Published Tuesday February 2, 2010
BY DAVID ROOKS
RAPID CITY JOURNAL

Early Monday I looked out my window: It was snowing again, of course. Is it simply my age or are winters growing colder, longer? The scene of black, gray and white seemed sketched with charcoal on notebook paper. I thought to pray for ranchers and their livestock. In a moment, I added anyone suffering from this bitter cold to my supplication. It’s a loveless world out there.

I related the desolate picture through my window to an article in Monday’s Rapid City Journal. Once again, White Clay, Nebraska is in the news just for being White Clay, Nebraska.

Nothing out of the ordinary has to happen there to warrant the occasional mention. It’s just that, periodically, the moral and spiritual decay of this apparently God forsaken little burgh reaches critical mass. This sends out a psychic wave of negative energy that tweaks the consciences of legislators and journalists alike.

The self-inflicted human misery that is the poisoned bread of a majority of White Clay’s inhabitants makes White Clay a kind of sociological pulsar. That an obscene amount of profit, both private and state, is made as a direct consequence of that misery should be enough to make the demons blush. So goes the Gordian knot of socially concentrated alcoholism wherever it is found. In the same way that cancer cells take over healthy cells, the imperatives of alcoholism have pirated the economic soul of White Clay.

It has a grip on the Nebraska Legislature, too. The general tone of the piece, which appeared first in the Lincoln Star Journal, is that something – anything – must be done. The article describes efforts to find funding for a clean up effort to include a recycling center to be manned, apparently, by the town’s streetwalkers. I had to read that part twice. Color me cynical, but I’d have to see that. Having seen it, I’d conclude no idea is too absurd for legislative consideration.

What makes the whole White Clay shooting match downright radioactive to white journalists and white legislators, and, consequently, virtually immune from any common sense discussion about solutions for it, is the sad fact that well over 95 percent of White Clay’s alcoholics are Native American. Notably absent from the story was a single quote from, or reference to, any official or interested member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Odd, that, given the tribe’s headquarters lie just two miles from White Clay.

So – what do the Indians think? Well, that’s a problem, too, because, well – it’s complicated. For every tribal member, myself included, who thinks the tribe should just legalize the sale and consumption of alcohol on the Pine Ridge Reservation and use the proceeds to combat alcoholism there are 10 tribal members who point to sacred cultural traditions that require a continuance of the status quo. And so you have … White Clay.

Having spent two years of my life as a raging alcoholic, staring bleary-eyed over the counter of a beer cooler onto White Clay’s benighted street, I’d say the jury is no longer out on the status quo. It should be a source of shame for every self-respecting tribal member to be standing by expecting some, however well intended, half-baked solution for White Clay from the federal government or state legislatures.

After all, whose problem is it, really? Whose relatives are these dying day by day on White Clay’s streets? Let’s face it, White Clay is merely geography. Meanwhile, 100 percent of the suffering is in the soul of the Lakota. And ho! Mitakuwe Oyasin! We are all related. This ostrich-like approach we’ve had for White Clay for nearly a century must stop.

David Rooks lives and works in Hot Springs. Write to lakinst@gwtc.net.

Tags: alcoholism, legislation, Oglala Sioux Tribe, prohibition

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