My mind was much occupied with the Lakota people who have suffered through an early and devastating South Dakotan blizzard. 600 electrical poles down at the beginning of what promises to be a punishing winter. Koakuma's excellent posts on the plight of these ones educates us and offers us an opportunity to help through donations to the One Spirit organization—a native-run nonprofit organization which helps natives.

Before the meeting, I searched the Internet to find high schools on Pine Ridge Reservation and found two.

Red Cloud High School is a private Catholic school which survives 90% on donations. Crazy Horse High School is a grossly underfunded public school. I spoke to the children about the Pine Ridge Reservation as being the most impoverished place in America. These are the horrifying 2000 U.S. census statistics I gave them which have worsened over the past eight years:

* 80% unemployment,

* 49% live below the Federal poverty level,.

* Adolescent suicide is four times the national average,.

* Many have no electricity, telephone, running water, or sewer. Many families use wood stoves to heat their homes,.

* Shortest life expectancies of any group in the Western Hemisphere:

47 years for males and in the low 50s for females,.

* The infant mortality rate is five times the United States national average.

My Mayan girl, whom I have known since she was a second grader, still calls me “Mrs. Stephanie” even as a senior without any embarrassment at all, and I love her for that and her great character. After I had talked about these ones, she asked me a question.

“Mrs. Stephanie, why are they so poor?”

I looked around at the children's faces, and I remembered why I had not relinquished this club when I quit my job at the school to return to graduate school. Besides the fact that no staff member stepped forward in a top-down system of clubs where the staff decides the club offerings and not the students, I knew that no one would run it like I do. Schools abhor any kind of “political” content, fearing angry parents at school board meetings. No one else is going to tell them stories which they never hear in U.S. history classes. No one else is going to tell them about the Sand Creek Massacre. Further, I trust the intelligence of children. I trust the hearts of children.

I validated their question by saying that it indeed does seem wrong that the people who once owned the continent now own nothing. I told them the history of how the government ( a scant eight years after signing the Fort Laramie treaty) had taken the sacred Black Hills when gold was discovered there and how the Lakota people had never accepted the money offered to them. They felt that you could not buy and sell the sacred. I spoke of how native individuals my age had been forcibly removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools where their hair was cut and their languages forbidden. This is not ancient history. I spoke of assimilation and the Melting Pot and how this has been used for cultural genocide.

They are leaning towards adopting Crazy Horse High School. One girl remarked that she would love to go to a school with that name. Then I knew I had the right kids.

Over this year, we will learn about the Lakota people and particularly Pine Ridge Reservation. The school newspaper will do a story on us which I will bring to the attention of our local press. We have a fundraiser request in to sell fry bread and chili which for me as cook will constitute a novena. We will send money. We will send blankets.

Most of all, we will send them the hearts of our children.