A note on traveling through fringe societies.

On Monday morning, as I drove across the state of South Dakota heading west toward the Nebraska/Wyoming border, and after visiting the "World's Only Corn Palace" in Mitchell, I was decidedly sick of the interstate system and veered off course. I chose to do this part of the journey the old-fashioned way, with a paper map and general direction. I turned off the GPS and chose roads that looked small and interesting. This is how I wound up in Pine Ridge, a Lakota-Sioux Indian Reservation, located near the southern South Dakota state border. I showed up in Pine Ridge unannounced, uninvited, and unwelcome.

You hear about Indian Reservations in books and on the news, primarily because of the casinos, alcoholism, poverty, and federal feuds. I have to say I'd never ventured into such a place before, and am not sure that I shall again.

I knew something was different long before I reached the town's only gas station. Stray dogs were literally walking along the streets, cars and trucks were missing windows and headlights, houses (shacks and shanties) leaned sideways and sagged under disintegrating roofs. A man riding in the bed of the rusty pickup truck in front of me stared at me for a good ten miles... I couldn't break his gaze, and he never smiled.

When I tried to park my car at the Shell station at the junction of Highway 18 and Road 87 (the newest building in town), I got stares and jeers. There was no parking system, just stop and get out. Inside the restroom signs were in Lakota, not English. When I got to the register to pay for some water, the clerk's smile faded, and she dropped my change on the counter instead of in my open palm. The weather-beaten faces of old Sioux men and women met mine as I walked through the building (which doubles as a restaurant, indoor seating area, meeting hall, and post office). I was a stranger, a minority (by about 150 to 1), and an unsettling, untrustworthy sight on a Monday afternoon.

I wanted desperately to take photographs, to talk to people, to get at the gist of the Pine Ridge history and existence, but didn't dare. I'd need an interpreter, for starts, and furthermore a big pair of balls and a friend or two. I have no doubt that the residents of Pine Ridge are good people, obviously hardworking, and honest. But they have been placed in one of the most rural, remote, and marginalized spots in the country, and life there cannot be easy. To them, I represented the other, the co-signer of the land deed on the rest of the country. Not an ally.

I hate to admit this, but I got out of the reservation as fast as I could. Little children with beautiful brown faces watched me go, I swerved to avoid hitting dogs, and precariously maneuvered between haphazardly parked late-70s model vehicles. I turned off the radio and was silent for a good hour after hitting the Nebraska border, just thinking.

(Although I did not take pictures in Pine Ridge, others have, and a google image search for "Pine Ridge SD" yields some pretty interesting stuff.)