# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cultural Appropriation vs. Appreciation | CBC Radio | CBC

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Two back-to-back discoveries this year of the unmarked graves of hundreds of Indigenous children are sending shockwaves across Canada and throughout North American Indigenous communities. The children, who were students at residential boarding schools from the mid-1800s to mid-1900s, died far from home after having suffered brutal abuse and neglect. For decades, Indigenous children in both Canada and the United States were taken away from their families and sent to boarding schools, where they were forced to assimilate to Euro-American culture.

Last Thursday, Cadmus Delorme, Chief of the Cowessess First Nation, announced the discovery of 751 unmarked graves of mostly Indigenous children at the cemetery of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in the southeast corner of the Saskatchewan province.

In late May, Chief Roseanne Casimir, of the Tk'emlúps te Secwe̓pemc First Nation, announced that researchers using ground-penetrating radar (GPR) had discovered the unmarked burials of 215 students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Some children buried onsite had been as young as 3 years old, the First Nation noted in a statement.

After the Kamloops news broke, the Cowessess First Nation initiated the scanning of Marieval with GPR on June 2, Delorme reported in a virtual press conference.

"This is not a mass grave site. These are unmarked graves," Delorme says.

The finds have rekindled a national reckoning with the traumatic history of Canada's residential schooling system, a practice that systematically separated Indigenous children from their families and sent them to church- and government-operated boarding schools across the country.

On Twitter, the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FISN), the provincial federation of Indigenous groups, noted that survivors of residential schools in need of support can call a toll-free line at 800-721-0066 or a 24-hour crisis line at 866-925-4419.

The boarding school system "was a crime against humanity, an assault on a First Nation people," Chief Bobby Cameron, of FISN, tells Ian Austen and Dan Bilefsky of the New York Times.

"The only crime we ever committed as children was being born Indigenous," says Cameron.

Canada's National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 2008 to investigate the residential schools, stated in the 2015 report "What We Have Learned" that nearly 150,000 First Nation, Métis and Inuit students passed through the system. About 150 schools operated in the country in total, from the first schools founded in the few years before Canada's 1867 founding to the last school closure in the late 1990s. (The United States government funded about 350 such schools.)

For children sent to-or forced to attend-the Marieval and Kamloops schools, the experience was, according to the Canadian analysis, "lonely and alien." Students faced harsh punishment and were often prey to sexual and physical abuse from the priests, nuns, ministers or teachers that operated their institutions. Aboriginal cultures and the student's native languages were "demeaned and suppressed," in what the government now describes as an attempted "cultural genocide," per the report.

Some experts estimate that more than 4,000 children died at the schools, often from a combination of poor living conditions and disease, per the 2015 report. But Murray Sinclair, the Indigenous former judge who led the commission, tells the New York Times that the true total may actually be "well beyond 10,000."

Founded by Roman Catholic priests in 1889, the Marieval Indian Residential School operated until 1997, per the CBC News. The Canadian federal government began funding the school in 1901 and took over administration in 1969, until turning the school over to the Cowessess First Nation in 1987, report Amanda Coletta and Michael E. Miller for the Washington Post. The Roman Catholic church also founded and operated the Kamloops school for most of its years, from the 1890s to the late 1970s.

The Canadian federal government has set aside funds for Indigenous groups to carry out similar research at residential schools, to seek out and commemorate the dead, per the Post. "The findings in Marieval and Kamloops ... are a shameful reminder of the systemic racism, discrimination, and injustice that Indigenous peoples have faced-and continue to face-in this country," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau noted in a statement last week. "While we cannot bring back those who were lost, we can-and we will-tell the truth of these injustices, and we will forever honour their memory."

On Thursday, amidst renewed pleas from Indigenous leaders to Pope Francis, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, to apologize, as Alec Salloum reports for the Regina Leader-Post, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Regina Donald Bolen said he and others were trying to bring about an apology for the church's role in operating boarding schools and perpetuating the abuse of Indigenous children. As Matthew S. Schwartz reported for NPR earlier this month, the Pope offered his condolences regarding the Kamloops discovery but stopped short of offering a full apology for the church's actions-despite consistent urging from the Canadian federal government.

This week, spurred in part by the discovery at Kamloops, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced plans to investigate the "troubled legacy of federal boarding school policies" in the United States. Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, recently wrote about her own family's history with boarding schools, including her great-grandfather who attended the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.

Like Canada, the "United States also has a history of taking Native children from their families in an effort to eradicate our culture and erase us as a people," she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. "I am a product of these horrific assimilationist policies," she added.

