Badlands Basketball | Post 28 | South Dakota
Expanse and sparsity notwithstanding, no segment of my virtual road trip has served up more visual clues to aspects of American life than southwestern South Dakota.
Here, the ranches and Sandhills of Nebraska yield to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and Badlands National Park. Such place names could prompt travel essays on the historical plight of Native Americans — I passed through Wounded Knee, of the eponymous 1890 massacre and 1973 incident — or the founding of iconic national parks. But the goal of this Street View project is to experiment with the opposite: Ask not what American media tells us about a place we visit in Street View, but what Street View tells us about America.
For example, in the environs of Wounded Knee, my inclinations for Lakota-U.S. government battle monuments were quickly overwhelmed by a stunning number of outdoor basketball hoops:
Street View, it turns out, had tipped me off to the cultural phenomenon of “rez ball,” a high-tempo style of basketball popular among Native Americans from Wounded Knee to Arizona. No less a source than The New Yorker has reported on Native American basketball, noting that the Lakota Nation Invitational in these parts has
evolved into one of the premier showcases for “rez ball,” the run-and-gun, offense-first style of play that first caught on at reservation high schools in the nineteen-eighties. Over the years, the L.N.I. has widened its scope to become a winter homecoming of sorts for Native Americans all across the Dakotas, and a vital platform for fostering Lakota culture.
If basketball serves as a community binder, the Street View traveler might suspect another community node in schools. The roads I took from Wounded Knee to Rapid City crossed vast space punctuated not by tiny town centers, but by multi-purpose compounds built around schools. Long, straight roads meet not at a post office, bar, general store, and sprinkle of houses, but at a complex of school buildings, gyms, and residences.
A worn sign welcomes the open road traveler to Wounded Knee District School, but you have to pass through a tree-lined residential stretch before the school appears.
The poverty afflicting reservations is well documented — sources estimate Pine Ridge per capita incomes at less than $5000 with suicide, murder, and infant mortality rates among the nation’s worst — and the Street View traveler will notice.
My first clue was actually an artifact of the Obama-era economic stimulus package, a.k.a. the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. A graffitied sign indicates that a section of Wounded Knee received a portion of the $510 million tabbed for rehabilitating Native American housing.
Laid out on a couple of suburb-style arcs, the development strikes conflicting poses on the prairie-and-butte landscape: Neat-corner solid; chipped and trash-strewn. As a longtime ex-pat who spent many years in sub-Saharan Africa, I could not help but notice architecture, materials, and mode of disrepair resembling housing developments targeting Africa’s aspiring middle class.
Behold my old house in the Kanda neighborhood of Accra, Ghana:
On the road, another item that caught my attention was route signage. Instead of the highway shield of U.S. routes — or the circles or squares of state highways — I occasionally clicked past arrowheads with the letters BIA, for the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Indian Routes — per my guidebook, Wikipedia — are sections of road on reservations maintained by the federal BIA, a tribal nation, or both. (Later, I traveled along Bombing Range Road, a reference to the Badlands Bombing Range used for World War II and Cold War military training.)
As I approached and passed through the Badlands…
… space was accentuated by a lone pedestrian, a lone biker, a pair of horses, an abandoned church, an abandoned dinosaur statue attraction, a red barn, and a lone, friendly motorcyclist.
The first town beyond Pine Ridge and Badlands National Park proper did little to negate emptiness. Scenic, S.D., appears to be an archetypal wild West ghost town, but it does have a population of several dozen and in 2011 was bought in its entirety by the Philippines-based Iglesia ni Cristo Christian church — a curious story for another day, or another blog entirely.
By the time I scrolled into Rapid City, four-lane roads and office parks may have signaled a more personally familiar America. But Main Street — color, cars, and commercial — came as a sensory shock.
Ground covered since last post:
- Start: Gordon, Nebr.
- Batesland, S.D.
- Wounded Knee, S.D.
- Scenic, S.D.
- Creston, S.D.
- End: Rapid City, S.D.
Trip to date:
Blog post sources:
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Motorcycle Rallies All Look the Same | Post 29 | South Dakota
