In mid-November, I was lucky enough to join our client Conscious Alliance on their annual holiday meal delivery to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Conscious Alliance is a non-profit based in Boulder, Colorado that supports communities in crisis through hunger relief and youth empowerment. By hosting food drives at concerts and festivals nationwide, Conscious Alliance has served over 2 million meals across the country, opened two emergency food banks on Pine Ridge and hosted countless youth empowerment workshops.
I’d like to first share a few facts about Pine Ridge, home to the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) tribe. It is a place that not many Americans are familiar with. I can confess that before working with Conscious Alliance, I had never heard of Pine Ridge although it’s a mere six hour drive from Boulder. The statistics are powerful:
- 91 percent of the population on Pine Ridge lives under the federal poverty line
- The reservation covers nearly 2 million acres of land (the size of Connecticut) with a population of 30,000+ but only has one grocery store
- 50 percent of the population has Type II Diabetes (800 percent higher than the national average)
- Heart disease is two times higher than the national average
- Teenage suicide rate on the Pine Ridge Reservation is 150 percent higher than the U.S. national average for this age group
- The infant mortality rate is the highest on this continent, about 300 percent higher than the U.S. national average
- Average life expectancy is 52 years for women and 48 years for men — the lowest anywhere in the Western Hemisphere except Haiti
I could go on, but at some point you have to remember that these statistics represent real people – something that didn’t fully hit home for me until I visited Pine Ridge and interacted with the families and children there.
While each moment brought new realizations on a deeply personal and emotional level — from visiting the Wounded Knee K-8 school ravaged by suicide in the last year to feeling the small sense of hope at Conscious Alliance’s new food bank and distributing more than 500 ‘turkey and fixings’ meals — I’d like to focus on what I learned about Pine Ridge’s relationship with the media.
From Conscious Alliance’s field director we learned that many who live on the reservation have a strong distrust of the media, and with good reason. Over the years, they have learned to expect a lack of truth from the media. They are used to a big-name reporter trying to win an Emmy swooping into the reservation for one or two days, having their camera crew film dilapidated shacks that no families are even living in, and then put together their 3-minute long, heart wrenching, sympathy-triggering story.
On the reservation, there is a name for this — poverty porn. And that’s exactly what it is — an exploitation of the problems this community faces with no context and very little time spent getting to know the people on any real level, with intentions only of creating a compelling story, not helping the people in this community.
To cover this community in a respectful and legitimate way, a reporter would do well to spend time in all the villages across the reservation, visit the schools where students honor U.S. veterans with drawings on their walls and fight valiantly to win their basketball games, spend time with the tribal council and the elders on the reservation, and report on youth empowerment and suicide groups on the reservation like Tiny D and the Bear Program. Yes, the stories of devastating poverty, violence and suicide need to be told, but so do the stories of hope and resilience – and they are there, if you spend time looking for them with an open heart.
