Indians taking over from the Cowboys 23/7/01

TOM CARVER:
In South Dakota, this is how teenagers get their kicks.

ANNOUNCER:
He'll see what the ground feels like, put your hands together, won't you!

CARVER:
This is no rodeo for tourists. In these parts of America, tourists are an unknown breed. When the tiny settlement of Lemon hosts its annual rodeo, all the locals turn out. The ranchers and farm hands spend several hours preparing for the saddle bronk. They get one chance only.

ANNOUNCER:
Number five.

CARVER:
All they have to do is stay on board for eight seconds.

ANNOUNCER:
We want to thank the BBC film crew out here.

CARVER:
As the only outsiders, we get a special welcome, the locals are surprised that rodeos are not a common event in Britain. Outside Lemon, the Great Plains dip and ride for hundreds of miles in every direction. This is the geographic centre of the United States. Once it was also America's heart and soul. But what used to be the Wild West, today suburban Americans dismiss as flyover country, and the land is emptying. Those who came here to carve out the American dream at the turn of the century are now leaving. When Dennis Rivinuis's great-grandfather arrived from Russia in the 1900s, he built a shelter from mud and earth, a two-day journey from the nearest town. Though they never exactly prospered, Dennis's family managed to make a living from this land, until now.

DENNIS RIVINIUS:
FARMER
The cost of production, if you look at that, as compared to what the market is, you are losing money. How can you make ends meet after a while, when you get two-and-a-half or $2 a bushel for wheat and it costs you $4 to produce it? Pretty soon the bank isn't going to give you a loan to keep farming any more.

CARVER:
That's what's happened. Dennis can't afford to keep the farm going and pay for his father, who is in a nursing home. In the fall, he'll sell off his small herd. The following spring he'll auction his machinery and then move to town to look for work. Losing the land is going to be one of the worst moments of his life.

RIVINIUS:
It's like losing a family member, I guess. You love these hills out here, you get attached to it. That's why we're out here in the middle of nowhere, trying to make a living on next to nothing.

CARVER:
Can you imagine living in a town and not being out here?

RIVINIUS:
I guess it's going to be a change for me, yeah.

UNNAMED MAN:
Bring those cows out and I'll bring the bulls down there!

CARVER:
Wednesday is market day in Lemon. Many of the pens are only half full, trading is light. Inside the hall, the bidders are mostly from out of state. Dennis and his wife Paula come for the spectacle only. Their farm will probably be bought by a large farming company which can eke out a profit using economies of scale. Wayne Weishaar, a local rancher who doubles as the auctioneer, has the depressing job of bringing local farms under the hammer, many of them owned by friends he's known since school.

WAYNE WEISHAAR:
AUCTIONEER
We'll probably sell ten to 12 farms in the average year.

CARVER:
That's a lot.

WEISHAAR:
That's a lot of farms. We saw a rapid depopulation of our area because the small farmers could not make it and the larger farms have absorbed them and that's the way things have been going here.

CARVER:
An area of nearly a million square miles is now more sparsely populated than it was 100 years ago when this was the frontier. Wayne Weishaar's land is surrounded by vacant farms.

WEISHAAR:
The farm to our left is a farm that belonged to an early family in this area. I went to high school with one of their family members. When he got out of high school, he felt it wasn't economically feasible to come back to this farm.

CARVER:
At this one, the family scrawled a forwarding address on the mailbox and walked out. Keys still sit in the ignition of one of the cars. On the path to the fields, the family tractor lies abandoned. Over the last decade, the population has declined in 60% of the great plain counties. These are the ruins of a national dream, a dream which once fired the imagination of every American.

COMMENTATOR:
As the migration continues, more and more pioneers settle in the territory around the Mississippi river. They are turning the wilderness into farm land.

CARVER:
80 years ago America saw it as destiny to populate the prairies and to teach white man's ways to the Indian tribes who had been living here happily for thousands of years. Hungry immigrants poured out here, lured by the Government's promise of free land.

