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DM: Can you tell me a little bit more about some of your, some of your volunteering and activism? I know that you've been doing volunteer work with Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and also with some immigrant dialogues in Boulder.

AM: Yeah. The Pine Ridge work was something that got started about 1978 when I was still on -- not still, but was on the board of the American Friends Service Committee. And they had a Native American Peoples Task Force on the committee, on the board. And I visited Pine Ridge for the first time in 1978. And what struck me when I was there was not just the poverty, but the sense of hopelessness more than... it was the aura that I was struck by. And our project was dealing with women and children and health care issues, because clearly the Indian Health Service was not fulfilling its obligation to the Indians, American Indians or the Native Americans, whichever term you want to use. And so we're trying to build clinics where people could be taken care of for, better than they were getting from the Health Service. The Indian Health Service is a lot better than it used to be, but in 1978 it was just pretty desperate. The hospitals were non-existent, and those that were existent were horrible condition. So I think that that's the one piece that I got involved in. And that's my first experience in an Indian reservation. The people that I worked with then at that time were pretty, American Indian movement activists, which was really different than some of the people who were actually living on the reservation. Today, lot of people are coming back to the reservation, it's been rejuvenated, people want to come back and live (...) where their ancestors are buried. But in those days, it was really quite, quite different.

Today, when I go to Pine Ridge, I'm struck by how you don't see old cars. Isn't that amazing? Because 1978, the only thing you saw was old cars, just barely moving, rattling. Today, you find people who've come back to the reservation, there's the Oglala Lakota College, which is the university that was started from sociology department folks from University of Colorado. I don't know if you remember any of the people, but Howard Higman... well anyway, the people from the sociology department sponsored some of the students from, some of the people who had graduated from different universities and colleges, and who came to the University of Colorado to get a masters in sociology. And that was sort of the beginning of my connection with the reservation. One of the men I met who was the former tribal chair of the Oglala Nation said the State of South Dakota, which funds most of the educational programs does not have, does not fund art and music, and how important that was. And he asked if I would somehow manage to run the art and music programs for at least one of the schools. So I went to Oglala, which is one of the communities in the southeast corner, southwest corner of South Dakota, which is the more traditional Oglala Nation communities, and started running art and music camp in the summertime for Loneman School, it was called. And that's sort of my connection to them. So I've gotten, and that was, I think I've been doing it for about twelve years now. So every summer I take artists and musicians up with me, and we run a summer art and music camp for about two weeks sometimes, sometimes three weeks, but mostly two weeks. This year I'm gonna go -- I'm just gonna do the logistical stuff 'cause I can no longer walk around the classroom, but I'll take care of the, setting up the schedule. And I know everybody so I could set up the things like that. So we're gonna take two artists and one musician and run summer school.

<End Segment 30> - Copyright ©2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.