Post by Okwes on Dec 19, 2006 12:44:43 GMT -5
Shortened Lives Marked by Diabetes and Despair
Posted by: "Victoria" bayareauk@yahoo.co.uk bayareauk
Sun Nov 19, 2006 3:34 am (PST)
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Dorothy Sun Bear lives in public housing on the Pine Ridge reservation
with her seven children on a monthly income of $136. She makes
traditional beadwork in her bedroom to earn extra money. (Photo by
Jennifer Brown) TWO AMERICAS
Shortened Lives Marked by Diabetes and Despair
BY CAROL ANN CAMPBELL
www.newhousenews.com/archive/campbell1117063.html
<http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/campbell1117063.html>
SHANNON COUNTY, S.D. -- Lawrence Red Feather inches his wheelchair
toward home, a desolate, faded box of a house with a dirt yard on the
sun-washed prairie.
He tucks a pant leg beneath his left stump, all that remains of a limb
lost to diabetes -- a scourge of these Northern Plains Indians. The
disease has plundered the rest of Red Feather's body, too. Surgeons
patched his ailing heart a few years back, and now, three times each
week, nurses hook him up to kidney dialysis machines.
He's also going blind.
Men die young here. The men on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation can
expect to live only to the age of 58, the lowest life expectancy of any
group in the nation.
Red Feather is 59. "I'm on borrowed time, I guess," he says.
Everywhere in these sand-colored grasslands and rolling hills is extreme
poverty and early death. A federally funded study that examined death
records found Indian men in six counties of South Dakota -- including
Shannon County and the Pine Ridge reservation -- are the least likely to
live into old age.
Red Feather, an Army veteran, says the Lakota people were healthier
before they were forced onto reservations. "We hunted deer and buffalo,"
he says. They also gathered berries and grew corn, tomatoes and squash.
Today people on the reservation eat bacon and eggs with fried potatoes
for breakfast. Poverty means budget-stretching meals of macaroni and
canned meats, washed down with cheap soda. Lunch could be burritos from
Taco John's, since just one grocery store exists on the reservation of
40,000 people.
With this modern American diet has come disease. The diabetes rate on
the reservation is 37 percent, according to the Indian Health Service, a
part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Obesity is
rampant, and 70 percent of young people are overweight. Even teens get
diabetes.
Among Indians, deaths related to alcoholism are six times the rate of
all races in the United States. Infant mortality is three times as high
and accidental death twice as high.
WORKING THE `REZ'
Carole Anne Heart hits the gas pedal and heads from her office in Rapid
City to the reservation. She zooms through the Badlands National Park,
passing ragged buttes and an occasional herd of wild pronghorn antelope.
Heart is full-blood Lakota, part of the Great Sioux Nation, and she
straddles two worlds. She grew up "on the rez," she says, learning about
the Lakota ways from her grandmother.
"You can't forget the past," says Heart. "But my grandmother always told
me, `Get an education. Look forward."'
Today she lives in a condo in Rapid City and dresses like a Wall Street
executive. She directs the Aberdeen Area Tribal Chairman's Health Board.
As her car passes tourist traps on the edge of the reservation, homes
appear, many of them dilapidated trailers, some with sheets on the
windows and junked cars on the lawn.
"People have no money to tow the cars away. And they can use the old
cars for parts," Heart says.
The board advises the Indian Health Service on how to reduce infant
mortality and target diabetes and smoking. It pushes to improve
nutrition, diagnose children with asthma and increase physical activity,
often by connecting the health efforts to Indian traditions.
For instance, one local poster displays a turn-of-the-century photograph
of lean and muscular Indian men in tribal dress. "Physical Fitness is
the Lakota Way," it reads.
Heart blames many of the health problems on reservation life, which, she
says, has destroyed the tiyospaye (ti-osh-pie-a), the family structure
that acted as the scaffolding of Indian society.
The tiyospaye, which governed rules of dating and marriage, would never
have allowed men to have children with a series of women, which happens
frequently now. It would not allow family violence, she says, or drug
and alcohol abuse.
