Practicing bridge-builders at Pine Ridge High School: Cheryl Cedar Face, Alex Wilson, David Michand and Samantha Bissonette with teacher Ronda Neugebauer. (Photo: Terry Harris.)
Originally published in Current, March 26, 2007
By Jeremy Egner
Cheryl Cedar Face knows there’s more to life on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation than alcoholism and crushing poverty. But she’s not always sure others see it.
The soft-spoken Pine Ridge High School senior says most media coverage, when it focuses on the reservation at all, fixates on the Oglala Lakota tribe’s problems — unemployment, substance abuse, gangs — while missing the good things that distinguish “life on the rez” from life elsewhere.
Things such as the buffalo ranchers who thrive with an updated version of an age-old Lakota practice. Or the Lakota musicians who make their own variations on the big-city art of hip-hop. Or the Pine Ridge people who reveal themselves through poetry.
“I know there are a lot of negative things happening on the rez,” says Cedar Face. “But there are also lots of people who are really good at poetry, and I figured that would be a good thing to show to others.”
The poetry writers are the subjects of a short radio doc she’s producing for South Dakota Public Broadcasting. The aspiring journalist, now 18, plans to show this to a statewide audience, thanks to a new partnership between her school and the state-operated public TV/radio network.
South Dakota Public Radio — inspired by kids-make-radio projects such as Ghetto Life 101 — offered to lend recording gear to Pine Ridge students with the aim of airing their insiders’ glimpses of the reservation.
Pine Ridge English teacher and journalism sponsor Ronda Neugebauer identified Cedar Face and three other students who’d be ideal for the project — Alex Wilson, David Michand and Samantha Bissonette.
Terry Harris, the network’s director of radio, and Charles Michael Ray, a reporter, are now working with them on their short docs.
The goal is to air the reports in mid-May, the week before they graduate from high school.
“The main thing is that the kids are getting a chance to learn about this stuff,” Ray says. “But I have a feeling they’ll come back with something that can offer more insight into Pine Ridge and Native communities in general.”
If it works, both the students and the network’s listeners will benefit. The students will receive professional instruction, access to good recording equipment, an audience of thousands for their work and, perhaps, Neugebauer says, a glimpse of an open-ended future.
Now it looks more like a dead end. “All the kids hear is negativity on the rez,” says the teacher, “and it’s hard for them to overcome individually."
"It’s like, ‘How can I, as a Native, succeed, when people are telling me that it’s impossible?’” she adds. “This project can help them see, ‘Wow! I can be a journalist!’”
In addition to honoring its educational mission, meanwhile, the state network gains an insider’s perspective on reservation life — a set of circumstances that affect many South Dakotans but are not widely understood.
While the net covers news that happens on or affects Pine Ridge, Ray says, “it’s a hard place to break into.”
South Dakota is a pretty racially tense place when it comes to white and Native relations,” he says. “Every time you meet a new Lakota person, especially a very traditional one, you have to sort of break down that wall.”
Ray, who is based in Rapid City, S.D., has covered the reservation since 1992. “But I still couldn’t get the kind of access one of these youngsters could get,” he says.
Ray also hopes the Pine Ridge High School partnership will bridge the cultures between the network and people on the reservation.
The need for closer ties with Pine Ridge was underscored by repeated break-ins at the state network’s Pine Ridge translator over the past year, SDPB Executive Director Julie Andersen told public TV reps at APTS’ February lobbying conference in Washington.
Vandals strung barbed wire across the site’s entrance and “sort of spray-painted a ‘keep out’ sign,” Harris says.
Amanda Takes War Bonnet, editor of the reservation’s weekly Lakota Country Times, suspects the act was the sort of garden-variety vandalism that’s common on Pine Ridge. “I don’t think it was a message” aimed at SDPB, which she says is one of the few TV broadcast channels available on the reservation.
The network shares a transmitter site with other state agencies. “My guess is that [the vandals] see it as their land and think the state shouldn’t be on it,” Harris says.
