Donors Ensure Christmas On Poor Reservation Walking Shield American Indian Society, Based In California, Looks Out For Kids
To these remote prairies, home to the first and poorest Americans, Santa Claus finally arrives.
Ignoring the chill December wind, 4-year-old Wambli Little Boy politely takes a new toy car presented to him and runs barefoot to play with it in front of the one-room shack his family calls home.
For Wambli, the car provides a brief respite from the reality of life on this reservation of 20,000 Sioux in southwest South Dakota. The Little Boy family home has no running water. A wood stove provides the only heat. Furnishings consist of one bed, a table and a couch whose springs long ago punched through the fabric.
Wambli’s siblings and two cousins either find space on the couch or sleep on the bare floor.
Christmas with a sparkling tree, gifts underneath and a big supper awaiting is beyond comprehension for most here; Wambli’s plastic toy car is one of some 15,000 toys collected and shipped to American Indian reservations this Christmas by the Walking Shield American Indian Society.
“I see these children and think of my own grandchildren,” says Walking Shield’s president, Phil Stevens of Newport Beach, Calif., whose paternal great-grandfather was an Oglala Sioux.
Walking Shield, which Stevens, 66, founded, is dedicated to programs aimed at helping American Indians, including the Christmas program that this year gathered the thousands of gifts and distributed them in mid-December to children on reservations in South Dakota, Montana, Utah, Oklahoma, Arizona and California.
Pine Ridge is considered the most destitute of the reservations in the country and Walking Shield, based in Tustin, Calif., hopes the gifts will help stay the hand of despair for the reservation’s children long enough for them to at least finish high school, something only 30 percent achieve now.
In dilapidated houses and rusted trailers across the reservation, the toys delivered this month brightened the Christmas season for children whose sum total of gifts might be a few pieces of candy and perhaps a pair of mittens.
At another makeshift house at the end of a rutted, unpaved road, Walking Shield volunteer Marci Glidden unloads cartons of fresh fruit for a family. Like others on the reservation, the house is held together with scrap boards and old tires on the roof to keep it from blowing off. Duct tape, bits of old carpet and blankets fend off the cold where glass windows once were.
Weeks before, Glidden had organized a toy drive for the reservation among students at Castille Elementary School in Mission Viejo, Calif., where two of her children attend. “Being here is a very emotional experience,” she says of the reservation. “As a mother and a human being, this is very hard.”
At Little Wound elementary school in the town of Kyle, in the middle of the reservation, the gift-giving program electrifies the hundreds of children gathered in the gym while teachers unpack and pass out the presents.
Parents and teachers distribute the gifts - Power Rangers, Lion King stuffed animals, Barbie dolls and other toys.
“This means a lot,” says Vienna Red Feather, whose 6-year-old son attends the school. “There is not much left for gifts after the bills are paid.”
Stephanie Standing Soldier, a teacher aide at the school, is likewise touched. “It’s a surprise, something special,” she says, “this never happens to us.”