Whiteclay, Nebraska

[intertribal]

I went to watch Battle for Whiteclay last night. It's a movie about, well, Whiteclay - a tiny town whose alcohol-related death rate is 300% higher than the national average.

"Neville Red Star receives medical attention after a severe, alcohol-related, fall" in Whiteclay, NE. By Lyric R. Cabral.

Whiteclay is a "village" of fourteen people on the Nebraska side of the Nebraska-South Dakota border. On the other side of the border is Pine Ridge Reservation. Seven of the U.S.'s poorest counties are in Pine Ridge. Whiteclay has existed for a hundred years, snuggled up underneath Pine Ridge, solely for the purpose of selling alcohol. Pine Ridge Reservation's tribal council has long outlawed alcohol, you see. Whiteclay has four liquor stores - all owned by whites - and they sell 4.5 million (4,000,000) cans of dirt cheap malt liquor every year. That is approximately 12,500 cans a day. As cheap as alcohol is, it's not always cheap enough, so alcohol is also offered in exchange for roughing up people that are behind on their tab, harassing visitors, and sex. Alcohol is also sold to the clearly intoxicated and the underaged. All this in spite of legally, there is no place for Pine Ridge residents to drink this alcohol - they can't go back to Pine Ridge, and it's illegal to drink "on the premises" of liquor stores. Of course, there is little to no law enforcement, and Whiteclay's "downtown" consists of people who have drunk themselves to death on the premises. Not unrelated is the extremely high rate of suicide (teen suicide is 150% higher than the national average) and abuse in Pine Ridge.

An article in the December '09 issue of Harper's Magazine about Pine Ridge, "Ghosts of Wounded Knee" (the battle site being within Pine Ridge), that touched on Whiteclay toward the end:

Blind-drunk Lakota stumble along the road. A man with a hat that reads NATIVE PRIDE sleeps against a building, using a five-gallon bucket for a pillow. The only businesses in town are "bars," really just tin-roofed shacks, owned by whites, with stacks of malt liquor cases behind counters. On offer: Hurricane High Gravity, 8.1 percent alcohol, one dollar for a twenty-four-ounce can. Or Camo Black Ice. Or Evil Eye Red Kiwi Strawberry. All cheap, all around 10 percent alcohol, twice an ordinary beer. They taste like paint thinner and burnt breakers. Heavy drinkers on the rez are often said to be "mizzing out" or "blank."

Brian Believer Jr.: Winter, Johnny was always bundled up, they'd offer him a sleeping bag or a blanket. Sometimes I'd come over here, colder than hell, he'd still be standing out here with a big old hood sweater on. I said, Where do you sleep, and he says, Don't worry, I got a place to sleep. ... We're Lakota warriors, and we should be able to take care of ourselves, but all we get is just the VA checks. A VA check won't even buy you a house. I don't know what's going on. I don't care.

Of course, former Nebraska Governor Johanns isn't going to shut down Whiteclay because, hey, those liquor stores have the right to try to make a profit. It's free enterprise. This same Governor Johanns will also go to Pine Ridge and ask them to shut down casinos because of the moral bankruptcy they bring about for the (white) people that go there.

When the stores' liquor licenses need to get renewed, the issue goes to the Sheridan County Board. Whiteclay's supporters always tell the two towns closest to Whiteclay, Gordon and Rushville, that if Whiteclay is closed, "they" will just swoop down on Gordon and Rushville - if they want alcohol, they're going to get it, and you don't want those drunk Indians in your town, now do you? The Nebraska Liquor Control Commission says alcohol consumption is a matter of personal responsibility. When one liquor license is suspended - the owner is a felon - another guy from a different town immediately throws his hat in the ring. He wants to open another liquor store to replace the one that was "lost." Another supporter of Whiteclay suggests that maybe Pine Ridge should give up prohibition and just sell alcohol on-reservation. "Didn't seem to hurt the United States," he says.

Meanwhile, many of the people dying of exposure and alcoholism in Whiteclay are veterans. One man says he got out of the military and looked at the American flag and said, "You people killed my people" - then told his mother not to let them bury him with the flag.

Pine Ridge has declared Whiteclay a public nuisance. Duane Martin Sr., one of the Indian activists featured in the movie, tried to organize a blockade between Whiteclay and Pine Ridge and was told that he'd have to go through the Nebraska legislation system. "Nebraska, man," he says, "They don't listen."

After watching this movie, I think that he's right.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Wow. I had no idea--well, I had an inkling of an idea, but no idea of the level of... I don't have a word for it: small, intense cruelty, maybe. Gah.

So how did you come to see the movie?

ETA...It puts my stomach in knots thinking about the continued, cynical, deliberate destruction of lives, willful creation of misery that this involves, and when you add in that it's also the destruction of a people, it adds a whole level of awful.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

They were showing it at UNL (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), where I work.

I know you can order it for "a suggested donation of" $15, but I can't say the movie itself, aesthetically, is worth that.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I find my consciousness raised pretty effectively just by reading things like your review. Watching an actual full-length film is a degree of battering that I'm often not up for unless, afterward, I'm pointed in a direction in which I can turn my energies to make a constructive difference.

Sometimes, though, it's worth enduring the battery even just for the information, even if there's nothing I can then actually do. Sometimes I've been glad that something has (metaphorically) grabbed my face, made me look, and said, see this? See all this? This is real. This is what happened.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Yeah - it's bad enough when you just think about what's going on now, but when you put it in the context of history it gets really bad. And I get the sense that no one who has any decision-making power puts it in the context of history. I'm sure if anybody brought up what white people have done to the American Indians over the past three hundred years, they would just stick their fingers in their ears and go "la la la."

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Sometimes people of conscience get crushed by the sense of historical guilt/culpability, while meanwhile people unencumbered by conscience just don't care much. I was going to say "but there's no hiding from what's happened," but of course, there is--people edit textbooks, they tell Big Lies... eventually, though, the truth seems to come out...

Tangentially, it pains me the way marginalized peoples are forced into marginalizing professions (e.g., animal slaughter in cultures that disdain killing animals; moneylending among Jews in medieval Europe, and modern-day casino operation for American tribal people)--and then judged based on that.