The network’s work with Pine Ridge students wasn’t a reaction to the vandalism, Harris says, but SDPB staffers have talked to residents about the damage during their trips to the school in the hopes that it will stop.
“We’re hoping that the message gets around,” he says. “You never know if that’s going to work or not, but you hope it might.”
Inspiration for the Pine Ridge project came to Ray at last year’s Public Radio News Directors Inc. conference in Los Angeles.
That was where independent radio producer Dave Isay, while discussing his sprawling StoryCorps project, played a clip from Ghetto Life 101, his captivating 1993 doc reported and narrated by LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman, then young residents of Chicago’s Ida B. Wells housing projects.
“I thought, ‘That’s something we could do at Pine Ridge,’” says Ray.
Pine Ridge covers more than 11,000 square miles in the southwestern part of the state, along the Nebraska border. Almost 21,000 Native Americans live there, according to the Oglala Lakota tribe. The unemployment and poverty rates are in double digits. Life expectancy is shortest in the nation, according to a 2006 study by the Harvard School of Public Health—66.6 years, 11 shorter than the national average.
It’s also the site of historic clashes between American Indians and the U.S. government.
“You have to look at the history here,” says Tom Casey, development director for KILI public radio, the reservation’s only station, based in Porcupine, S.D.
Pine Ridge was the site of the last major conflict of the 19th-century Indian wars. On Dec. 29, 1890, the U.S. Army killed hundreds of Lakota men, women and children in the Wounded Knee massacre, when a skirmish erupted between Lakota warriors and Army troops who were relocating the tribe.
“For a long time that summarized the relationship between Indians and non-Indians,” Casey says. “Just kill ’em off.”
In 1975, blood was shed again at Wounded Knee with a clash between members of the militant American Indian Movement and FBI agents. Two agents were killed and the man eventually convicted for their murders, Leonard Peltier, remains an international human-rights celebrity among activists, who insist he was framed.
More recently, bridge-builders have been at work. The Lakota Nation Invitational basketball and volleyball tournaments include teams from non-Indian high schools — including one from a high school named for Indian-fighter Gen. George Custer. South Dakota leaders, including the late Gov. George Michelson, have publicly called for reconciliation among the different groups.
“But there remains a huge gap between Indians and non-Indians,” says Casey, who lives on the reservation. “There are so many connections that need to be made.”
“We share such a small geographical area,” he adds. “It’d be crazy for us not to try to connect.”
Charles Michael Ray hopes the Pine Ridge project offers the sort of cross-cultural links that many South Dakotans might otherwise miss.
“Public broadcasting has a white mainstream audience,” he says. “The idea is for us to offer a window onto life on Pine Ridge.”
Its bleak aspects are well known in South Dakota and beyond. To fill out the picture, the state net looks to thoughtful programming such as Prairie Public Broadcasting’s Indian Pride, as well as to the reports from Pine Ridge High.
While Cedar Face profiles poets, Alex Wilson is exploring the influence of hip-hop music, and David Michand is interviewing ranchers about the importance of buffalo to modern Lakota life.
“The history of it all,” says Michand, “is pretty well documented, but not many people know we still have people who raise buffalo.”
Neugebauer hopes her students’ horizons expand as well. The school’s only journalistic outlet, its newspaper, collapsed last year.
“When Mike and Terry contacted me, I was floored that the students would have the opportunity to work with professionals,” she says.
Cedar Face, who plans to study journalism at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., hasn’t decided yet whether she prefers to work in print or broadcast.
Whichever way she goes, her career goal matches her aspirations for the public radio project: to counteract stereotypical depiction of Native Americans often seen on the news.
“We’re from the rez and we’ve lived there our whole lives, and have maybe a different way of looking at things,” she says.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to let the radio listeners see our culture through us.”
This version of the story has been corrected. The print version incorrectly attributed a quote to Cheryl Cedar Face. It was the teacher, Ronda Neugebauer, who said, "All the kids hear is negativity on the rez ..."
Web page corrected April 2, 2007
Copyright 2007 by Current Publishing Committee