Children forced into boarding schools, meanwhile, lost many of the old
ways, such as gathering wild turnips; creating wasna, a mixture of dried
buffalo meat and chokeberries; or cooking soups of corn and wild onions.
"My grandmother had a garden of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and corn,"
says Heart. "Now we get our spinach from Mexico."
The male role as hunter and protector also disappeared, setting many men
adrift.
Forced to live on land incapable of sustaining crops, Indians began
relying on government surplus food distributed to reservations. Heart
says government food and reservation life created something new in
Native American culture: "chubby Indian kids."
COMMODITY BODIES
Jeanne Bedell loads her flat-bed cart at the commodity center in Pine
Ridge, a nondescript building near the center of town.
"I had the `commod-bod,"' Bedell says, referring to the weight she
gained eating commodity food. She even had early signs of diabetes.
Bedell says the food is better these days, with fresh produce joining
the typical surplus products, such as canned meats, white flour and
processed cheese.
Commodity foods distributed on reservations used to be only government
food distributed to keep farm prices high. Today the Pine Ridge center
operates more like a food bank, distributing a variety of food to 5,500
people each month, said Joe Blue Horse, who runs the center. The food is
meant to supplement what people buy on their own, but Blue Horse said
for many the commodity food is the mainstay.
"The economy is so poor. People have low-paying jobs or no jobs," he
said. Often, one person making $7 or $8 per hour will support an entire
family. One trailer can be home to two, three or even four families.
Healthy eating is difficult. Some towns, such as Wanblee, are an
hour-and-a-half drive from the nearest grocery store, so people eat at
fast-food places or buy high-salt, high-fat snacks, or maybe deli
sandwiches at convenience stores and gas stations. The fruit is often
canned and packed with syrup.
The usual diet revolves around high-fat processed cheese, which often is
bartered like currency, and casseroles made from cans of commodity meat
and starches. A popular breakfast is fried bread.
"Do you think there's a Whole Foods on the reservation? Not in 100
years," said Leo Nolan, a policy analyst at the Indian Health Service.
Finding a fresh, crisp apple seems like finding a gold nugget.
"We have such high rates of diabetes because there's a lack of
nutritious, wholesome food for people to eat," Nolan says. "It's easier
to get a soda on the reservation than a quart of skim milk."
Ethel Swallow's job is to teach young people to eat well and to exercise
so they will reduce their risk of diabetes. As a community health
representative for the Oglala Sioux Tribe, she is trying to prevent
diabetes from claiming another generation.
It isn't easy.
She urges young people to get out and walk, but the roads are narrow,
the cars move fast and there are few sidewalks on the reservation,
The adults aren't much more active. Few have jobs, so work-related
exertion is unlikely. Most live sedentary lives, often staying inside.
Swallow urges people to eat healthy foods and to reduce portions. But
few know how to cook. And many don't even know they have diabetes until
they go blind or an infection rages out of control.
There also is genetic susceptibility. A recent report of the Human
Genome Project noted a Caucasian with a blood sugar count of 200 has a
20 percent chance of developing diabetes after 20 years, while a Native
American with a same count has an 80 percent chance.
Lack of nutrition and exercise on the reservation is a recipe for
diabetes. But it gets worse. People here smoke like it's 1950s America.
The anti-smoking movement is just reaching the reservation, where half
of the adult population smokes cigarettes.
In downtown Pine Ridge, outside the offices of the Oglala Sioux Tribe,
older men sit, puffing away.
Several just shrug when told they have the lowest life expectancy in the
country. No one seems surprised.
Two recent copies of the Indian paper Dakota/Lakota Journal, for
instance, include 13 obituaries, and just two of the deceased are over
age 65.
"I don't mind. When it's my time to go, I'll go," says 57-year-old
Abraham Tobacco.
Health programs try to keep cigarettes and smoke away from the youngest
Indians. At the Northern Plains Healthy Start in Wounded Knee,
counselors help pregnant women, some of them teenagers and a few in
middle school.
The counselors act like the "aunties" of the tiyospaye, who in the past
guided pregnant women. Now the "aunties" must teach the mothers-to-be
not to binge drink (most will stop when told of the risks) and stay away
from tobacco. Other programs encourage adults to sign smoke-free-home
pledges.
