owning a vehicle is a catch-22. “I have a vehicle that I’m paying off, so I have car payments that come out of my check,” explains Ellison. “The car is just really another baby. It’s equally as expensive to take care of.” The Dakota weather and the long-distance driving take their toll on vehicles. While Ellison is among the wealthier people on the reservation because she owns a vehicle, she can’t really afford to have something go wrong with her car. On Ellison’s budget there is no such thing as a small car repair. Even a small problem could start a cascade of events that will threaten both her budget and her livelihood. Worse yet, a mechanical breakdown would require a tow to a repair shop and leave Ellison with no way to get to work. With reduced work hours, it may take a while for her to be able to pay for the repairs – assuming she doesn’t get fired for missing work. “Even though some of us have more than others,” says Ellison, “we’re still struggling.” This is clearly true and, as Ellison points out, not everyone struggles in the same way.
Erika Brooks identifies herself as a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe; she holds an associate degree and has worked her way up in Head Start from an initial position as an aide, to becoming a teacher, and then to her last position as a supervisor of several centers. She has traveled more widely than most people I meet. As a member of a religious organization, she traveled to Germany, Romania, and Russia doing service work. But when we met, a lot had already gone wrong in Erika’s life. When her siblings struggled with substance abuse issues,31 Erika came home to South Dakota to help with their children. For the last ten years she has been caring in some way for nine children, four of whom live with her. She arrived to meet me in a restaurant with the two youngest. Without romanticizing the challenges, she says the children give her life both meaning and satisfaction.
Now at age fifty, Erika is unemployed and filled with worry for the children. While she supports herself and four children on an income of less than $16,000, Erika never described herself as poor. “It’s pretty stressful, because we’re on a really limited income, but I make sure that, you know, we do everything on a tight budget so that we have enough.” In 2017, the federal poverty line for a family of five was $28,780. Like all federal calculations of poverty this number is completely unrealistic. In the same year, the EPI self-sufficiency budget for a family of five living in Corson County, South Dakota, was $82,524.
As seems obvious, Erika cannot afford childcare – actually, she can’t afford most of what is on the EPI self-sufficiency list. Several years back Erika was working full-time and living in an apartment in Mobridge. Things were good and she was able to help care for her family. “I was pretty involved with buying groceries for them and paying bills for them, along with my own bills, just doing that.” One day her sister brought her daughter to Erika’s apartment and said, “‘You can have her.’ And I said, ‘For the weekend?’ and she said, ‘No, you can have her,’ and I said, ‘You mean permanently she’s mine?’ She said, ‘Yeah, take her,’ and she had her clothes packed in a wagon. So, I kept her. I raised her.” That was eight years ago. Since then, three more nieces have come to live with her. It wasn’t easy, but Erika stretched to work full-time and care for the four girls. Then one day the new building manager asked her for paperwork that would prove she had legal custody of the girls. On the reservation, that would never happen. But she lived in Mobridge and now she was being asked by a non-Native building manager for custody papers.
Erika went to the tribal courts to apply for custody of the girls, a process which requires a six-month waiting period. She had lived in the building without incident for years, but the new manager began threatening her and citing her for building violations. Erika tells me she watched him treat other residents with kindness but with her he was always rude. She has one word to describe what happened: prejudice. “I tried to explain my side of things. I had been a good tenant for five years, and how could this, all of a sudden, be such a problem? It was traumatizing for me. He didn’t just come and knock on the door or give me papers. He would bang on the door hard and say, ‘Open up,’ and scream and yell and be hysterical about it every time he came. It just scared the crap out of me. I don’t know why, but I was so intimidated by him.” Within months, Erika and the girls were evicted. She had four kids and no place to live. And soon no job. The story gets worse. The manager claimed they had left the apartment in a mess and charged them $4,000. “We had washed walls and cleaned carpets,” explained Erika. “I took pictures of it to prove that we had left it in really good condition, and they still charged me.”
“I’ve lived pretty much an isolated life with going to school and working. I’ve been bringing the girls into my home one by one and raising them in a really quiet, stable environment. I’ve done everything to protect that way of life, and now we’re thrust into this whole other dynamic. You have to be really cautious and careful and watchful, because the children are the ones that suffer the most.” After being evicted, Erika’s best option was to take the girls to a shelter. “We ended up staying there for five months, and then we were asked to leave, because they couldn’t help us anymore.”
Erika and the four girls have been living in the basement of a two-bedroom house. Her sister, her sister’s boyfriend and his brother live on the main floor. “They drink a lot,” says Erika. “Like five days out of the week they’re drunk.” And when they drink, Erika and the kids become targets for abuse. “We basically live downstairs and have our meals and stuff in the basement and just kind of keep to ourselves, or we go for drives or go to the park a lot. So, we kind of, you know, keep a low profile in the home, and we’ve been living like that for about two-and-a-half years.”
Their possessions had been stored in an empty house in the country that was recently rented out. Erika didn’t have gas money to get to the house and pleaded for time to get her things out – it was a lot of memorabilia. But her pleas went unheeded and she lost everything. It’s a huge emotional loss for Erika but, at the moment, she sees it as the least of her troubles. Her thirteen-year-old was recently raped by a trusted family member. (More on this in Chapter 7.) Erika decided to let go of her possessions and focus on the future.
Erika has applied for housing on the reservation. Standing Rock housing policies prohibit drug use and she is hoping that the fact that she doesn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs will help her. But even so, the waiting time for affordable housing on the reservation is years long. Erika is working with the tribal leadership to get their case expedited to stabilize life for the children. She is afraid to rent an apartment off of the reservation, even if she could afford it. “I’m still so frightened by confrontations with landlords. I mean, I’m amazed at myself, because I’ve been a really strong person all my life, very independent, very straightforward, and now I cower. I just shiver every time I think about dealing with a landlord. I’m scared they’re going to kick me out, or something’s going to happen, and I’ll be on the street with four girls again and a very limited income. So, it’s really frightening. I know that I’m at the disadvantage, because I’m Native. They think automatically that I’m stupid or I’m uneducated, that I’m not an equal, and don’t deserve the same respect that someone else might. I see that everywhere I go.”
The sense of Erika as a capable, professional person is palpable to me as we talk, as is her paralyzing sense of vulnerability. “My life is like a yellow caution sign, because I’m just always so concerned with the girls’ safety and their well-being from the time we wake up.” The daily routine for Erika and the girls starts early. The school bus arrives at 7 a.m. for the older girls in junior high and Erika is there to meet the driver every day, to make sure the driver knows her, as she sends the girls off for the ten-mile trip to the nearest school. In South Dakota, thirty-four school districts have opted for a four-day week to save money on transportation. This means that Erika’s two older girls are picked up for junior high at 7 a.m. and returned home at 4:30 or 5 p.m.
Her youngest child has just started at a local kindergarten and Erika hopes this will enable her to get
