Pte Hca Ka, Inc. | Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe
Abstract
Indians living on the Cheyenne River Reservation in north central South Dakota are among the poorest in the United States. In the early 1990s, 70 percent of reservation’s Indian households had incomes near the poverty level, and the unemployment rate exceeded 50 percent. While these economic conditions are the result of many different factors, one of the earliest and most devastating was the systematic destruction of the high plains buffalo herds in the late 1800s. It was an attack on both the Lakota economy and the Lakota way of life. Today, leaders of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe (CRST) are committed to improving reservation economic conditions and to doing so within important boundaries: they hope to achieve economic success without causing further cultural disintegration.