And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
link provided by Steve..thanks..:) Ish
Whiteclay, Nebraska:
The Town That Booze Built
By Bruce E. Johansen
Native Americas Journal
Thursday, January 28, 1999
http://www.yvwiiusdinvnohii.net/News99/NAJ990128.htm
Copyright � 1999 Native Americas
All Rights Reserved
Whiteclay, Neb., located 400 yards south of the Pine Ridge reservation, is
a town with a registered population of 22 people and has four stores with
one major line of business: the sale of beer to Indians.
One day during the summer of 1997, Frank LaMere, a Winnebago, who is
executive director of the Nebraska Inter-Tribal Development Corp., visited
Whiteclay. He counted 32 intoxicated Indians on the streets of Whiteclay at
5:15 a.m., and 47 drunks on the streets in the afternoon, some of whom were
fighting each other. Several other Indians were passed out at the
intersection of Nebraska Highway 87 and the road that leads to the
reservation. Others were urinating on the street.
Shortly after he visited Whiteclay, LaMere asked the Nebraska Liquor
Control Commission to shut Whiteclay down.
"I don't know what constitutes infractions of liquor laws in Whiteclay, but
my good sense tells me there is something terribly wrong ... ," LaMere told
Toni Heinzl of the Omaha World-Herald. "What I saw ... in Whiteclay would
not be acceptable in Omaha or Lincoln," LaMere continued. "If we walked
down O Street in Lincoln and saw 47 students (of the University of
Nebraska) passed out in the streets or engaged in violent situations, we
would consider jerking the licenses of those liquor establishments," he
told the Liquor Control Commission.
The commission's executive director, Frosty Chapman, told LaMere that none
of the four Whiteclay beer stores has been cited for liquor-law violations
during the past 12 years. Commissioners said they cannot suspend liquor
licenses without concrete evidence of violations.
LaMere next took his case to the state's governor, Ben Nelson, Sen. Bob
Kerrey, the head of the state patrol, and the heads of several state
agencies involved with social and health services. Col. Ron Tussing,
superintendent of the Nebraska State Patrol, pledged to increase police
presence in the area after visiting Whiteclay.
LaMere said he visited Whiteclay and decided to complain to the Liquor
Control Commission on request of the Oglala Lakotas at Pine Ridge who felt
that they had no voice in Nebraska politics.
The Pine Ridge reservation in 1996 had an alcoholism-related death rate of
61.9 per 100,000 people, twice the average for reservations, and nine times
the national average of 7.1. LaMere said that $12.1 million a year is spent
at Pine Ridge on health care for alcoholics, as well as on victims of
alcohol-related traffic accidents.
The four beer stores in Whiteclay sold 4 million bottles or cans of beer in
1996, taking in $3 million, a 46 percent increase since 1994. Why the
enormous jump in Whiteclay's clientele? One reason may be the rising
population of Pine Ridge, swollen by Native Americans returning to the
reservation following cutbacks in welfare benefits in many states.
In the meantime, the owners of the four Whiteclay beer stores stood solidly
on what they believe to be the American right to get drunk. Don Schwarting,
owner of the Arrowhead Inn, told Heinzl, "It's not the liquor stores. It's
the individual person. It's their choice to do what they want to do."
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Native Americas Journal
Akwe:kon Press
Cornell University
300 Caldwell Hall
Ithaca, New York 14853
Reprinted under the fair use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
doctrine of international copyright law.
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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