Will You Join the
1,000 Arrows Campaign
for Economic Opportunity?
The Greatest Resource of the Oglala Lakota is the Oyate (people)
An arrow can easily be broken by itself, but it is impossible to break 1,000 arrows banded together. Today we are asking you to become one of 1000 unbreakable arrows.
Lakota Funds has chosen the arrow as our emblem because the arrow is the tool that only one hundred years ago was used to protect and feed our people. Success depended on its perfect flight and the abilities of our Watanye (skilled huntsmen), Ohitika (braves), Wawókiye (helpers), and Wacinyapi (dependable ones) to provide food for our people. Additionally, the arrow provided protection when danger threatened the people.
Each part of the arrow represents the will of our people to survive and prosper on the land of our ancestors, as well as a symbol of each part of Lakota Funds' work.
Lakota Funds is the new arrow, the tool to protect the people from poverty and hopelessness by helping to build an economy capable of feeding and housing our people.
We need to do more than just survive. It is time for us to thrive.
Milestones
Over the last twenty years Lakota Funds has:- Lent out over $3.5 million dollars to over 600 borrowers.
- Provided training to more than one thousand entrepreneurs.
- Created over 750 permanent jobs.
- Provided marketing services to more than 1600 artists and craftsmen.
- Developed the first Native American–owned, tax credit-financed housing project in America.
- Developed the Lakota Trade Center, a 12,000 square foot small business incubator and Tribal Business Information Center.
- Co-founded the Pine Ridge Area Chamber of Commerce.
- Founded the Wawókiye Business Institute.
- Won the Great Strides Award for poverty reduction from the Northwest Area Foundation.
- Helped move the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation from poorest county in the United States to 56th poorest.
- Created an entrepreneurial environment.
The Challenge of Building a Modern Lakota Economy
The tiospaye (extended family structure) was historically the foundation of our economy and the heart of Lakota society. We lived by our Lakota values of Respect, Honesty, Bravery, Generosity, Fortitude, and Sacrifice. The tiospaye system successfully provided for Lakota families over thousands of years.The buffalo was the basis of this traditional economy, providing food, clothing, shelter, tools, medicine and trade.
The destruction of the great buffalo herds was followed by confinement to the reservation and the break-up of the Lakota family tiospaye. The Allotment Act and boarding school systems effectively ended the lives of the Lakota people as a self-sufficient, independent nation.
This left our people in a permanent state of economic poverty, dependent on the federal government to live up to its treaty obligations for law enforcement, health care, education, elderly care and more. The Federal government’s failure to maintain treaty obligations has resulted in our people having the lowest life expectancy and highest poverty rate of any sub-group in the United States of America.
These economic statistics don’t begin to encompass the painful effects that over one hundred years of forced poverty has had on our Lakota people:
- Over half of all families live below the poverty level (compared to 9.2 percent of South Dakota families)
- The tribal unemployment rate is over seventy percent
- Median Household Income is fifty eight percent lower than the rest of South Dakota and fifty two percent lower than the US national average
- On Pine Ridge Reservation there are thirteen businesses per thousand people, while the rest of South Dakota has eighty three businesses per thousand
- Retail sales leakage off the reservation is estimated at more than eighty percent
- There is a shortage of over 1200 houses, with three to five families often living in a single dwelling