Posted on 12/28/2006 7:37:34 AM PST by DJ Taylor
PINE RIDGE, S.D. — Here in the poorest corner of the poorest Indian reservation in the country, Geraldine Blue Bird’s household was one of the worst off.
Then President Bill Clinton stopped by her home during his 1999 tour of the nation’s most impoverished places. Ms. Blue Bird, who lived on a disability check, was squeezing 28 adults and children, most of whom she had taken in from the streets, into a four-room shack with no plumbing and a pop-up camper out back. When word got out, donations poured in, and continued for years. Ms. Blue Bird even received a brand-new double-wide mobile home with four bedrooms.
But the woman who became a symbol of enduring, desperate poverty in the United States now bunks in a jail cell in Rapid City, some 90 miles to the northwest. In October, a federal jury convicted her of running a multimillion-dollar drug ring out of her double-wide. The ring supplied cocaine throughout the hills and valleys of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which is the size of Connecticut.
Her arrest and conviction followed a two-year investigation by federal and tribal authorities that netted 16 people, including several of her relatives and “adopted” children. Ms. Blue Bird, who is 50 and suffers from congestive heart failure, is to be sentenced on Feb. 20. She faces up to life in prison.
The case has brought a sense on the Pine Ridge reservation that Ms. Blue Bird betrayed her people. After Mr. Clinton’s visit, her burst of fame made her a kind of ambassador for the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe. She gave interviews in which she spoke of a need to rescue Lakota youth from drugs and gangs.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
How sad.
When Bubba visited, did he inhale?
HF
Until her arrest at a Rapid City motel on Dec. 21, 2005, she was raising money to open an orphanage...
Now we know HOW!
Did it ever even once occur to this woman to GET A JOB?
WHile contracting at the Pentagon in the 90's, I was offered an appointment to a minor position there. It would have been a presidential appointment. I refused it stating that everyone who had anything to do with Slick Willie was either dead or indicted.
That's Ok, Ms. Blue Bird. Your friend, Bill Clinton, was "single-handedly responsible for ruining the lives of every young person involved" with him, too.
But at least you didn't have a young intern servicing you in the trailer out back while you flavored your cigar...
"Did it ever even once occur to this woman to GET A JOB?"
Drug-dealing's a job. You have a product line, suppliers, sellers, security concerns, marketing, money coming in, money going out. Not a legitimate business, but still a business.
makes me think about that little airstrip in (Mena?) Arkansas
I drove through that reservation. It looks like a suburban devleopment.
-Did it ever even once occur to this woman to GET A JOB?-
Or, while we're asking - did any of the other 28 people living in the "box" think of that, either??
Let's say it really WAS an Indian reservation, and not the pretend ones we have in this country now. If they want to keep with traditions, they wouldn't have electricity, plumbing, TVs or cell phones or whatever else The White Man finds necessary to live from day to day. Aren't they supposed to live off the land, kill their own deer, tell their stories and etc., etc.?
Oh, but wait - they've kept their fine heritage alive with casino gambling! They can sit around the fire, smoke weed, and pray to the Odds Gods!/sarc
Sorry, but if they can't be successful in the old OR new world, we shouldn't help them do ANYthing. They want their own laws and land - fine! Let them die out, or join the rest of us.
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