July 7, 1999
Web posted at: 3:55 p.m. EDT (1955 GMT)

RAPID CITY, South Dakota (AllPolitics, July 7) -- President Bill Clinton on Wednesday became the first sitting chief executive since President Franklin D. Roosevelt to visit Indian country, touring South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation for a visit with the Oglala Sioux nation.

President Clinton spoke Wednesday at the Pine Ridge Reservation

The president's visit was part of his four-day tour of America's economically struggling regions. American Indian communities have long been some of the poorest regions in the country.

"We know well the imperfect relationship that the United States and its government has enjoyed with the tribal nations, but I have seen today not only poverty but promise and I have seen enormous courage," Clinton said during his address at Pine Ridge.

The president saw examples of the region's grinding poverty, touring reservation housing facilities. He was almost disbelieving as Geraldine Blue Bird, stifling tears, explained her housing situation.

"She let me sit on her porch and she told me how she tries to make ends meet for the 28 people that share her small home and the house trailer adjoining," Clinton said.

Tribal President Howard Salway said Blue Bird's Igloo neighborhood -- a collection of foam-green shacks with crumbling porches -- is typical of housing conditions on the reservation. "In the winter, the hardship it puts on our people increases tenfold," he told Clinton.

Clinton saw another part of the reservation that has new housing secured with federal assistance.

While there, the president also signed a pact with Oglala leaders establishing an empowerment zone for Pine Ridge and participated in a conference on home ownership and economic development for Native Americans.

The president's tour of areas in the U.S. the good economic times have left behind is aimed at highlighting the "untapped markets" in America's inner cities and rural areas.

According to statistics from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there are 1.43 million Indians living on or near reservations. Roughly 33 percent of them are children younger than 15, and 38 percent of Indian children aged 6 to 11 live in poverty, compared with 18 percent for U.S. children of all other races combined.

Only 63 percent of Indians are high school graduates. Twenty-nine percent are homeless, and 59 percent live in substandard housing.

Twenty percent of Indian households on reservations do not have full access to plumbing, and the majority -- 53.4 percent -- do not have telephones.

An estimated 50 percent of American Indians are unemployed, and at Pine Ridge the problem is even more chronic -- 73 percent of the people do not have jobs.

"Pine Ridge is simply the poorest census tract in the nation," said Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo, who visited the reservation in August 1998. "The main business on the reservation is a gas station. All of the housing is HUD housing, Indian housing, which is in many cases deplorable."

Arriving Tuesday night in Rapid City, Clinton decided to make a nocturnal visit to Mount Rushmore. Clinton never had seen the monument and accepted an offer of a guided excursion from Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. He and Daschle then motored over to Thunderhead Mountain to view the completed face of Crazy Horse carved in it.

During his speech Wednesday, the president said such attractions could also help in the economic recovery of the reservation and urged the native Americans to "seize the vast potential of tourism right here in Pine Ridge by building a Lakota-Sioux Heritage Cultural Center."

"If we built this cultural center, of all the people that go to see Crazy Horse, of all the people that go to see Mount Rushmore, of all the people that go to Badlands National Park, how many would come here? I'll tell you, a whole lot -- an enormous percentage, if you give them something to come and see," he said.

Pine Ridge, which is not far from Mount Rushmore, is the second largest Indian reservation in the United States. Spread over about 2 million acres (800,000 hectares), the reservation was created in 1889 by an act of Congress. It has 38,000 residents, no public transportation and a smattering of Indian-owned businesses such as cafes, video stores and gas stations.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Wednesday, July 7, 1999

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