Transcription
America can stand back right now and watch as my own people attack some of our traditional people for believing in our own Lota way of life. The media often portrays us as like these sad, like poverty-stricken people. You know, there isn't that, that focus on who we are today. We live on the poorest county in America. It's poverty-stricken, but just because we live in poverty don't mean we're poor. How do you feel American? I've always been to, we were Indian, we were Lota first before we were anything else, before we were Christian, before we were American.
Okay, so I've just woke up in the Rose Bud reservation here in South Dakota. I'm on a beautiful ranch with lots of chickens and horses. I'm going to be spending a few days here, um, sleeping in people's houses and in the Pine Ridge reservation about 2 hours from here. I want to find out what it's like to live here, but also how younger people can envisage their future and how they feel about modern-day America as a Native [Music] American.
Around here, it's kind of hard 'cause all the drugs and alcohol. It's a very hard place to grow up in a lot of ways. The majority of people that are working on the res, you know, you're, you either work at the tribal office or IHS. Not much to do around here. And when you do find something to do, you usually have to travel 20 miles or so. Longer, there's a lot of suicides and that kind of stuff. People, people lose hope. I mean, they feel, oh, maybe oppressed. We've all fallen as teenagers around here, and we've all experimented with alcohol and things. It's really, it's really sad to have alcohol [Music] here.
One thing about these kids here is they're survivors, and they're fighters, and a lot of them are wanting change. They want something different. They want something better than our adults are leaving them. We actually don't believe in the word Native American 'cause Native American, it also has the word American in it. They took everything from us. America's built on stolen rights. America is a stolen country. We used to live with everything, you know, and now we're on these little reservations and we're all clumped together, and we shouldn't be like that.
Like non-natives see us as, um, these historic people with the bucking cloth and headdress because you see the Washington Redskins, you see the Cleveland Indians, you see all of that, and it's a big joke. And you hear, everybody knows the, the phrase drunken [Music] [Applause] Indian. We may live in this really rough situation, you know, and it's very real, but that there is hope in that our culture is alive still. I think it's important for us to have, for our young people to have role models and to see other people going out and doing big things and coming back to the reservation and showing them that there's other things that out there, and this is what we're doing, and you can do this too, you [Music] know.
[Music] Of course, there's high rates of suicide, alcoholism on any reservation, but that's because of the lack of ability to express oneself, right? Hi, we are Scatter. I'm Scotty Clifford, and I'm Juliana Brown Eyes. We recently just acquired a record deal out in Los Angeles, so that'll be fun. As much as we can do, and just to show children here at home that we really need to get away from the poor, pitiful, pissed-off Indian. All that matters now is what we do for [Music] ourselves.
I'm going to need you to do something. I'm going to need you to trust me. This film is an opportunity to give, you know, our youth, our native youth, kind of, uh, these, these heroes and heroines to look up to, you know? Um, I think that that's something that I wanted when I was growing up was to see someone like myself. You don't see a lot of native characters, uh, kind of leading in, in, uh, in mainstream movies, you know, in big blockbuster movies. It's always, uh, uh, usually it's, you know, a predominantly white cast. I want to see our people, um, thrive and not get caught up in what outsiders think we are and stereotype us as, but rise up and show the world what we can do, basically. [Music]