BOB LEE:
GREAT PLAINS HISTORIAN
They came out here and lived on the land. They farmed it for three years and the land was given to them. That was the method the government decided to colonise the Great Plains, and not realising that the Great Plains was not as fertile as some of those states back east where 160 acres was very adequate for making a good living on a farm. That wasn't true for this area.

CARVER:
In South Dakota's Black Hills, they carved the likeness of their leaders to remind the Indians who was boss. Few of the tourists who come to Mount Rushmore realise this land was given to the Indians by treaty, only to be taken away again once gold was discovered. By the time Mount Rushmore was carved, the great dream of life on the prairie was already fading. Ever since the 1930s, homesteaders and their descendants have been in retreat from the frontier in one of the greatest exoduses of American history. Manifest destiny, it seems, belongs after all not to the settlers but to those who are dispossessed, who are now beginning to return. Buffalo once close to extinction now graze thousands of acres. This was ranch land owned by the white settlers which has been bought up by local Indian reservations. History is in reverse. Mike Faith runs the herd for the Standing Rock Reservation.

MIKE FAITH:
BUFFALO MANAGER, STANDING ROCK SIOUX RESERVATION
Just to know the buffalo are coming back has a real good sense of pride to our people, for us to start bringing back our history, our culture, in practising the traditions and also the buffalo. It seems to be a new start up but it looks good for the future. We started with five animals. We're around 300 head. Our plans are looking at 1,000 head, with expansion of land and again that's some of our goals we're looking at for the future here.

CARVER:
The American Government did all it could to wipe out the Indian culture, in 1913 forcing every tribe to kiss the American flag. Indian children were shipped off to missionary boarding schools, one of which had the motto, "Kill the Indian, save the man." Even on Indian reservations, the Indians own less than half the land. MacLaclan, named after a particularly unpopular commissioner for Indian affairs, is a non-Indian town in the centre of Standing Rock Reservation. As the whites pull out here, the Indians are taking their place. Last month, Sandra Welch bought the town's hardware store. The day we visited she was stocking up with cheap dollar items and selling Indian art on the side.

SANDRA WELCH:
STANDING ROCK SIOUX RESERVATION
The family who had this before us were here for 31 years so it's quite a change and there's a lot of other non-Indian families moving out, while the native American families are purchasing the homes and trying to get businesses started. I hope that it's a good trend that's starting right now, because we need economic development on the reservation.

CARVER:
Unlike the whites, the Great Plains Indian population is growing. Poverty and boredom are still endemic but bit by bit they are recovering some self-esteem.

WELCH:
When I first got here about ten years ago there was hardly any native Americans that were on the east side of MacLaclan. It was predominantly a white community. I feel people are starting to go work together a lot better. Some of the racial tensions are lowering, and I think it has to do with the native Americans buying businesses and purchasing homes on this side of town instead of when we had a white side of town and an Indian side of town. I think that's made a big difference.

CARVER:
This is Standing Rock Reservation's biggest money earner. They call the Prairie Nights casino the new buffalo. For once, Indians are making money out of the whites. The casino is owned by the tribe, profits help to fund other small businesses. But it's a dubious engine of growth. Money from the casino is now having to pay for gambling addiction classes.

DEANNE BEAR CATCHES:
STANDING ROCK SIOUX RESERVATION
Here on the reservation, the parents lack the knowledge of being a parent, they're distracted by alcohol, drugs, bingo, casinos. A lot of the parents...

CARVER:
They're just not there.

CATCHES:
They're just not there. They're not spending enough quality time with their child.

CARVER:
Yet children and the concept of children is central, is sacred to Indian life, isn't it?

CATCHES:
I think that's an ideal concept, and that's the way it should be. But in reality, it hasn't been that way for a long time.

CARVER:
Once the government stopped trying to force Indians into white society they began doing it by choice. Some are becoming businessmen, others are moving off the reservation, some becoming ranchers in their own right. At the Lemon rodeo there's a large contingent from the Standing Rock Reservation. Mike Faith loves the steer roping competition, though nowadays it's the steer that usually has the upper hand. Almost unnoticed by the rest of America, the Great Plains are going through a quiet revolution. The homesteading experiment that began 150 years ago is drawing to a close. The two groups, the cowboy and the Indian are jostling to find new roles.