Pine Ridge: The Oglala Lakota Nation Today

The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation covers more than four thousand square miles of southwestern South Dakota, making it one of the largest reservations in the country, and it is home to the Oglala Lakota Nation, one of the seven bands of the Teton Lakota people. The Oglala are a living nation, governing themselves through their own tribal council, maintaining their own courts and law enforcement, and working to preserve the Lakota language, ceremonies, and cultural practices that survived a century and a half of systematic suppression.

The Lakota arrived in the Black Hills around seventeen seventy-five, following the great buffalo herds that made the northern plains one of the most productive hunting landscapes on earth. The Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight guaranteed them a vast reservation stretching across the Dakotas. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills in eighteen seventy-four, during a military expedition led by George Armstrong Custer, the United States government effectively tore that treaty apart. The Lakota were pushed onto successively smaller reservations. The buffalo, which had numbered in the tens of millions, were commercially slaughtered to extinction by the eighteen eighties, deliberately eliminating the foundation of Plains Indian economies.

Pine Ridge today carries some of the most severe poverty statistics in the United States. Oglala Lakota County has historically ranked as the poorest county in the nation by per capita income. Average life expectancy on the reservation has run more than ten years below the national average. These are not inevitable conditions but the legible results of specific historical policies: land dispossession, forced boarding schools, the destruction of subsistence economies, and chronic underfunding of federal treaty obligations.

What the statistics do not capture is the resilience, artistry, and cultural depth of the Oglala people. Lakota language revitalization programs are active. Artists, educators, and community organizers work continuously to build a better future on a foundation of cultural pride. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in nineteen eighty that the government had illegally seized the Black Hills and ordered compensation of more than a hundred million dollars. The Oglala have refused to accept the money. The hills are not for sale.