e: katie@katiescarlettbrandt.com

The American government has, by all appearances, forgotten the small South Dakota town of Pine Ridge, located on an Indian reservation of the same name. Condemned houses with paint peeling off the sides fill the reservation’s streets. Rust-eaten cars sit neglected in overgrown front lawns. Children bounce on a trampoline in one yard, but that extravagance is rumored to have come from drug money.

In one house, Kevin Poor Bear sits in his wheelchair using reds, whites, and blacks to paint wolves and other symbolic creatures in Lakota culture on a large canvas. A recovering alcoholic, he relies on the income he earns from his art to get him through each day.

Three of his paintings now appear over the couch in Becky Malone’s living room. A graduate student in the School of Film at Ohio University, Malone traveled to Pine Ridge during March 2004 to film on the reservation and interview some of the Lakota elders for a documentary she’s producing. There, the man behind the paintings invited her into his home – a small house where up to 25 other Lakota Indians have slept on cold winter nights.

“They’re so generous they would give you the last bit of food they had to eat,” Malone says of the Lakota people in general. “They don’t believe people should suffer.”

Suffering, however, is nothing new to the Lakota. For generations before the Europeans crossed the Atlantic, bringing weapons, diseases, and alcohol, the Lakota lived in peaceful, patriarchal societies.

“This country was founded on religious freedom, but Native Americans weren’t allowed to practice theirs until 1978,” Malone says, noting that many were killed or imprisoned for practicing their religion when manifest destiny spread west in America.

Since then, cities have overtaken the vast wilderness the Lakota once knew, and the government that promised to provide for them has whittled their land down to rows of dilapidated houses.

A few years ago, Roger LaMere, one of three remaining Lakota medicine men, decided he was done waiting on broken promises. He had watched his culture slip away for decades, each generation knowing less of their language and traditions.

“Language loss happens so quickly, within generations. You need to know what words mean to understand the culture,” Malone says, adding that the Lakota word for “woman,” for example, literally means “backbone of the nation.”

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