On Sioux Reservation, Lack of Transportation Can Be Fatal

The need for transportation dominates the lives of the Oglala Sioux in ways that city dwellers would find difficult to understand.

Even a trip from homes scattered about the remote Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to grocery stores here, the reservation’s largest town, is an event. Some people begin walking before dawn for a 40-mile round trip to the store, returning after dark.

“They’re used to walking, because there’s no transportation on the reservation at all, and it’s a big reservation,” said Marguerite Vey-Miller, a onetime VISTA volunteer among the Oglala Sioux who now runs the Sheridan County Public Transportation System just over the state line in Nebraska.

It is a well-run, dial-a-ride service that stands in stark contrast to the transit poverty of the reservation. “If I had my dreams, I’d just run up and down the highway so I could pick up people who are walking,” said Vey-Miller.

When it comes to mobility, America has become a nation of haves and have-nots. The story has been told often: Rural communities have been left with deteriorating bus service; local train service disappeared years ago; local dial-a-ride van services are subject to the whims of county governments and federal subsidies that are static or declining.

The plight of the have-nots of transportation is uniquely displayed on the Pine Ridge reservation, a vast expanse of rolling green hills and badlands where soldiers massacred more than 200 followers of Sitting Bull in 1890 at Wounded Knee.

Many residents do not own cars. There is no public transit system.

With a constant 85% unemployment rate, most Oglala Sioux residents find it difficult even to pay for a ride. Throughout the reservation, sometimes arrogant young men charge exorbitant prices for rides, in what has grown into an informal taxi service in which Sioux prey on Sioux. But if there is no nearby relative with a car, there may not be a choice.

Transportation can mean life or death in this sparsely populated country, especially when combined with the paucity of telephones. Two premature infants died this summer on the way to faraway hospitals because the needed facilities were unavailable at the Indian Health Service hospital here. The two-hour wait to get a plane from Rapid City was too long for their tiny bodies.

A 5-year-old girl slowly died from a chronic heart ailment on a Saturday night in July as her mother, who has no telephone or car, desperately tried to flag down cars on the highway. Two passed, but neither stopped. And the nearest neighbor, a quarter-mile away, did not come home until 4:30 a.m.

“Essentially the child was dead on arrival,” said Joe Lucero, an official at the Indian Health Service hospital. “That’s one example of how transportation caused the death of a 5-year-old child. . . . If we’d got to her at 2 or 2:30 a.m., she’d be alive.”

Such transportation tragedies are unusual. But just getting around is a daily struggle.

It is especially severe among people who are disabled and use wheelchairs. Neither the tribe nor various federal agencies provide special services or transportation for the disabled. It is not unusual for quadriplegics and paraplegics to spend weeks or months in bed simply because there is nothing else to do.

John Yellow Hair has been a paraplegic for almost two decades, and he is familiar with the struggle for mobility. For transportation, he relies on a wheelchair with bicycle tires and his mother’s 1981 Chevrolet Monte Carlo with an engine from another car that was wrecked when it hit a horse.

He cannot drive, so he is dependent on his mother and the family car for the occasional 23-mile trip from his home to a hospital here. Driving the family car is almost an act of faith.

“Our car?” huffed Rebecca Yellow Hair. “It’s falling apart, the roads are so bad.”

Yellow Hair is part of a self-help group called the Quad Squad, which was formed to help quadriplegics and paraplegics deal with their depression and the lack of services on the reservation, where there is no nursing home, no independent living facility, no physical therapy.

The Quad Squad potentially could recruit a lot of members. An unusually large number of quadriplegics and paraplegics live on the reservation, most disabled for reasons that grow out of wine bottles and beer cans.

Yellow Hair said his accident, which happened in Arlington, Va., was not alcohol-related. But he has plenty of friends who awoke paralyzed in hospital beds after a Saturday night of drinking.

Marlin Weston, a quadriplegic who once rode on the rodeo circuit, remembers slipping into a drunken stupor in 1985 on the passenger side of a friend’s car and awakening in a Denver hospital seven days later, unable to move. His friend, the driver, suffered a broken collarbone.

Weston’s 18-year-old sister, Colleen, was killed by a drunk driver on the reservation in 1987. And nine months later his 7-year-old nephew was killed by a drunk driver while riding his bicycle at Wounded Knee.

Weston is to graduate this year from Oglala Lakota College to become a drug and alcohol counselor. “I don’t want other young kids to go through what my family went through,” he said.

Unlike some reservations where political stability has allowed progress and even prosperity, the Oglala Sioux change governments every two years. As a result, it is difficult to sustain community programs and easy to overlook the disabled.

In 1989, frustrated by the lack of action, Weston and social worker Jim West decided that if government would not help, the people would have to help themselves, and the Quad Squad was born.

The Quad Squad has evolved into an amateur lobbying group, with a primary emphasis on transportation and mobility. “We wanted to influence positive change without blaming,” West said. “And we wanted to emphasize individual responsibility and the power of community.”

Weston is president and Yellow Hair is vice president; along with their friends, they have made some people uncomfortable in the tribal government and on trips to the state capital at Pierre.

Take the case of Yellow Hair’s wheelchair ramp. The tribe promised him a ramp repeatedly over the years, a promise that was never fulfilled. In a way, his only advance during the 1970s and 1980s was to find inflated bicycle tires for his wheelchair, to avoid jarring his body while riding over rocky roads around his home.

In 1990 he appeared at a disabled-advocacy meeting in Pierre, telling his story, with his friend Lyle Bald Eagle translating for him, since his traffic accident left him unable to form full sentences.

The state Office of Vocational Rehabilitation immediately offered to build a ramp, not knowing that the tribe had succumbed to Quad Squad lobbying and had already built one. A lot of ramps have begun appearing all over the reservation.