Reservatin conditions prompt state of emergency

Date: Sun, 24 Dec 1995 01:37:20 -0500

BY JEFF ROWE

Orange County Register

At the Oglala Sioux reservation in South Dakota, some families consider 
themselves lucky to live in a one-room shack or an ancient trailer.

Drafty, one-room houses that never have seen paint brave the wind, rain and snow
 with pieces of carpet, cardboard and plywood covering long-broken windows. 
Camper trailers, rusted and battered by shrieking winter storms and the searing 
summer sun, have long since lost windows and doors but nonetheless are homes to 
entire families in this reservation of 20,000. For the lucky, water comes from a
 nearby pump; others depend on supplies from trucks to fill empty paint pails.

Near almost every habitation are rusted, cannibalized cars that serve as a 
transportation history and car-parts source. For the desperate -- and there are 
4,800 homeless, including 2,400 children on the reservation -- these hulks 
sometimes are shelters of last resort.

Conditions are so bad that in early December the tribe declared what may be the 
first-ever state of emergency on a reservation. Tribal leaders fear children 
will die in winter storms because so many of the houses and trailers have leaky 
roofs, missing windows or broken doors.

``It's a human tragedy,'' says Phil Stevens, founder of Walking Shield American 
Indian Society.

Walking Shield's larger goals for better housing and opportunities for American 
Indians seem to mirror the thesis of the recently published book ``Reinvesting 
in America: The Grassroots Movements That Are Feeding the Hungry, Housing the 
Homeless and Putting Americans Back to Work.''

Author Robert Garr advocates programs that ``build on the strengths of poor 
people rather than assume that their weaknesses will forever defeat them.'' Garr
 spent four years researching poor villages and towns across the United States, 
including the Oglala reservation.

As Garr noted in his book, the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Sioux reservations in the 
southwest corner of South Dakota are perhaps the poorest of the poor 
reservations.

Stevens is trying to persuade the federal government to provide building 
materials so the Sioux can make emergency repairs to the worst of the houses on 
the reservation. Then in the spring, he wants to move some surplus housing from 
Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota to the reservation.

He struggles with a thicket of conflicting regulations and interests.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs is responsible for nongovernment houses on the 
reservation, but the Department of Housing and Urban Development oversees new 
housing on American Indian lands. Tribal officials estimate 1,860 new houses are
 needed just to accommodate the homeless and those whose dwellings have 
deteriorated beyond repair on the Oglala reservation.

>From his office in the town of Pine Ridge, seat of tribal government, Paul Iron 
Cloud struggles to administer housing programs for the reservation, which 
stretches across a dozen hamlets and 5,000 square miles.

``Congress only gives us enough housing to fight each other,'' says the director
 of the Oglala Sioux Housing Authority, which comes under the federal Department
 of Housing and Urban Development. ``I walk out of here very depressed some 
days.''