Bernie at Pine Ridge

Bernie Sanders visited Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota yesterday and was received with great affection.

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Pine Ridge, with a life expectancy lower than Haiti’s 49 years, is one of the poorest places in the Western Hemisphere.  If there is a Ground Zero for Native American conflicts with white European colonizers (and there are certainly many), Pine Ridge is near the top of the list.  It is the home of Wounded Knee, where the massacre of 1890 and standoff of 1973 took place.  It is the home of the Oglala Shootout, where Leonard Peltier was implicated and later (and still) imprisoned, a scapegoat to demonstrate FBI suppression of Native liberation.

Bernie has shown unprecedented attention to Native American issues as a presidential candidate.

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About Stephen Carr Hampton

Stephen Carr Hampton is an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation, an avid birder since age 7, and a former resource economist for the California Department of Fish & Game, where he worked as a tribal liaison and conducted natural resource damage assessments and oversaw environmental restoration projects after oil spills. He writes most often about Native history and contemporary issues, birds, and climate change.
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