Bigger Picture

This past week I joined 14 Creighton students and a fellow Cardoner employee on our Fall Break Trip to the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Reservations in South Dakota. This trip is half cultural immersion and half service. We have two goals, the first of which is to visit the high schools in the area and assist the seniors as they are applying for the Gates Millennium Scholarship. The second goal then is to expose the college students that attend the trip to a culture different from their own.

As the organizer and leader of this trip I felt that I was obligated to provide opportunities to experience this culture to the college students. But in my planning and thinking about these things, for some reason I always had the history of the culture in mind and not so much where their culture is today. Arriving at the reservation puts thoughts of the here and now into your head right away. You are greeted with a reality that is not quite storybook quality. The dilapidated conditions of the housing hits you like a slap to the face. There are stray dogs everywhere you look. People walk along a dark highway from town to town even in a bone chilling cold downpour because they don’t have a car that works. This is the reality of the reservation today.

My question then is - do we do any good by coming to the reservation to tell the students about college? Or are we just another outsider trying to tell the natives what to do? Are we just getting their hopes up for something that is unlikely to happen? One thing that I’ve learned about the culture of many Native Americans is their strong tie to family. This is one reason that many students feel that it is hard to go to college. They are often caretakers and breadwinners for their extended family. If they go off to college, they feel, that they are then abandoning their family and the reservation. Knowing this, I try to convey the sentiment that by going college, you can then come back to the reservation and use your talents for the betterment of not only yourself, but your family and the reservation as a whole. This is just one example of the reasons many students from the reservation see college as impractical.

And certainly there are bigger problems on the reservation than hoping that a group of college students visiting for a week have a good time and learn some culture. The staggeringly high rates of alcoholism and suicide are two of those bigger problems that people on the reservation face daily. The interactions we have with the high school students at the reservation may be brief, but in those interactions there is at least a hope that some chord was struck between us. We may be different in many ways, but it may be just enough to get the student to think differently about their future and the possibilities it brings.