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Bill (LB1306) proposed to re-create 5 mile buffer zone around reservation from alcohol retailers. Native Americans will have to drive or walk drunk 15 miles to nearest town to buy booze.
Nebraska could honor the Oglala Sioux's efforts to curb alcoholism on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation by reverting to a century-old concept: a buffer zone intended to keep the white whiskey peddlers away from the Natives, state senators were told Monday afternoon
Not long after the Pine Ridge Agency was established in 1882, President Chester A. Arthur created a 5- to 10-mile strip in Nebraska as a buffer zone, an area that couldn't be sold to white settlers. It was used as a protection for Natives receiving rations and annuities at the Pine Ridge Agency. The goal was to keep undesirable whites and their whiskey away from Natives, according to James Abourezk, a former U.S. senator from South Dakota.
In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt removed the buffer and opened the land for settlement. Today, four small stores in Whiteclay, a town of 14 people, sell about 4.1 million bottles of beer a year, primarily to residents of South Dakota's nearby Pine Ridge Reservation, which has one of the highest alcoholism mortality rates in the nation.
This is a place "where anything goes," said John Yellowbird Steele, president of the Oglala Lakota. Beer is bartered for sex, and stolen property is used to pay for booze. People urinate on the streets.
"All kinds of laws are being broken there. Nobody cares," he said. "It is a wide-open town, just like the Old West."
Supporters of re-creating the 5-mile buffer zone, where alcohol retailers would be barred, rallied at the Capitol at noon Monday, then testified at a hearing on the proposal (LB1306) before the Legislature's General Affairs Committee in the afternoon. Abourezk's statements were read at the rally.
Sen. Don Preister of Omaha said he agreed to sponsor the bill after Natives and Nebraskans for Peace ran into roadblocks in trying to close the four stores.
The groups were told repeatedly by the governor, the State Patrol and the Liquor Control Commission that it was legal to sell alcohol in Nebraska and that there was nothing that could be done without a change in state law, Preister said.
His bill may not be the total answer, he said, but senators "need to work together to come up with some solutions to (the) life-and-death situation in Whiteclay.
"We have a desperate situation that merits desperate kinds of solutions," he said.
Alcohol cannot be sold on the reservation, home to between 15,000 and 38,000 Oglala Lakota. Yet just 200 feet away, tribal members can buy it.
The U.S. government tries to go to the source of its drug problem: where it is grown in South America, Steele said. "The source of a very great problem on the Pine Ridge Reservation is Whiteclay," he told the committee. "Your jurisdiction is causing it."
If Nebraska doesn't help, the tribe may be forced to sue the state in federal court, raising the issue of the 1882 buffer zone, Steele said. "That costs money. I would rather work together," he said.
Frank LaMere, a Winnebago tribal member who has been working on the Whiteclay issue for five years, said the state "needs to put the sad legacy of Whiteclay behind us."
Nebraska could honor the Oglala Sioux's efforts to curb alcoholism on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation by reverting to a century-old concept: a buffer zone intended to keep the white whiskey peddlers away from the Natives, state senators were told Monday afternoon
Not long after the Pine Ridge Agency was established in 1882, President Chester A. Arthur created a 5- to 10-mile strip in Nebraska as a buffer zone, an area that couldn't be sold to white settlers. It was used as a protection for Natives receiving rations and annuities at the Pine Ridge Agency. The goal was to keep undesirable whites and their whiskey away from Natives, according to James Abourezk, a former U.S. senator from South Dakota.
In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt removed the buffer and opened the land for settlement. Today, four small stores in Whiteclay, a town of 14 people, sell about 4.1 million bottles of beer a year, primarily to residents of South Dakota's nearby Pine Ridge Reservation, which has one of the highest alcoholism mortality rates in the nation.
This is a place "where anything goes," said John Yellowbird Steele, president of the Oglala Lakota. Beer is bartered for sex, and stolen property is used to pay for booze. People urinate on the streets.
"All kinds of laws are being broken there. Nobody cares," he said. "It is a wide-open town, just like the Old West."
Supporters of re-creating the 5-mile buffer zone, where alcohol retailers would be barred, rallied at the Capitol at noon Monday, then testified at a hearing on the proposal (LB1306) before the Legislature's General Affairs Committee in the afternoon. Abourezk's statements were read at the rally.
Sen. Don Preister of Omaha said he agreed to sponsor the bill after Natives and Nebraskans for Peace ran into roadblocks in trying to close the four stores.
The groups were told repeatedly by the governor, the State Patrol and the Liquor Control Commission that it was legal to sell alcohol in Nebraska and that there was nothing that could be done without a change in state law, Preister said.
His bill may not be the total answer, he said, but senators "need to work together to come up with some solutions to (the) life-and-death situation in Whiteclay.
"We have a desperate situation that merits desperate kinds of solutions," he said.
Alcohol cannot be sold on the reservation, home to between 15,000 and 38,000 Oglala Lakota. Yet just 200 feet away, tribal members can buy it.
The U.S. government tries to go to the source of its drug problem: where it is grown in South America, Steele said. "The source of a very great problem on the Pine Ridge Reservation is Whiteclay," he told the committee. "Your jurisdiction is causing it."
If Nebraska doesn't help, the tribe may be forced to sue the state in federal court, raising the issue of the 1882 buffer zone, Steele said. "That costs money. I would rather work together," he said.
Frank LaMere, a Winnebago tribal member who has been working on the Whiteclay issue for five years, said the state "needs to put the sad legacy of Whiteclay behind us."
