By Richard P. Holm, MD
In 1735, John Wesley visited Savannah in the Province of Georgia in the American Colonies, and gave an account of the Native Americans as the perfect example of health. He described this as mostly due to their lean diet and their rigorous physical lifestyle. It is now nearing 300 years later and people of all races could learn from the habits of the early American Indians.
What has happened since has deeply affected not only the American Indian, but also the white and multi-ethnic settlers of this country. As advancements in technology have taken away the need for hard daily work to survive, the American public has became lazy, letting the wheels and motors do the walking. Especially over the last 25 years, we have become a country of game-boy, couch-potato, TV watchers, who drive to school and work, always looking for an easier way.
At the same time diets have changed with the availability of inexpensive oil, flour, syrup and cheese. This made fry-bread, pizza, donuts, cheesy potatoes and sugary drinks the dietary staple, rather than the lean meat, fruits, vegetables, roots, fungi and legumes, which were the traditional American Indian and Native Alaskan diet.
With all these too-easy and greasy-sugary ways, comes an epidemic of obesity, with two out of three Americans overweight, and half of these, frankly, obese. No surprise an epidemic of diabetes has followed. Right now, 12 million Americans know they have diabetes, and about five million more have it but don’t know it. Paradoxically, obesity and type II Diabetes is about twice as bad in the American Indian population who, in the 1700s, were looked upon as the epitome of health.
So how can we change this trend in not only the American Indian population but in all the rest of those European, Middle Eastern, Asian, African, Mexican and South American immigrant populations that make up this admixture we call America?
It certainly will not come from developing and prescribing more medicine. One study from Bosnia-Herzegovina showed educating children and parents about diabetes made the biggest difference. This spreading of education must come not only from economists, politicians, educators, and medical care providers, but especially from local community leaders and elders working together to bring on a leaner diet and more rigorous physical lifestyle.
We all could learn from the habits of the early American Indians.
To hear more from Dr. Holm, watch his TV show, On Call with the Prairie Doc, every Thursday at 7 p.m. CT on South Dakota Public Broadcasting and his Web site, www.PrairieDoc.org. On Call with the Prairie Doc is produced by the Healing Words Foundation in association with the South Dakota State University journalism department and airs Thursdays on South Dakota Public Broadcasting Television at 7 p.m. Central.

The massacre at Wounded Knee occurred when our state was just one year old, yet the effects of that cold winter day still reverberate throughout our state and our country. Dec. 29 marks the 125th anniversary of Wounded Knee. To remember, we dedicated much of our current issue of South Dakota Magazine to the tragedy.
We began by visiting Pine Ridge to find descendants of Wounded Knee survivors. We met Leonard Little Finger, who lives near Oglala. Both of Little Finger’s grandfathers, along with more extended family, were survivors of Wounded Knee. He is a direct descendant of Big Foot, whose band was decimated in the massacre. Little Finger had 39 relatives at Wounded Knee. Only seven survived.
Before the massacre, Big Foot and nearly 400 men, women and children were living on the Cheyenne River Reservation. Some were from Sitting Bull’s band and had fled to Big Foot’s camp after Sitting Bull was killed farther north on the Standing Rock Reservation. Black Elk, in Black Elk Speaks, recounted that only about 100 of the almost 400 were warriors. The rest were women, children or elderly. But all were starving and cold. Big Foot was ill with pneumonia, but still decided to meet with Oglala Chief Red Cloud on the Pine Ridge Reservation to help work on a peace agreement with the federal government.
Soldiers had heard they were on the move and were on lookout. Big Foot’s band was known to have embraced the Ghost Dance, a new religious movement circulating among tribes. White soldiers saw it as a sign of disobedience and trouble because federal law prohibited any exhibitions of Native religion on reservations. But the weak, cold and hungry people that those soldiers met on Dec. 28 were not rebellious. Big Foot was taken by ambulance to the cavalry’s camp on Wounded Knee Creek, and his band was escorted to a nearby valley and instructed to set up camp.
Soldiers seized guns from the Lakota the following morning. The Lakota complied, but the cavalry believed that there were more guns that were being hidden and a search was ordered. Warriors gathered in the camp’s assembly area, and the soldiers began to individually search them.
Although there are various stories on how the massacre began, our managing editor John Andrews writes that it is widely believed that it began when a young, deaf Lakota named Black Coyote held his gun over his head, proclaiming it had cost him money and he wasn’t going to give it up. As a soldier tried to seize the weapon, a bullet discharged. Both sides panicked, and the massacre began. It is generally believed that over 300 Lakota died. About 90 were men, the rest women and children. Most of the men were killed in the assembly area, but soldiers pursued the Lakota relentlessly as they tried to escape camp.
Little Finger believes it is a responsibility of tribal elders to pass on the traditional knowledge of what happened, and that the knowledge of each generation can formulate a response to the tragedy.
“Let’s say you look at time as a cloth,” Little Finger told us. “Then along comes some violence and tears it. You can stitch it, but you can never tear the threads that consist of that fabric. I come to that every day.”
It’s not easy to search for meaning in something like the Wounded Knee massacre, but it was in that spirit that we collected the stories for this issue. Besides seeking stories from descendants of Wounded Knee survivors, we also asked Native American leaders Elsie Meek and Craig Howe to discuss what Wounded Knee means today. We explore artistic interpretations of Wounded Knee and wrote a travel guide for our readers who might like to visit Pine Ridge. We also pored through photos of the massacre aftermath, debating which we should print and if they were too shocking. John Andrews studied the massacre from many sources and points of view to create the best accounts I have read of what happened on that terrible day.
In the end, I hope we did some justice to the Lakota experience and that we provide perspective on our state’s greatest tragedy.
Katie Hunhoff is the editor of South Dakota Magazine, a bi-monthly publication discussing the people, places and culture of our state. Visit www.SouthDakotaMagazine.com for more information.

