Siletz.Net

Tribes look to $3B share of stimulus funds
Tuesday, 5-12-09

By Marisol Bello, USA TODAY

PINE RIDGE RESERVATION, S.D. — The 30-year-old trailer that Naomi Sitting Bear shares with her two children, her sister-in-law and her nephew has a broken furnace, broken water pipes and holes in the walls and floor that let in daylight and cold air.

Outside, siding is missing, insulation is exposed, boards cover broken windows and the door has no lock, so it is blown open by the Great Plains winds.

Sitting Bear, an emergency dispatcher on the reservation, says she can't afford to repair the dilapidated trailer. She applied to rent or buy a low-cost, low-interest home from tribal housing when she graduated from high school. That was 12 years ago.

"There's just not enough housing here," says Sitting Bear, 29, who bought the trailer from her aunt six years ago for $1,000.

She hopes $3 billion in federal stimulus funding for Indian tribes will help address the chronic housing problem on Pine Ridge and reservations across the USA. More than 200,000 new homes are needed in Indian Country, the National American Indian Housing Council says.

The nation's 562 federally recognized tribes are gearing up to apply for economic stimulus money to build and repair ailing infrastructure on their reservations. The funding will go for houses, schools, jails, roads, water treatment plants and health clinics. Tribes may use grants and loans for job training, improving the energy efficiency of houses and expanding youth and domestic violence programs.

The stimulus funding is "a huge investment, but it does not begin to meet the need," says Jacqueline Johnson Pata of the National Congress of American Indians.

The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation reported in July that Indians are worse off economically than any other minority. In 2007, American Indians' median household income — the middle figure, with half the amounts above and half below — was $35,000, 31% less than the $50,700 median for all Americans, according to the Census Bureau. One in four Indians, 25%, live below the poverty line, compared with 13% of all Americans.

Indians are more likely than other Americans to live in crowded, substandard homes: 12% are without plumbing, 14% without electricity and 11% without kitchen facilities, Johnson Pata says.

Much of the stimulus funding for Indians hasn't been awarded yet. It will be distributed by various federal departments, some through grants and some on a competitive basis.

Among the tribes' proposals:

• Pine Ridge Reservation plans to apply for $12.7 million to construct 36 homes, renovate 124, repair the roofs of 150 and build a "green" government office building. It also will apply for $2 million to build an alcohol- and drug-treatment center. The tribe expects $40 million to house its courts, police, ambulance services, emergency dispatchers and detention facilities.

• White Earth Reservation in Minnesota plans to request $3.7 million for a study for a new jail, communications equipment and more officers to bolster its 22-member police force. The tribe of 19,000 on a 1,200-square-mile reservation plans to build 30 new homes with $1.3 million in housing money.

• The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians on the Oregon coast plans to build 10 apartments with a $1.4 million grant and construct new sidewalks with a separate $600,000 grant. The group plans to apply for $500,000 to expand a job-training program.

Pine Ridge sits on 2.8 million acres in a desolate stretch of southwestern South Dakota that includes parts of the Badlands, a national park of dry, rugged terrain.

The reservation has a troubled history — in 1890 as the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre that killed an estimated 300 Sioux and 25 cavalrymen, and in 1975 as the place where two FBI agents were killed in a shootout.

It needs 4,000 new homes for its 40,000 residents, says Paul Iron Cloud, director of Oglala Sioux Lakota Housing, the federally funded authority that provides tribal housing.

As part of $255 million in stimulus funds the Department of Housing and Urban Development already has given to U.S. tribes, the Pine Ridge agency has received $4.3 million to renovate another 124 houses and repair roofs on 150 more. Sixty percent of the homes on the reservation are substandard, tribe President Theresa Two Bulls says.

Applying for funds is a challenge for tribes which can't afford to pay grant writers and don't have the money for preliminary work, Johnson Pata says.

For the Siletz Indians, a tribe with 4,600 members, most of them scattered over an 11-county area, tapping into the federal stimulus will be challenging because they don't have the kind of large-scale, "shovel ready" projects the money is intended for, tribal planner Pamela Lind says.

Because rules vary by federal department, she says, "we're still trying to figure out how to access funding."