Word: rivers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...though, Cheyenne River is being swept up in the quiet revolution--both a temperance movement and a traditional, spiritual revival--that is moving across many reservations. The four-year teepee-camp program is being funded by an $803,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as part of its Healthy Nations program to reduce the damage caused by substance abuse among Native Americans. The foundation is sponsoring 12 other similar programs, including an Inupiat kayak expedition near Nome, Alaska, and an Apache multimedia campaign against alcohol and drugs in the White Mountains of Arizona...
...everyone in Cheyenne River agrees that living in the past is the best way to save the next generation. Some say the real problem is the lack of jobs on the reservation, where unemployment hovers at around a staggering 80%. Monica Lawrence, a counselor at Cheyenne River, notes too that there is only one substance-abuse counselor for teenagers on the whole reservation, and wonders if the Healthy Nations grant money is being used effectively. "It's nice to experience something that our ancestors did," she says, "but what happens when summer is over and the kids come back...
...begins another day at Wolakota Yukini Wicoti, a spiritual boot camp on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, where the borderline between this world and the past can sometimes be lost on the vast and trackless prairie...
...towns, are trying to break a grim cycle of alcoholism and despair by living as their forebears did: sleeping in teepees, traveling on horseback and learning their once forbidden language and ceremonies from tribal elders. "This camp is more than a camp," says Gregg Bourland, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. "In a way it is the rebirth of the Great Sioux Nation...
This may be a heavy agenda. But for the Lakota--what the western Sioux tribes call themselves--and many of America's nearly 2 million Native Americans, the situation is critical. Tribal health-care specialists say that on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, an area about the size of Connecticut where 10,000 Lakota live, 85% of the population between ages 12 and 35 binge on alcohol and other drugs; child abuse is rampant; and gangs like the Crips and Bloods have been offering a brutal form of sanctuary for lost or neglected kids...