PINE RIDGE, S.D. — Delora Kills Enemy sleeps on her van’s back seat.
Raymond Eagle Hawk, his girlfriend and his young daughter live in a plywood-walled shack barely larger than their bed. Rachel Hunter shares a single bedroom with her boyfriend and two children.
The housing shortage on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is a long-standing problem for thousands of Oglala Sioux members — from the poorest to those who can afford a house — but the tribe is pushing the issue into the spotlight again after severe storms and flooding in May spurred a federal disaster declaration.
Roughly 200 households are receiving new homes, and about 100 homes will be repaired. A task force of federal and tribal officials and housing advocates also began work this month on a plan to address the shortage on the reservation of about 35,000 people, starting with a study of current houses and their condition to better understand the situation. Tribal officials say the reservation needs 4,000 more units to ease crowding and ensure residences have plumbing and electricity.
The task force will use the results in a plan to help address the shortage and improve the tribe’s ability to get grant funding, federal officials said. Tribal housing leaders hope the numbers back up their estimates and spur federal recognition, because the largest direct grant for American Indian housing programs hasn’t kept up with inflation since the 1990s.
“I can show a plan from 1997 with the same amount of money and the same ideas,” said Vince Martin, chief operating officer of Oglala Sioux Lakota Housing. “It’s just not enough resources to meet that need.”
The tribe gets about $10 million to $12 million, which it uses to build 30 to 40 housing units a year.
Almost half of Pine Ridge’s residents live in poverty, and unemployment sits at more than 21 percent.
Kills Enemy, 43, said she sells beadwork to buy gas to heat her van, where she makes a bed in the back while her husband sleeps in the front seat.
She’s in a dispute over her father’s house and was forced to remove her tent from his land during the summer.
Oglala Sioux Lakota Housing’s inventory includes about 1,200 low-income rentals and roughly 500 homes for ownership that have been built since the 1960s, Martin said, estimating an average of 12 to 15 people live in each home.
The housing authority’s waiting list is hundreds of families long and can take years. It likely would include thousands if some people didn’t let their applications lapse from discouragement, Martin said.
Raymond Eagle Hawk, 29, lives in a small shed next to his mother’s trailer, near the site of the Wounded Knee massacre. His girlfriend, Natasha Cuny, said she’s been on the list for about seven years. Neither works, but Eagle Hawk receives Social Security benefits.
The family shares an outhouse and gets water through a garden hose. The three boil water on an electric hot plate to stay warm in the shed, Cuny said.
Cuny, 31, said she would like a home with running water and heat, but after years living largely with neither, she’s not angry.
“Life goes on, and you can’t do nothing about it,” she said.
