This is in today's news:
Clinton will travel to Pine Ridge, site of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre and home
of the poorest county in the nation, to announce more than $1.5 billion in new private
investment programs and government assistance to provide housing and economic
development aid to America's reservation Indians.
President Franklin Roosevelt was the last sitting president to visit a reservation, paying
an unofficial call at a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina in 1936 on his way south
to vacation, White House officials said.
Clinton is visiting Pine Ridge on the third-day of a four-day cross country trip aimed at calling attention to places bypassed
by the U.S. economic boom and promoting investment in the areas.
In Pine Ridge, a chronic problem is housing.
''We need a house ... just some space to live,'' Pine Ridge resident Lucille Blue Bird told Reuters recently.
Blue Bird and her husband, Belleron, live with their five children in a one-room, 400 square foot rented shack on the
reservation, making money selling tacos and doing odd jobs.
Of the 2.3 million Native Americans in recognized tribes in the United States, 1.43 million live on or near reservations,
legacies of the U.S. drive in the 1800s to win traditional Indian lands for expanding white settlement.
Despite the recent economic gains of some tribes able to open gambling casinos, poverty is the predominant way of life on
reservations. While unemployment is about 50 percent among Indians nationwide, at Pine Ridge it is 73 percent,
according to government figures.
The average per capita income of Native Americans in 1995 was $21,619, one-third less than that of Americans as a
whole.
Assistance to be unveiled by Clinton Wednesday includes pledges by bond underwriters Banc One Capital Markets and
George K. Baum & Co. to underwrite $1.5 billion in bonds over five years to finance home purchases by Native
Americans.
In addition, the federal department of Housing and Urban Development will spearhead an effort with the Mortgage
Bankers Association trade group and mortgage lenders to double the number of government-backed home mortgages in
Indian country over the next three years.
The effort will employ training of lenders, streamlined lending procedures and other methods to create 1,000 new Indian
homeowners.
Pine Ridge has played an important symbolic role in American Indian history. The Wounded Knee massacre, in which
200 to 300 Indian men, women and children were killed by U.S. troops, was one of the final defeats of Sioux Indians
trying to seek a return of their traditional lives.
More recently, a period of Indian militancy in the 1970s was crystallized by a 1975 shootout on Pine Ridge in which two
FBI agents and a Native American were killed. The conviction and jailing of Leonard Peltier for the agents' deaths became
an international cause celebre.
Some Pine Ridge Indians have called for Clinton to apologize for America's treatment of Indians, similar to his expression
of regret over slavery last year.
White House officials said that a formal apology was unlikely, but noted Clinton has in speeches this year on ethnic
cleansing in Kosovo acknowledged America's own historic ''problems'' in dealings with ethnic minorities including
Indians. <EOM>
I hope this will be positive for us.
Peace,Randy
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