By Dee “Baby” Baysinger

America is struggling — and I don’t need an arrogant Donald Trump to tell me that disheartening news. Never in my lifetime did I think I would see the United States being drug down slowly, but surely to its knees and not by outside forces such as ISIS, but our enemy within. America, we are our own worst enemy.
Respect — We have crippled our school systems by essentially tying the hands of our educators by taking away the ability to even reprimand misbehavior without a threat from irate parents or a possible lawsuit. I applaud the actions of the security officer who dragged that brat out of her chair on the news after she refused to listen to her teacher and principal! Yet, the officer was fired for doing his job. Parents, let your children take the repercussions of their actions. By the way, we did not need security in schools when I grew up. We lived by the rule if you got in trouble at school, you would be in double trouble when you got home.
Drugs — Appalling to me that we would see the headlines “Drug Resort” at Flandreau, likening it to going to relax at a spa. Our court system would contemplate that idiotic notion when our prisons are bursting at the seams with drug addicts who have stolen from hard-working people who work for a living. Our leaders in Pierre should go spend a week in rehab to listen to the people’s stories of how drugs have “improved” their lives! As long as I’m on the subject, why are we paying for thousands of dollars of dental work for prisoners with rotten meth teeth?
Laziness — I can’t tolerate laziness! A great majority of the next generation has no work ethic. A typical example is at our own nursing home in Woonsocket, where workers continually don’t show up for their “weekend shift” so the other responsible workers have to do double and triple shifts. We see it at Van Dykes, also. One young man showed up two hours late on his first day and just said, “I’ll just start tomorrow” and then left early on the second day. Again — parents, you are not doing your kids a favor by not making them hold a job as a teen just because you think you want them to have an easier life than you did. Stop paying their phone bills, car insurance, payments and credit cards!
Welfare — One of the biggest “maggots” of our nation. Welfare was meant as a temporary step to help people who were down and out — not as a way of life. I wish they would put me in charge of the system.
#1. You will be tested for drugs — one strike, you’re out!
#2. You will be installed with a birth control device. We will aid the children you currently have, but you will not go on to have numerous children to be raised in a continuing spiral of poverty.
#3. You will not be rewarded by the government with “child credit” and receive thousands of dollars when the working people are supporting you already!
#4. Go back to food stamps. I don’t care if it’s embarrassing. The stupid decision to give them credit cards allows them to get alcohol, cigarettes and money for video lottery. The needy children are not getting their food.
Believe me when I say where there is a will there is a way. The woman with the “card” at County Fair in front of me ran her groceries up and then had the clerk take back so many she decided she “didn’t need,” got the cash and bought high dollar scratch tickets. (My hand is getting tired writing at this point.)
Spoiled — We are a spoiled nation who takes for granted so many things other countries die for — clean water, just to name one, even one meal a day. I can see why other countries despise us with our excess. Movie stars, as an example, are paying $10,000 for a purse or more for a pair of shoes. How far would that go to help our veterans returning home who are permanently disabled? How about the person who just spent $2.4 million to purchase John Lennon’s guitar?
Clean out Congress — If you are caught accepting lobbyist bribes, no pension for you. (Outlaw the lobbyists.) We elect people who steal from our social security system and they aren’t thrown in jail? Hire a team like “The Untouchables” and ferret out and expose and terminate whoever allowed the construction of a $45 million gas station in Afghanistan and a $200 million highway. Think how far that alone would go for our national debt.
I started writing this at 4:30 in the morning, and now I have to step down from my soapbox and go to my job so I can pay for my health care, care insurance, etc., that middle class America is saddled with so other people can sit home and watch TV and not work.
Irate,
Dee Baby