WHERE HOPE FADES
There is a fog of despair that lingers over the reservation.
Sociologists call it "cultural trauma." By any name, it can been seen in
the staggering 80 percent unemployment rate and a suicide rate that is
twice the national average.
Mixed with the desperation is a palpable anger over the past. People
talk about broken treaties and stolen land, and a lack of opportunities.
In a parking lot, Jerry Bear Shield, a tall 26-year-old man with long
hair and a striking face, approaches people to sell the beaded necklaces
he and his family make.
"There are no jobs here for us," he says despairingly. "This is what I
do for a living."
Many here say alcohol, introduced by early European explorers, has
helped to destroy the tiyospaye and Indian culture. Nearly every
morning, Bill Pourier, chief executive of Pine Ridge Hospital, sees the
results of alcohol abuse in the emergency room, usually in car
accidents.
"We're starting to see more drug abuse, cocaine and now meth," says
Pourier. "I would say 90 percent of our motor vehicle accidents are
related to drugs and alcohol."
Also contributing to the high accident rate are unsafe cars; narrow
roads with high speed limits; and animals, such as cattle, horses and
deer, that wander onto the roads.
Alcohol cannot be sold on the reservation, but is available a mile from
the Pine Ridge border in White Clay, Neb., where some Indians drive to
"case up" for a weekend of binge drinking.
TRYING TO LET GO
Red Feather's niece, 24-year-old Jennifer Warrior, says she knows about
early death.
Her mother continued drinking despite liver problems, she says.
"She died in her 40s."
At the dialysis center where she picks up Red Feather after his
treatment, Warrior tells Ethel Swallow that others in her family have
diabetes. She knows she is at risk, too.
"You can learn to eat better," Swallow tells her. "Get out. Walk."
Warrior puts her head down, slightly embarrassed at a comment about her
weight. Later, though, she says she wants to learn more about how to
prevent diabetes.
Looking at her uncle -- with his kidney failure and amputated leg --
Warrior sees a future she can still escape.
Posted by: "Victoria" bayareauk@yahoo.co.uk bayareauk
Sun Nov 19, 2006 3:34 am (PST)
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Dorothy Sun Bear lives in public housing on the Pine Ridge reservation
with her seven children on a monthly income of $136. She makes
traditional beadwork in her bedroom to earn extra money. (Photo by
Jennifer Brown) TWO AMERICAS
Shortened Lives Marked by Diabetes and Despair
BY CAROL ANN CAMPBELL
www.newhousenews.com/archive/campbell1117063.html
<http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/campbell1117063.html>
SHANNON COUNTY, S.D. -- Lawrence Red Feather inches his wheelchair
toward home, a desolate, faded box of a house with a dirt yard on the
sun-washed prairie.
He tucks a pant leg beneath his left stump, all that remains of a limb
lost to diabetes -- a scourge of these Northern Plains Indians. The
disease has plundered the rest of Red Feather's body, too. Surgeons
patched his ailing heart a few years back, and now, three times each
week, nurses hook him up to kidney dialysis machines.
He's also going blind.
Men die young here. The men on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation can
expect to live only to the age of 58, the lowest life expectancy of any
group in the nation.
Red Feather is 59. "I'm on borrowed time, I guess," he says.
Everywhere in these sand-colored grasslands and rolling hills is extreme
poverty and early death. A federally funded study that examined death
records found Indian men in six counties of South Dakota -- including
Shannon County and the Pine Ridge reservation -- are the least likely to
live into old age.
Red Feather, an Army veteran, says the Lakota people were healthier
before they were forced onto reservations. "We hunted deer and buffalo,"
he says. They also gathered berries and grew corn, tomatoes and squash.
Today people on the reservation eat bacon and eggs with fried potatoes
for breakfast. Poverty means budget-stretching meals of macaroni and
canned meats, washed down with cheap soda. Lunch could be burritos from
Taco John's, since just one grocery store exists on the reservation of
40,000 people.
