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Gorton points out that health and education fall outside the ambit of his subcommittee. Yet lapses in policing, child welfare and sanitation will have an indirect impact on health. And many tribes spend the discretionary funds he is imperiling on health and schooling. "Tribes are in desperate need of resources for educating children, for protecting abused and neglected children, for combating alcoholism and drug abuse, for fighting crime, for building roads and water and sewer systems," said Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, as he argued to reinstate Indian funding earlier this month. "And we, the Federal Government, have a special trust responsibility to provide those resources to tribes." His side lost by a vote of 61 to 36. "It's not that people don't want to work," says Joe Blue Horse, director of the Pine Ridge reservation's federal food-distribution program. "It's that there is no work for them to do." There is no major commercial development near the reservation, which sits within South Dakota's Shannon County in the shadow of the Badlands, and no factories or malls. Construction work provides some labor: unemployment drops from 85% in winter to a still miserable 65% when it is warm enough to build. Oglala who have ventured off-reservation to find work have more often found alienation and a different kind of penury and have returned. All are almost totally dependent on the Federal Government, which long ago signed treaties with the Oglalas promising education, health and welfare.
Housing is the need that first assaults a visitor's eye. With only 1,500 units for the reservation's 26,000 people, tribal officials estimate that an average of 17 people are crammed into each dwelling. Many of the homes are not in much better shape than Little Boy's; 1,800 families have been officially designated as "in need of housing." Yet the only money in town available for building is $285,000 derived from federal Tribal Priority Allocation accounts, which probably will not even stretch to cover this year's 700 requests for weatherproofing. If the congressional cuts go through, that money will drop to $176,000.
Education is almost as ill-served. Leon Brave Heart, like an estimated 50% of the tribe, had an alcohol problem; it caused him to drop out of school. But when his father died of cirrhosis of the liver and his mother was killed in a car crash, he dried out and returned to school. In San Francisco, he joined the Job Corps, specializing in cooking and culinary studies. Now the 22-year-old works at a tiny convenience store on the reservation while caring for 10 extended-family members who share a shack and a trailer. Brave Heart wants to go to college, but was told not to bother applying for a tribal grant because the federally funded grant program had only 215 places for 524 applicants this fall. With the cuts, the number could drop to 115.