Word: sioux
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...into someplace better than where he lives now. Little Boy, 41, lives in a one-room shack. Along with him live his wife, five children and two nieces: nine people jammed into a space that measures 20 ft. by 20 ft. The house, on the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux reservation in South Dakota, has one tiny window with a plastic pane. It is made of Sheetrock and cheap wood siding. In winter the frigid South Dakota wind tears through it like a knife. When it rains, its dirt and sawdust floor becomes a swamp. Now, in a sweltering late summer...
Little Boy does not have a job. He was a janitor once, and a tribal policeman for a while when his uncle was police commissioner. But jobs on the Sioux's Pine Ridge reservation are so scarce that only 1 out of every 3 adults has one. In fact, as in hundreds of other reservations where Third World conditions prevail, there is only one real source of income, only one source of medical services and of food. There is only one real source of hope that someday Little Boy's family will be able to move out of squalor...
Standing off Highway 18 on the Pine Ridge reservation is what Slade Gorton would like to believe is a symbol of hope and self-sufficiency. It is Prairie Wind, the Oglala Sioux's venture into Indian gambling. Housed temporarily in two connected double-wide trailers, it consists of several slot machines and two tables for poker and blackjack. The casino's revenues in its 10 months of existence have run from $13,000 to $92,000 a month, of which 30% is earmarked for its investors. Thus far, after expenses, it has provided $10,000 for children's school clothes...
Costner and his brother Dan, who already own a casino-restaurant in Deadwood, are building a more than $100 million resort there and are ogling the parcel for the compound's planned golf course. The spiritual Sioux find this hard to comprehend. "Costner just wants to make himself more powerful, greater and bigger," claims Sidney Keith, a Lakota Sioux elder. Lakota activist Madonna Thunder Hawk protests, "It's a betrayal. Costner is making millions on our backs...
...Forest Service will decide this fall whether to let Costner procure the parcel in exchange for a 585-acre site 12 miles from Deadwood. The Costners aren't talking, but Jim Fisher, program director for the planned resort, contends that the critics represent only a vocal minority of Sioux and that the resort will improve an 85-acre site that used to be a salvage yard. "We view all land as sacred," he says. "We're going to add something environmentally." Which doubtless won't calm the ruckus over what some Sioux are calling Costner's field of green...