USA: PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON VISITS NATIVE AMERICAN COUNTRY

Record ID: 986409

  • Title: USA: PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON VISITS NATIVE AMERICAN COUNTRY
  • Date: 8th July 1999
  • Summary: PINE RIDGE, SOUTH DAKOTA, UNITED STATES (JULY 07, 1999) (U.S. POOL) 1. SLV PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON SHAKES HANDS WITH INDIAN LEADERS AFTER ARRIVING AT PINE RIDGE RESERVATION 0.08 2. SCU PAN FROM INDIAN DRUMMERS TO CLINTON STANDING WITH TRIBAL LEADERS 0.21 3. SLV CLINTON TOURS PINE RIDGE RESERVATION 0.31 4. CUTAWAY OF HAROLD SALWAY, PRESIDENT OF THE OGLALA-LAKOTA NATION 0.36 5. SOUNDBITE (English) PRESIDENT SALWAY SAYING "To give you some glaring realities and examples of our hardships today, Pine Ridge faces many challenges. Nearly 60 percent of the young people on the reservation live in poverty. Life expectancy for the Oglala men is the lowest in the country. We have more than four thousand families waiting for homes and our current housing stock is in serious disrepair. Twenty percent of Oglala houses lack basic plumbing. And unemployment in our community is recorded as high as seventy three percent plus." 1.17 6. CUTAWAY tribal leaders listening /las clinton on stage 1.34 7. SOUNDBITE (English) CLINTON SAYING "We see it from Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to the inner cities of our country to the Native American communities. If we can't do this now, we will never get around to it. So let us give ourselves a gift for the twenty first century, an America where no one is left behind and everyone has a chance." 2.01 8. CUTAWAY OF MEMBERS OF THE AUDIENCE HOLDING UP SIGNS SUPPORTING LEONARD PELTIER 2.06 Initials Script is copyright Reuters Limited. All rights reserved
  • Embargoed: 22nd July 1999 13:00
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  • Location: PINE RIDGE, SOUTH DAKOTA, UNITED STATES
  • City:
  • Country: USA
  • Reuters ID: LVA7I0F3VMV55DWT09CGNQA5H0JV
  • Story Text:For the first time since Franklin Delano Roosevelt
    dropped by a Cherokee reservation in 1936, a U.S.president
    visited Native American countryon Wednesday.

    The trip to the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South
    Dakota is part of President Clinton's four-day "new markets"
    tour, an effort to highlight and promote investment in
    economically depressed areas.

    President Bill Clinton became the first president in
    63 years to visit Native American country on Wednesday (July
    7) when he travelled to the historic Pine Ridge reservation,
    home to the poorest county in the nation and site of the 1890
    Wounded Knee massacre.The trip was part of the President's
    four-day effort to highlight communites bypassed by the U.S.

    economic boom and promote investment in those areas.

    Clinton was there to announce more than 1.5 billion
    dollars (U.S.) in new private investment programmes and
    government assistance to provide housing and economic
    development aid to America's reservation Indians.But he
    quickly learned it would not be easy to turn around the
    grinding poverty that exists at Pine Ridge and other
    reservations.He toured the Igloo Housing area, a stretch of
    small, overcrowded homes badly in need of repair.Residents
    told him of the lack of jobs on the reservation and their
    desperate efforts to make ends meet.

    To give you some glaring realities and examples of our
    hardships today, Pine Ridge faces many challenges," said
    Oglala-Lakota Nation President Harold Salway in a later
    speech.He described the problems at Pine Ridge."Nearly 60
    percent of the young people on the reservation live in
    poverty.Life expectency for the Oglala men is the lowest in
    the country.We have more than 4,000 families waiting for
    homes and our current housing stock is in serious disrepair.

    Twenty percent of Oglala houses lack basic plumbing.And
    unemployment in our community is recorded as high as 73
    percent plus."
    Noting the economic prosperity enjoyed by much of the
    country, Clinton said the nation will never have such an
    opportunity again to help these lingering pockets of poverty.

    "We see it from Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to the
    inner cities of our country to the Native American
    communities.If we can't do this now, we will never get
    around to it.So let us give ourselves a gift for the 21st
    century -- an America where no one is left behind and everyone
    has a chance."
    During Clinton's speech, a small group of protesters held
    up signs supporting Leonard Peltier, who became an
    international cause celebre after he was convicted and jailed
    for the deaths of two FBI agents during a shootout at Pine
    Ridge in 1975.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS - SOURCE TO BE VERIFIED
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