Ridge Reservation. For decades, it has ranked at or near the bottom of every major socioeconomic measure in the United States: median household income estimated in the range of eleven thousand to thirteen thousand dollars annually, against a national median roughly five times that. Unemployment at Pine Ridge has been estimated above eighty percent in some survey years. Life expectancy for men on the reservation has been documented at approximately sixty-seven years, more than a decade below the national average.

These conditions have a documented cause. They are not mysteries.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight confined the Oglala Lakota to reservation land. The allotment policy of the Dawes Act of eighteen eighty-seven broke up collectively held reservation land into individual parcels, reducing the Lakota land base by more than half and opening the remainder to non-Indian purchase. The boarding school system separated children from families and language for generations, dismantling the transmission of cultural and economic knowledge. Federal commodity food programs replaced a subsistence economy that had been deliberately destroyed by the elimination of the buffalo.

Each policy was designed to solve a problem that was itself created by the previous policy. The land was taken. The economy that sustained life on the land was eliminated. The replacement economy was structured to produce dependence.

The result is Shannon County. The cause is not poverty. The cause is documented federal policy, sustained across more than a hundred and fifty years.