Reznet

Pine Ridge Appreciation

By Elena Azul Cisneros

PORCUPINE, S.D.—Sen. Tim Johnson returned to the Pine Ridge Reservation recently to thank the people largely credited with reelecting him to the U.S. Senate.

"We all know how the senator got elected here," John Steele, president of the Oglala Lakota tribe on Pine Ridge, said in his opening remarks to the tribal members who gathered at the Porcupine Clinic here to greet Johnson.

South Dakota's Native American voters were a major force in the Democratic senator's narrow election victory over his Republican challenger, former congressman John Thune, who was strongly supported by President Bush.

"It was something that was simply extraordinary," Johnson said of the Indian vote, especially the polling on Pine Ridge, whose returns were the last to be counted in the state and put the senator over the top.

The Pine Ridge polling caused something of a backlash from some in the South Dakota Republican Party. There was an accusation of election fraud on the Pine Ridge Reservation to "pay people to vote," as Steele described it.

"For all the effort to discredit the Indian vote," Republicans have acknowledged there was no unlawful voting, Johnson said.

Needs and Programs

Now people recognize that the Native American vote is important—and so are the needs of the Indian people, Johnson said.

"Suddenly there's some power here," he said, but "we've (still) got our work cut out for us."

Johnson said he wants to free up federal money for a diabetes budget of $100 million to $150 million. That would be "a piece of what we can do," he said.

"We need your direction," he said to the audience, which consisted of dialysis patients, as well as tribal officials and members. "We need the tribe to be telling me" the priorities and agenda of the tribe.

"Working together we can make a lot of progress," Johnson said. "We need to have a sense of what exactly Pine Ridge wants."

Federal funding for Indian programs is not that large, according to Johnson, and "we don't know what exactly is going to happen."

Johnson promised to fight proposed budget cuts that directly or indirectly target Indian programs. He mentioned funding for tribal colleges, water issues, the diabetes epidemic, a veterans' hospital for Native Americans on the reservation, treaty rights and sacred lands.

"I'm not going to throw the towel in on anything," Johnson said.

Elena Azul Cisneros, Oglala Lakota, attends Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn. She is a 2002 graduate of The Freedom Forum's American Indian Journalism Institute.