The Indians that Do Shoot Straight

To anyone who has traveled across our extensive Western states, he or she has seen the signs for the Native America reservations and pueblos, often in distant and isolated stretches of American countryside. A few have casinos, many financed with Asian or other outsider investment money, that have spun-off a few gold coins along the way, but harsh economic times are hurting even this business. Most of these federal treaty lands (they are separate governmental units under the Department of Interior… not generally beholden to the states where they are situated) are bastions of poverty, disease (lots of alcoholism, drug abuse and diabetes) and exceptionally poor educational systems.

Small schools with few teachers, limited facilities, often cater to multiple grades in a single classroom. Medical help is often limited, distant and profoundly inadequate. What is in oversupply on these bastions of a people run over by foreign invaders is hopelessness. Perfect feeding grounds for young men and women, seeing little or no hope for the future, looking for an alternative. Enter America’s bubonic plague: gangs.

Say the word “Crips,” and you are likely to conjure up a vision of blue-bandana-wearing African American street gangs in Los Angeles. The fact that the Crips are in almost every community in the United States is not surprising to many, and that Crippin’ is no longer just for African Americans is ancient history to law enforcement. What is more surprising, because most of these communities are so isolated from the big cities, is that Crips are now making serious inroads into pueblos and reservations.

How does the “North Side Tre Tre Gangster Crips” sound to you? New York, Chicago or LA? Don’t like that crew? Try Wild Boyz, TBZ, Nomads or the Indian Mafia. Like those better? They’re all Native American gangs. Many can trace their roots to former prison inmates, recruited while doing time, who brought gang-bangin’ back home upon release.

The Navajo Nation in northern Arizona reports 225 gangs (there were 75 known gangs in 1997). Among the Oglala Sioux in South Dakota, according to the December 14^th New York Times, there are 5,000 members in 39 recognized gangs in the isolated Pine Ridge Indian Reservation (about the size of Rhode Island) alone: “The gangs are being blamed for an increase in vandalism, theft, violence and fear that is altering the texture of life here and in other parts of American Indian territory… This stunning land of crumpled prairie, horse pastures turned tawny in the autumn and sunflower farms is marred by an astonishing number of roadside crosses and gang tags sprayed on houses, stores and abandoned buildings, giving rural Indian communities an inner-city look…

“The Justice Department distinguishes the home-grown gangs on reservations from the organized drug gangs of urban areas, calling them part of an overall juvenile crime problem in Indian country that is abetted by eroding law enforcement, a paucity of juvenile programs and a suicide rate for Indian youth that is more than three times the national average… If they lack the reach of the larger gangs after which they style themselves, the Indian gangs have emerged as one more destructive force in some of the country’s poorest and most neglected places.”

There is anger, seething and boiling in lands forgotten. Murder, sexual assault, the drug trade, vandalism, violence, burglary, robbery, protection… it’s all there. And even some unique crimes, like “commod-squadding” where gang members hurl cans of federally-provided cans of food at each other. The symbolism is painfully unsubtle. It’s easy to look around at the problems that surround our daily lives and forget about the hopelessness of peoples betrayed by conquest, banishment and modernity… left in distant and isolated dust… to do the best they can.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I thought you might want to know.