On the Margins in Rural America: Crow Creek Indian Reservation, South Dakota

Ronda Hawk runs the Crow Creek Reservation Boys and Girls Club, a haven for hungry children in the community.

Buffalo County, South Dakota, home to the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation, has the distinction of being the poorest county in the United States, with an average per capita income of $5,233.¹ There are 2,142 people in Buffalo County, according to the last census, roughly 10 percent of the population of Hunt’s Point in the Bronx and occupying about 200 times as much land.

The vastness of an Indian reservation contrasts starkly with poor urban areas. Remoteness is what defines life on the reservation. The South Bronx is the poorest congressional district in the United States, but the richest is just a couple of subway stops away.² From Crow Creek, the nearest town off the reservation is 25 miles away, which might as well be 2,500 miles if you haven’t got a car or can’t afford to fill the tank with gas. Unlike in New York, there is no nearby public transportation to get you where you need to go. To put it bluntly, many people are literally stuck.

Hunger is always lurking on the reservation. It’s not the milder form of hunger known to the U.S. government as “low food security.” Here we find the painful, stomach-churning hunger described blandly as “very low food security.” The Boys and Girls Club is a magnet for hungry children on the reservation. Ronda Hawk, the director of the Crow Creek chapter of the Boys and Girls Club, knows that parents send their children to her because of the lack of food at home. She and her board members are very good at scraping together every available bite of food to give to the children. Ronda has spent her whole life working around hungry children and watching the effects of hunger carry over from one generation to the next. When children begin getting failing grades and skipping school, all too often the next step is dropping out of school altogether, followed by joblessness and substance abuse. Each phase hardens a shell of despair that becomes more and more impervious to change.

Hunger harms people of all ages, but the harm done to children is saddest of all. The trajectory of a person’s life is just beginning. If we try, we can bend the arc of the trajectory in a different direction, away from the outcomes Ronda Hawk knows all too well. Americans are not heartless people. They respond to crisis as it becomes real to them. President Obama has set a goal to end child hunger by 2015, but so far the goal has drawn little attention except from inside-Washington policy watchers. A hunger crisis is an everyday reality in a place like Crow Creek. But the trouble is that Crow Creek is as far as you can get from the everyday reality of most Americans.

The big news on Crow Creek, as on Rosebud and other neighboring reservations, is the potential to make renewable energy out of the wind that blows through. Few turbines are spinning yet, though, because the existing infrastructure to move the energy from the reservation to the population centers of the country isn’t able to handle the load. Federal investments through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and additional monies committed in the American Climate and Energy Security Bill of 2009 made a down payment on the necessary upgrades to the nation’s electric grid. The economic rewards that could eventually flow to the reservation are substantial. Although it’s not described this way in the media, it’s compelling to think of how wind power could improve the lives of children on the reservation.

Harvesting Initiative

Chauncey Long Crow lives on the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota.

Unemployment on the Crow Creek reservation rarely falls below 50 percent. Wind power alone won’t create enough jobs to dramatically reduce this depressing statistic. While a wind farm can create a handful of jobs to install the turbines and later maintain them, the largest share of jobs in the wind power industry comes from the manufacturing of parts, which will be done off the reservation. Crow Creek stands to benefit mainly from the land payments negotiated with commercial developers and the reduced cost of electricity to consumers.

It’s highly unlikely that a large employer will relocate to the reservation. The prospects for job creation here depend on small business growth and homegrown entrepreneurship. Currently, the largest private sector employers are a small grocery store, a convenience store, and a casino. Six percent of the population earns a share of their living from self-employment. Government services account for most of the jobs. As in many poor communities in the United States, the school system is the largest employer.

“The human capital to run businesses is right here,” says Dustin Miller, who with Jason Yates co-directs the nonprofit Harvest Initiative, which was established in part to help start native-run businesses on the reservation. In the year since Harvest Initiative was incorporated, Miller and Yates have raised close to $1 million to sponsor lending and financial literacy. They have assisted 30 existing and potential entrepreneurs on the reservation, leading to the formation of 7 nonprofits and 5 for-profit ventures. They hold an adult financial literacy class, a “Money Matters” course through the Boys and Girls Club, and a business law class at Crow Creek’s high school. Miller serves on the board of the Boys and Girls Club.

Harvest Initiative was established by Barry Griswell, a former business executive, who in 2009 was inducted into the Boys and Girls Club of America Alumni Hall of Fame.³ Griswell grew up in an extremely poor family and credits the Boys and Girls Club with helping him to rise above poverty and achieve success. Miller and Yates both graduated from Drake University Law School in 2008. With family backgrounds in missionary work, they were eager to join Harvest Initiative, and though neither is Native American, they work closely with the tribal government and have earned tribal members’ respect. Harvest Initiative has built trust by writing grants that secured hundreds of thousands of dollars in USDA rural development funding. Working with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, it also helped the tribal council develop a wind energy prospectus.

When Miller says the human capital is here, outsiders might find reason to doubt. Poverty, unemployment, high dropout rates, and alcoholism—on paper, the reservation’s human capital doesn’t seem impressive. But Miller knows something else. “Where I grew up in rural Iowa, unless you wanted to farm you were encouraged to leave. Here it’s different, the family ties are strong.”

In most persistently poor rural areas, outmigration is taken for granted. People with drive and talent, especially young people, leave when they get the chance. Home is not a place they can shine. People leave Crow Creek as well, moving off the reservation to find work or join the military—but a large percentage of them return. Family is a safety net for those who encounter discrimination and other difficulties off the reservation. They bring skills back with them, but a lot of their talent is wasted because there are few outlets for it.

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