By Judy KeenWHITECLAY, Neb. — The Jumping Eagle Inn, one of four stores selling beer here on the border of South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, is hopping. Several customers spend $19.50 for a carton of 30 beers. Then they drive north toward the reservation, where alcohol is banned.
Some customers buy one beer at a time and spend their days and nights in this unincorporated town of 14. At 7:55 a.m. on a recent weekday, a dozen men are waiting for the Jumping Eagle to open. By 8:10 a.m., they're drinking from silver cans. Others hang out in vacant buildings or panhandle outside the two grocery stores. A man sleeps on a sidewalk, flies swarming around his face.
The stores here sell the equivalent of about 10,000 cans of beer daily, according to the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission. Much of the beer — the stores don't sell hard liquor — makes its way onto the reservation. Some tribal leaders are infuriated by the stores' proximity to the dry reservation. They have fought for years to close the stores and plan to ask the Nebraska Legislature again next year to curtail the sale of alcohol to a population wracked by alcoholism.
Legal vs. 'moral' issueThe situation in Whiteclay is "gut-wrenching," says Indian activist Russell Means. "I don't even like to drive through it because I see my people suffering. I cry." Six people, including Means, were arrested last month when they blockaded the road between here and Pine Ridge and tried to search vehicles for beer.
"I've never considered myself a bad guy," says Stuart Kozal, 48, a part-owner of the Jumping Eagle. He's a businessman who obeys the law, he says. He interrupts a conversation to tell an inebriated man who wants to buy a beer, "No, you've had too many, buddy."
It's illegal to sell alcohol to anyone visibly intoxicated or underage. Consumption on store property and sales on credit are prohibited. Hobert Rupe, executive director of the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission, says liquor licenses can't be revoked without proof of violations of the regulations.
"The licensees are acting in conformance with the law as far as we can tell," he says. If Whiteclay's stores were closed, he asks, "Would you stop alcohol abuse? Unfortunately, no. … You just shift the problem to other places." Rupe says the commission supports stronger law enforcement in Whiteclay.
Kozal says he'd consider closing his store "if I honestly thought that doing away with Whiteclay would do away with the problem on the reservation with alcohol." It wouldn't, he says. "It's got to come from within the person."
Tom Poor Bear, 51, a tribal council member, agrees that the Oglala Sioux people are responsible for their alcohol problems. "Alcohol has weakened my people. Believe me, I know the pain of alcohol because I have tasted the alcohol and I've felt the weakness," he says.
However, he says store owners and Nebraska politicians must share responsibility because they are taking advantage of "people who have to live in a poverty-stricken area. Hope has been drained from them."
The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is home to about 20,000 people. More than half live under the poverty line, and the tribal government says the unemployment rate exceeds 80%. Suicide, infant mortality and fetal alcohol syndrome rates are high. In 2006, Shannon County, which is part of the reservation, had South Dakota's highest number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities.
Kozal and others here say closing the beer stores would not end those problems. "They'll just go somewhere else," says Mary Eckholt, 79, who has lived here for almost 50 years and runs a gift shop. Banning alcohol doesn't make sense, she says. "The whole country tried it once with Prohibition, and it didn't work."
Bruce BonFleur, 55, who runs a ministry in Whiteclay, says solving the problems here will require "moral leadership on both sides."
Legislation on tapThe battle over Whiteclay has prompted years of marches, protests and efforts to persuade the Nebraska Legislature to close the stores or reduce the number of licenses. Legislation that would tighten liquor laws has never made it out of committee.
Mark Vasina, president of Nebraskans for Peace, a social justice group that supported the blockade and lobbies the Legislature, says another attempt to pass a Whiteclay bill will be made next year.
"If what goes on in Whiteclay went on in downtown Lincoln, there would be community outcry and something would be done about it in a very short time," he says.
Poor Bear and others say Whiteclay was part of the reservation in the 1880s and should be returned. He also blames Whiteclay for the unsolved 1999 murders of two tribe members whose bodies were found just across the state line in South Dakota.
For some tribal leaders, Whiteclay is a symbol of their neighbors' indifference to the reservation's problems, says Frank LaMere, an activist from Nebraska's Winnebago tribe.
"We as Nebraskans have blood on our hands," says LaMere, 57, who was arrested during the blockade. "I am growing impatient with those who refuse to see the death and destruction we have wrought on Pine Ridge. … The next time I get arrested, it's going to be at the Nebraska State Capitol."
Duane Martin Sr., a Pine Ridge activist who heads the Strong Hearts Civil Rights Movement, plans more blockades. "We have to open up the eyes of the world to the devastation here," he says.
Loren Black Elk, 47, whose brother Wilson Black Elk was one of the 1999 murder victims, acknowledges that he drinks and spends time on the streets of Whiteclay. He doesn't think closing the stores would make any difference. "You can't stop alcohol," he says.
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