With this modern American diet has come disease. The diabetes rate on
the reservation is 37 percent, according to the Indian Health Service, a
part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Obesity is
rampant, and 70 percent of young people are overweight. Even teens get
diabetes.
Among Indians, deaths related to alcoholism are six times the rate of
all races in the United States. Infant mortality is three times as high
and accidental death twice as high.
WORKING THE `REZ'
Carole Anne Heart hits the gas pedal and heads from her office in Rapid
City to the reservation. She zooms through the Badlands National Park,
passing ragged buttes and an occasional herd of wild pronghorn antelope.
Heart is full-blood Lakota, part of the Great Sioux Nation, and she
straddles two worlds. She grew up "on the rez," she says, learning about
the Lakota ways from her grandmother.
"You can't forget the past," says Heart. "But my grandmother always told
me, `Get an education. Look forward."'
Today she lives in a condo in Rapid City and dresses like a Wall Street
executive. She directs the Aberdeen Area Tribal Chairman's Health Board.
As her car passes tourist traps on the edge of the reservation, homes
appear, many of them dilapidated trailers, some with sheets on the
windows and junked cars on the lawn.
"People have no money to tow the cars away. And they can use the old
cars for parts," Heart says.
The board advises the Indian Health Service on how to reduce infant
mortality and target diabetes and smoking. It pushes to improve
nutrition, diagnose children with asthma and increase physical activity,
often by connecting the health efforts to Indian traditions.
For instance, one local poster displays a turn-of-the-century photograph
of lean and muscular Indian men in tribal dress. "Physical Fitness is
the Lakota Way," it reads.
Heart blames many of the health problems on reservation life, which, she
says, has destroyed the tiyospaye (ti-osh-pie-a), the family structure
that acted as the scaffolding of Indian society.
The tiyospaye, which governed rules of dating and marriage, would never
have allowed men to have children with a series of women, which happens
frequently now. It would not allow family violence, she says, or drug
and alcohol abuse.
Children forced into boarding schools, meanwhile, lost many of the old
ways, such as gathering wild turnips; creating wasna, a mixture of dried
buffalo meat and chokeberries; or cooking soups of corn and wild onions.
"My grandmother had a garden of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and corn,"
says Heart. "Now we get our spinach from Mexico."
The male role as hunter and protector also disappeared, setting many men
adrift.
Forced to live on land incapable of sustaining crops, Indians began
relying on government surplus food distributed to reservations. Heart
says government food and reservation life created something new in
Native American culture: "chubby Indian kids."
COMMODITY BODIES
Jeanne Bedell loads her flat-bed cart at the commodity center in Pine
Ridge, a nondescript building near the center of town.
"I had the `commod-bod,"' Bedell says, referring to the weight she
gained eating commodity food. She even had early signs of diabetes.
Bedell says the food is better these days, with fresh produce joining
the typical surplus products, such as canned meats, white flour and
processed cheese.
Commodity foods distributed on reservations used to be only government
food distributed to keep farm prices high. Today the Pine Ridge center
operates more like a food bank, distributing a variety of food to 5,500
people each month, said Joe Blue Horse, who runs the center. The food is
meant to supplement what people buy on their own, but Blue Horse said
for many the commodity food is the mainstay.
"The economy is so poor. People have low-paying jobs or no jobs," he
said. Often, one person making $7 or $8 per hour will support an entire
family. One trailer can be home to two, three or even four families.
Healthy eating is difficult. Some towns, such as Wanblee, are an
hour-and-a-half drive from the nearest grocery store, so people eat at
fast-food places or buy high-salt, high-fat snacks, or maybe deli
sandwiches at convenience stores and gas stations. The fruit is often
canned and packed with syrup.
The usual diet revolves around high-fat processed cheese, which often is
bartered like currency, and casseroles made from cans of commodity meat
and starches. A popular breakfast is fried bread.
"Do you think there's a Whole Foods on the reservation? Not in 100
years," said Leo Nolan, a policy analyst at the Indian Health Service.
Finding a fresh, crisp apple seems like finding a gold nugget.
