LJS Editorial Board: Whiteclay’s turnaround is far from story’s end
Lincoln Journal Star Editorial Board
May 10, 2020
“Hope” has not traditionally been a word associated with Whiteclay.
But three years after the unincorporated Sheridan County community stopped selling millions of beers per year across the state line to the officially dry Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, that word is making a comeback. After all, the town has seen new businesses open and crime decrease.
The positivity, though, must extend across the state line and onto the reservation, where the problems fueled largely by the ease of access to alcohol persist – and will continue to do so for decades to come.
In reality, the closure of the beer stores in 2017 was merely the first chapter. And Nebraska has the moral imperative to help change the story on the Pine Ridge, given the state’s role in creating it.
No county in the 50 states has a lower per-capita income ($8,768, per the U.S. Census Bureau) or has a lower life expectancy (66 years, per the Journal of the American Medical Association), than Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota. That county directly abuts Sheridan County and is wholly within the Pine Ridge Reservation.
The result is rates of substance abuse, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and related conditions that occur at a far greater rate in this area than elsewhere in the United States. And these are chronic health problems, ones that children are at much higher risk of developing if their parents have them.
Just as problems that entrenched aren’t created overnight, they aren’t solved at the snap of a finger, either.
An oft-cited Chinese proverb notes that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” In Whiteclay, this is true. After years of efforts to cease the sale of alcohol so near the reservation culminated with the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission’s 2017 decision, the state began walking down the long road ahead.
So far, the early returns along this path are positive, but it’s a long, winding, challenging climb for Nebraska and the Pine Ridge to reach where the reservation wants to be.
As academic research by professor and documentarian John Maisch found, felony court filings and drunken-driving crashes in Sheridan County have decreased since the beer stores closed. Sales tax revenue in Whiteclay, too, is bouncing back toward pre-2017 levels.
For most Nebraskans, the unincorporated town is out of sight and out of mind. It’s a town far from wherever they live that few have visited.
But its impact is evident every day for residents on the Pine Ridge.
More than a century of alcohol sales can’t be erased in the three years that have elapsed since the beer stores closed. Hope, however, will be a powerful ally in the struggles ahead.