Its remoteness would suggest otherwise.  Tethered by the starkness of the Badlands, dusty Nebraska plains on the east and south and the sacred Black Hills, or Paha Sapa,  to the west.  This Lakota Indian reservation, steadfastly entwined to its heritage, is indicative of what happens when a people are marginalized, demoralized and disconnected from who they were historically in terms of who they are today.  

Pine Ridge has become, for better or worse, the media prototype of Native America. 

Forget Beverly Hills; Pine  Ridge is the Native 90210. Movies, from the smallest independent film to large productions hoping to capture the Native experience, find their inner and outer Indianness here.  Dreamkeeper.  Rez  Bomb. Thunderheart.  Skins.  Dances with Wolves.  Imprint. The Stone Child.  Crazy Horse  or historical movies with Pine Ridge themes filmed elsewhere like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee    and Into the West. 

On any July afternoon, tow-headed tourists from Germany, Austria and the Netherlands can be found sipping a cold soda at Big Bats or breathlessly snapping pictures at the local pow wow.  They love Indians; especially these Indians. Because Pine Ridge, above all others, represents what INDIANS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE.  It must be so because they’ve seen it in the movies. 

Pine Ridge—not the Saginaw Chippewa Reservation.  Not urban Natives in Chicago and Los Angeles.  Not the Mi'kmaq or Mohawk or Apache or Cherokee Nations.  Not even their Lakota brethren in Cheyenne River, Yankton and Rosebud.  

Ironically, this notoriety has bestowed negligible benefits for the 30,000 or so residents in this 11,000 square mile terrain in South Dakota.  For Pine Ridge remains, as it has for the better part of a century, among the poorest regions of the nation with unemployment upwards of 85 percent and epidemic diabetes and life expectancy rates at third world levels.  Yet this place holds a fascination that belies the reality.  

This fascination takes form in historical treatises, feature films, and documentaries unlike any other Native province in North America.  Indian talent has spawned from the focus here; Chris Eyre has adopted the Black Hills as his home and young actors from Tokala Clifford to the Spears brothers from neighboring Lower Brule and the Native Voice Film Festival in Rapid City are evidence of this burgeoning growth.  

Being optimistic, the influx of money from film productions and the people and press that come with it, even when temporary, may spur future opportunities for up-and-coming actors, directors, screenwriters, and film crew.  Likewise, seeing attractive, intelligent and successful members from the community has an impact on local kids yearning for positive role models. 

That’s the good part.  The other part—the part that attracts the dewy-eyed wannabes looking for Indians who are what INDIANS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE—that part doesn’t help Pine Ridge at all.  It perpetuates the mythology at the expense of the reality; a mythology that doesn’t do a damn thing to heat an elder’s home or buy a single school book.  

Forget Beverly Hills; Pine Ridge is the Native 90210.  And like Beverly Hills, buying into the spectator sport of gawking at the environs of the people who live there is hardly a healthy expression of support.  Pine Ridge, Hollywood style, does not convey the richness and diversity of real Native folks there or anywhere throughout North America, no more than focusing a camera lens on Paris Hilton conveys what it is to be a white American.  Because it's the movies.  That's all.

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  Do we buy into the romantic idea of what "Indianness" is through the image of Pine Ridge and plains Natives depicted onscreen? Join our forum and let us know what you think…. NATIVEVUE FORUM: PINE RIDGE 90210