Articles
“The federal government’s refusal to adequately fund the Indian Health Service is slowly killing two South Dakota tribes.
The Argus Leader published a massive series on Wednesday outlining the failures of the federally-funded Indian Health Service in South Dakota and the toll it’s taken on two tribes, the Rosebud Sioux and Oglala Sioux, also known as the Oglala Lakota. The Leader’s blockbuster report provides everything from first-hand horror stories of Natives losing limbs and loved ones to damning statistics that show the breadth of the systematic failure to provide decent healthcare to the tribes—citing a state report, the newspaper found that the median life expectancy for Native Americans living in South Dakota is a staggering 21 years shorter than the state average. I highly encourage you to go read the series.
The tribal reservations, located next to each other in the southeast corner of the state, sit on largely undeveloped, remote land in some of the poorest counties in the state and the nation, making it a difficult to recruit doctors to IHS hospitals. It’s this isolation, combined with the United States government’s inability to provide healthcare services as set forth in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1866, that’s led to a full-on crisis in the Badlands.”
– Splinter, Congress Is Starving the Indian Health Service and South Dakota Tribes Are Paying With Their Lives.
“Kathy, a native South Dakotan and enrolled member in the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, wasn’t the first to experience this kind of dangerously deficient care from the federal agency charged with providing treatment to 2 million Native Americans across the country.
Dozens of patients have died needlessly due to errors made in IHS hospitals in South Dakota alone. Thousands more in the state’s rural Indian reservations face limited access to primary care providers, long wait times for basic medical treatments and outstanding medical debt for necessary care sought outside the federally-funded facilities.
The federal government has largely ignored the deplorable conditions. Even well-intentioned lawmakers representing states with significant Native American populations have failed to make meaningful change, including South Dakota’s Congressional delegation.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government remains in violation of its treaty promise to provide health care to Native Americans.”
– Argus Leader, Violated: How the Indian Health Service betrays patient trust and treaties in the Great Plains.
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Download the 18″x24″ poster (.pdf), Indian Country 52 #49 – Starving Healthcare.
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
