Date: Mon, 06 Dec 1999 10:00:08 -0500
From: Fran Potter [EMAIL PROTECTED]
via Albert Running Wolf
Whiteclay News
http://www.omaha.com/Omaha/OWH/StoryViewer/1,3153,261476,00.html
Published Monday
December 06, 1999
U.S. Panel Inspects Whiteclay
BY PAUL HAMMEL
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
RELATED LINKS
U.S. Civil Rights Commission
Whiteclay, Neb. - The bright light of a U.S. Civil Rights Commission
investigation shone on this border town on Sunday, and at least two of
the panel's members, including its chairman, didn't like what they
saw.
The van carrying five commissioners pulled into town just before noon, in
time to see a group of 10 men waiting in a parking lot for the opening of
one of the town's beer-only liquor stores, the Jumping Eagle Inn.
Mary Frances Berry, a college professor from Philadelphia and the
chairwoman of the civil rights panel since 1993, said even at first
glance, it was clear to her that beer sales in Whiteclay exploited the
rampant alcoholism on the adjacent Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
It's unfortunate that other people profit from other people's
misery in a perfectly legal business, Berry said. It must be
painful to do that.
During a daylong visit that included visits with the Sheridan County
sheriff in Rushville, local merchants at Whiteclay and tribal members at
Pine Ridge, S.D., commissioners heard differing views on racism in the
area and what should be done, if anything, about beer sales at
Whiteclay.
The panel ends its two-day visit with a fact-finding hearing today in
Rapid City, S.D., focusing on equal justice issues raised in the deaths
of several American Indian men in South Dakota.
But Sunday's focus was Whiteclay, a village on the Nebraska-South Dakota
border that sells 4 million cans of beer a year, mostly to Indians who
live across the border on the reservation, where alcohol is banned.
The village of 22 residents and four liquor stores received national
publicity after a series of marches this summer protesting the lack of
progress in the investigation into the deaths of two Lakota Sioux men,
Wilson Black Elk Jr. and Ronald Hard Heart. Their bodies were found June
8 in a grassy ravine north of Whiteclay.
But the investigation, led by the FBI, has produced few leads. On
Thursday, FBI agents assisted by search dogs conducted what they called
the most comprehensive search yet in the investigation,
combing the area where the bodies were found.
On Sunday, even some civil rights commission members agreed with local
residents that the search was too late and appeared geared toward
demonstrating to the panel that something was being done.
Why weren't they here six months ago when this first
happened? asked Eileen Janis, a public-relations aide to the tribal
chairman.
She and other tribal members criticized the FBI, saying the agency is
unwilling to vigorously probe the deaths of reservation Indians because
of a lack of manpower and lingering anger over the deaths of two FBI
agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation during unrest in the 1970s.
Law enforcement on the reservation also is hampered, Janis said, because
tribal police are poorly trained and because the reservation is governed
by conflicting sets of state, federal and tribal laws.
She and Tom Poor Bear, the Lakota activist who has been leading the
protests at Whiteclay, said unsolved murders of Indian men in Whiteclay
and Rapid City and the release of white suspects in recent deaths of
Indians in two South Dakota towns, Mobridge and Sisseton, illustrate a
double standard of justice.
If those victims had been white, they said, the outcomes would be much
different.
It seems like it's open season on Indians, Janis said.
Non-Indians see they can get away with it.
As for the problems in Whiteclay, merchants said they were operating
legal businesses that, if closed, would only push sales of alcohol
farther down the road to other towns.
Sheridan County Sheriff Homer Robbins, during a 45-minute talk with civil
rights commissioners, said so many Native Americans are jailed in his
county because reservation residents must shop in border towns such as
Rushville and because of the high rate of alcoholism and unemployment on
the reservation.
Commissioners asked questions, but did not offer opinions, about the
deaths of three inmates -two of them Indian - at the Sheridan County Jail
over the past four years.
The sheriff told commissioners that one Indian man was highly intoxicated
when he was brought into the jail and died later of a brain hemorrhage
caused by a fall before he was jailed. The two other men committed
suicide by hanging, which may have been caused by depression because they
were jailed, Robbins said. Grand juries investigating the deaths found no
wrongdoing.
While some, but not all, Indians said shutting down alcohol sales in
Whiteclay would make it harder for those with alcohol problems to buy
beer, merchants in Whiteclay said there was no reason to end alcohol
sales.
If you put them on the
