Duplicity flourishes among a select few

 

For over a half century the inability of the Rapid City Indian Community to work together in common cause has allowed the duplicitous and unprincipled among us to work in cahoots with Wasicu to steal the land set aside for needy Indians. This land cut a swath, from Stevens High school to West Boulevard. It was not set aside for any tribe, or even all tribes. It was specifically set aside for “needy Indians.” Meaning, those Indians from whatever reservation who had chosen to relocate to Rapid City.

Over the decades this community has grown until it is larger than most of those now living on the respective home reservation. But because this community, from the days of Celia Montgomery and Eva Nichols, to the present, has been unable to work peaceably and positively together, great ideas are hatched, but the collective pettiness of the participants dooms action to failure.

Some of us, were born and raised in the Rapid City Indian Community. We have seen this pattern repeated over and over again, and when we did our best to pitch in and stop the conflict, we were simply targeted by it and excluded. Great nations are built by the ability of a critical number of people to work flexibly together in large numbers. This ability, when applied to the common good, ensures the Constitutional freedoms each one of us enjoys, but not only do most fail to appreciate those freedoms, they often scoff at the very Constitution that allows them the freedom to scoff.

The worst among us are well-practiced in the devious art of working secretively in small numbers for the good of a select few, so good they do this routinely in broad daylight. These select few can apply their cooperation to create big things, designed to appear as good and necessary things, but also benefitting all within the counsel of the select few. These created things however are subject to reality outside the circle of the select few, and that reality is we cannot work together flexibly in large numbers. So, the created thing cannot realize its publicly proclaimed mission.

Let’s say it was an IHS hospital for some Indian community. A select few organize and get a 638 contract to build a new hospital. The designers, the contractors, the hospital management, all profit greatly when the hospital is built, but operationally, it’s the same old. Still waiting two months for an appointment, still a revolving door of physicians. Still unreturned phone calls and tone-deaf responses to complaints. The lipstick is brighter, but the same pig survives underneath.

At this hospital the 1868 Treaty guarantees health care, but the 638 folks make patients sign a waiver saying they are responsible for the bill. They call patients “relatives” to cover up this practice. But according to the Treaty, relatives are never responsible for any part of their health care costs. Never.

But because we cannot work together flexibly in large numbers, to fight what is wrong and defend what is right, the select few prosper and we suffer.

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