During this time of year, school children are often taught the story of the first Thanksgiving, when the Pilgrims met the Indians upon coming to North America. Much like the first Thanksgiving, the true story of the current struggle of Native Americans has remained largely untold and misunderstood.
Native Americans live in some of the most extreme cases of rural poverty in the world and in recent years have encountered many of the same issues plaguing some of the country’s largest urban centers. A prime example of such is the Badlands of South Dakota, which is home to the Pine Ridge Reservation and the Oglala Lakota tribe.
Pine Ridge, once the home of chief Crazy Horse as well as the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, is experiencing poverty on levels usually seen only in third-world nations. Over 90 percent of the residents live below the poverty line, the unemployment rate is estimated to be 85 to 90 percent and life expectancy is 48 years for men and 52 for women.
Pine Ridge has also become home to another growing problem facing many Indian Reservations: gang violence. According to the FBI, Native American gang membership has sharply risen in the last decade, with many notorious street gangs making their presence felt on reservations across the country. Some of these gangs originated in the prison system.
With the high amount of poverty in many reservations, they have become a hotbed for illegal drug and gun trafficking. In some states, the Native gangs are also working in conjunction with Mexican drug cartels, including the infamous Los Zetas cartel of eastern and central Mexico.
According to a 2009 Wall Street Journal report, Washington State Tribal Police seized more than 233,000 marijuana plants in 2008, nearly 10 times the amount found in 2006.
“These criminal organizations are growing in Indian country at an alarming rate,” said Carmen Smith, the police chief of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Oregon. “The [growers] on our reservation were sent directly from Mexico.”
The gangs would infiltrate reservations, often paying Tribal members – most of whom are perpetually unemployed otherwise – thousands of dollars a month to tend to the crops of marijuana.
In a given year, the cartels could bank upwards of $120 million from weed alone. The grow operations largely run along reservations out west, but some have popped up as far east as Michigan and Virginia.
The best-known native gangs – Native Mob and Native Pride – are prevalent on reservations in North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Other native gangs have created their own versions of well known black, white, and Latino gangs such as the Bloods, Crips, Norteños, Sureños, and Juggalos.
They often wear the same colors and either have their own signs, names, and symbols or incorporate the ones used the other gangs. For example, members of the Native Mob wear red and black clothing and use such symbols as a medicine wheel or bear paw.
In February, federal authorities charged 24 members of the Native Mob were charged in a 47-count federal indictment with various racketeering and drug offenses in Minnesota.
The wide-ranging indictment included charges of attempted murders of rival gang members, robberies, assaults, threats against witnesses cooperating with law enforcement, and numerous shots fired into houses from 2003 through 2011.
“I consider Native Mob to be one of the most significant and problematic Native American-based gangs in the country, because of their organization,” Christopher Grant, a national Native American gang specialist from Rapid City, S.D., told Minneapolis radio station WCCO on Jan. 27, “[because of] their influence in so many communities and because of their clear propensity to engage in criminal behavior.”
On one count, a pair of Native Mob members was accused of shooting a witness while he was holding his 5-year-old daughter. In another incident, a gang member threw a pot of scalding water into the face of a person protecting a witness who was cooperating with authorities.
Native Mob members were also charged with selling and/or possessing various illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine, crack, ecstasy, and methamphetamine. Unlike many Native American gangs, the Native Mob are a highly-organized group with a leadership hierarchy similar to that of many well-known street and biker gangs.
“One of the problems traditionally has been these individuals feel they can commit crimes in the city or on one reservation and then go hide in another reservation or another state,” said Minneapolis Police Inspector Mike Martin, a department gang expert. “I think the federal authorities and state authorities here have sent a message to them that you can run but you can’t hide and we will bring them to justice.”
The issues on Indian reservations mirror those of many urban cities such as Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. The pockets of abject poverty have helped create a culture of crime and potential gang violence that has led to many big cities seeing a spike in violent crime in recent years.
While violence on reservations is not to the startling levels of Chicago, the gangs are becoming more pervasive and could start to cause more problems in rural and outlying areas if something isn’t done to change the climate. Just as African-American communities search for answers to stop gang violence, many Native Americans lament these issues that are starting to plague their neighborhoods.
“We failed these kids somewhere along the line,” said Bill Zeigler, president and chief executive of Little Earth of United Tribes, a Native American housing community in Minneapolis that he described as a drug-free zone. “We as a community better view this as maybe we have a little bit of a reprieve, a little bit of breathing room, and we better plug something in to replace gang violence.”
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