"We have such high rates of diabetes because there's a lack of
nutritious, wholesome food for people to eat," Nolan says. "It's easier
to get a soda on the reservation than a quart of skim milk."
Ethel Swallow's job is to teach young people to eat well and to exercise
so they will reduce their risk of diabetes. As a community health
representative for the Oglala Sioux Tribe, she is trying to prevent
diabetes from claiming another generation.
It isn't easy.
She urges young people to get out and walk, but the roads are narrow,
the cars move fast and there are few sidewalks on the reservation,
The adults aren't much more active. Few have jobs, so work-related
exertion is unlikely. Most live sedentary lives, often staying inside.
Swallow urges people to eat healthy foods and to reduce portions. But
few know how to cook. And many don't even know they have diabetes until
they go blind or an infection rages out of control.
There also is genetic susceptibility. A recent report of the Human
Genome Project noted a Caucasian with a blood sugar count of 200 has a
20 percent chance of developing diabetes after 20 years, while a Native
American with a same count has an 80 percent chance.
Lack of nutrition and exercise on the reservation is a recipe for
diabetes. But it gets worse. People here smoke like it's 1950s America.
The anti-smoking movement is just reaching the reservation, where half
of the adult population smokes cigarettes.
In downtown Pine Ridge, outside the offices of the Oglala Sioux Tribe,
older men sit, puffing away.
Several just shrug when told they have the lowest life expectancy in the
country. No one seems surprised.
Two recent copies of the Indian paper Dakota/Lakota Journal, for
instance, include 13 obituaries, and just two of the deceased are over
age 65.
"I don't mind. When it's my time to go, I'll go," says 57-year-old
Abraham Tobacco.
Health programs try to keep cigarettes and smoke away from the youngest
Indians. At the Northern Plains Healthy Start in Wounded Knee,
counselors help pregnant women, some of them teenagers and a few in
middle school.
The counselors act like the "aunties" of the tiyospaye, who in the past
guided pregnant women. Now the "aunties" must teach the mothers-to-be
not to binge drink (most will stop when told of the risks) and stay away
from tobacco. Other programs encourage adults to sign smoke-free-home
pledges.
WHERE HOPE FADES
There is a fog of despair that lingers over the reservation.
Sociologists call it "cultural trauma." By any name, it can been seen in
the staggering 80 percent unemployment rate and a suicide rate that is
twice the national average.
Mixed with the desperation is a palpable anger over the past. People
talk about broken treaties and stolen land, and a lack of opportunities.
In a parking lot, Jerry Bear Shield, a tall 26-year-old man with long
hair and a striking face, approaches people to sell the beaded necklaces
he and his family make.
"There are no jobs here for us," he says despairingly. "This is what I
do for a living."
Many here say alcohol, introduced by early European explorers, has
helped to destroy the tiyospaye and Indian culture. Nearly every
morning, Bill Pourier, chief executive of Pine Ridge Hospital, sees the
results of alcohol abuse in the emergency room, usually in car
accidents.
"We're starting to see more drug abuse, cocaine and now meth," says
Pourier. "I would say 90 percent of our motor vehicle accidents are
related to drugs and alcohol."
Also contributing to the high accident rate are unsafe cars; narrow
roads with high speed limits; and animals, such as cattle, horses and
deer, that wander onto the roads.
Alcohol cannot be sold on the reservation, but is available a mile from
the Pine Ridge border in White Clay, Neb., where some Indians drive to
"case up" for a weekend of binge drinking.
TRYING TO LET GO
Red Feather's niece, 24-year-old Jennifer Warrior, says she knows about
early death.
Her mother continued drinking despite liver problems, she says.
"She died in her 40s."
At the dialysis center where she picks up Red Feather after his
treatment, Warrior tells Ethel Swallow that others in her family have
diabetes. She knows she is at risk, too.
"You can learn to eat better," Swallow tells her. "Get out. Walk."
Warrior puts her head down, slightly embarrassed at a comment about her
weight. Later, though, she says she wants to learn more about how to
prevent diabetes.
Looking at her uncle -- with his kidney failure and amputated leg --
Warrior sees a future she can still escape.