Lange, the judge in the Oglala Sioux case, has noted the Pine Ridge reservation is among the most impoverished places in the country
That is a fact
While neither side disputes crime is very high on the reservation and its police are underfunded, the judge wrote, the federal government insists “the funding is fair given budget constraints and Congress’s decision to underfund law enforcement services in Indian country generally.”
And there is the reason for this story
The only place in the country where the cops aren’t given tanks and whatever else they want. And the reason is to oppress indigenous people, again.
Hmmmmmmm…so not being given as much money as you want is oppression? Geeez, i’ve been oppressed for years and didn’t even know it.
It would have been more accurate to say the lack of law enforcement depresses the population.
Depressing or lowering the ability of a population to live a positive and healthy environment because you are much more likely to be a target of crime is going to be oppressive to that population.
Being over-policed or under-policed lead to similar issues. Criminals being a burden to the civilian population or over reaching police being a burden to the population. A balance is needed and five officers for an area the size of Connecticut is too few for effective police presence.
I don’t know how much more depressed you can get by just living in Pine Ridge, but okay we’ll go with that.
I don’t just mean depression in just the mental sense. Depressed economy, depressed job prospects, depressed education system.
When systemic injustice is just the way life is for a group of people then they get depressed in more than just mental depression.
Yeah it’s pretty bad. I know a few people who came off of Pine Ridge.
I lived around Lakota Sioux as a kid. Spent a year in one month in Pine Ridge. Had a roommate in college that was Lakota from the Ridge. From what little I know, it’s a terrible place.
I thought the whole point of the reservation was to be separate from the US so they can run their own government. I honestly didn’t even know they would get federal funding of any kind.
They are autonomous to a point, but every tribe gets federal funds. It is usually focused on quality of life issues like health, nutrition and that sort of thing. Reservations are, with some exceptions, very poor and don’t have tax bases. Back in the day, they were given crap land which is the main reason.
Considering the long history of Americans fucking over indigenous people, murdering them en masse and stealing their lands even after treaties had been signed, they deserve all the U.S. funding they can get. And they don’t get enough.
I agree. Which is why i understood them to be so poor, that being a lack of governmental funding.
Because: A) poor nations all over the world receive funding from the United States in order to help secure our interests and stabilize regions of concern to us, that’s particularly significant when those regions include areas entirely surrounded by a state. B) They aren’t separate to a degree that matters for economic development. Many reservations are bound to some US or even state laws in exchange for certain things. They can’t decide to radically change their governance the way like Mexico can especially when it comes to things like building a modern standing army. They can’t create a hard border with the US. And C) their land sucks because whenever it turns out we accidentally built a reservation on land which has economically valuable resources we move the reservation to land that doesn’t or we starve and buy them out of it or something similar. We have created a system of hopelessness and routinely undermined their ability to create a society that can economically sustain itself without us.
If you’ve never driven across a reservation, it’s pretty eye opening. Poverty on another level. It doesn’t feel like you’re in a modern western country.
Shameful that it is allowed to get so bad