"The lasting and profound impacts of the federal government's boarding school system have never been appropriately addressed."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
751 Unmarked Graves Discovered Near Former Indigenous School in Canada

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Two back-to-back discoveries this year of the unmarked graves of hundreds of Indigenous children are sending shockwaves across Canada and throughout North American Indigenous communities. The children, who were students at residential boarding schools from the mid-1800s to mid-1900s, died far from home after having suffered brutal abuse and neglect.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Growing Up Trans (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What neo-Nazis have inherited from original Nazism | DW Documentary

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Black Art: In the Absence of Light (2021) | Official Trailer | HBO

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Problem With Apu - Official Trailer | truTV

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Adam Ruins Everything - Why Divorce is Actually a Good Thing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gabby Petito: What is Missing White Woman Syndrome? | USA TODAY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
ObGyn Reacts to Virginity Testing Daughters | Rapper T.I. & Deyjah Harris

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Slim Hopes: Advertising & the Obsession With Thinness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Science of Racism | Creators for Change

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, United States - Donald Morrison's one-room home, hidden behind a row of trees, can only be reached via a half-kilometre dirt path.

He lives on his family's ancestral land. His uncle's and brother's trailer homes are nearby. Donald's yard is dotted with rusting automobiles - decaying and half-dismembered, excavated for car parts.

A few metres from the wooden steps leading to his front door sits the decrepit structure - made from a pop-up trailer, scrap wood and tarps - that he lived in for two decades before the local charity Families Working Together built him a tiny home in 2011.

Donald, 60, has lived on his family's land his whole life. Time passes slowly in his corner of the Pine Ridge Reservation, and at no point in his six decades have local authorities connected his family's miniature community of shacks and trailers to the reservation's electricity grid or provided them with running water.

They use car batteries and generators for a few hours of electricity a day, and Donald heats up a five-gallon bucket of water on a wood stove to bathe and wash his clothes a few times a week.

The Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which encompasses more than 2.8 million acres, was established in 1889 as Camp 334 for indigenous prisoners of war as white colonists pressed westward across the North American continent.

It is home to the Oglala Lakota, a tribe that is part of the Sioux people.

Much like Native American reservations across the United States, the 38,000-person indigenous community is disconnected from the state's economic lifelines and untouched by development.

Among the most impoverished of these reservations, Pine Ridge is plagued by an 80 to 90 percent unemployment rate with a median individual income of $4,000 a year, according to the Re-Member nonprofit organisation's 2007 statistics.

The US Census Bureau's 2014 study found that more than 52 percent of residents in Oglala Lakota, the largest of Pine Ridge's three counties, lived below the poverty line.

Against this backdrop of poverty and joblessness, public health has suffered, according to Re-Member. More than 80 percent of residents suffer from alcoholism. A quarter of children are born with foetal alcohol syndrome or similar conditions. Life expectancy - 48 years for men, 52 for women - is the second-lowest in the western hemisphere, behind only the Caribbean country Haiti.
OPINION: Native Lives Matter goes beyond police brutality
The tuberculosis and diabetes rates are eight times the national averages, while the cervical cancer rate is five times more than the US average.

On a bright but chilly afternoon in late October, Donald walks through his yard, past the outhouse, around the old rusting sedan his dog is chained to, and arrives at the bundle of firewood he chopped earlier in the week. He moves some inside his home and emerges after a few moments.

A bundle of wires connects the battery of his Ford pickup truck to a rumbling generator on his porch. This source of electricity allows him to watch a few hours of television each night before bed.

Donald and his siblings never attended school. And while he understands a good amount of English, he never learned to fluently speak any language other than his mother tongue, Lakota.

Although Channels Five, Nine and Twelve broadcasted the highly publicised presidential debates between Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican counterpart Donald Trump, Donald explains that he was only able to watch the highlights on the news.

"It doesn't really make a difference to us here," he says of the forthcoming elections.

With neither Trump nor Clinton speaking to their specific needs, many Pine Ridge residents say they have been forgotten by mainstream society, abandoned by politicians and neglected by state institutions.

After years of pleading with the local tribal government - which administers the reservation on a semi-autonomous basis - and county authorities for running water and electricity, Donald resigned himself to spending his remaining years without either. "I eventually gave up," he recalls. "They just say they can't help me. It's a waste of time."

Donald and his 67-year-old brother Roland, who lives in a trailer home a five-minute walk over the subtle hills that bisect their family's land, survive the first two weeks of each month on food stamps.

During the second half of each month, they get by on canned meat and ramen noodles donated by charities and locals. When the donations aren't enough and they have enough gas money between them to make the 48-kilometre drive to the nearest town, they get boxes of scrap meat from a meat processing facility.

Roland left the reservation for the first time in his life in April, when he was airlifted to a hospital in Rapid City for an emergency surgery after he slipped in the snow and shattered his hip while chopping firewood.

READ MORE: America's hidden homeless - Life in the Starlight Motel

Only able to move with the help of a walker, Roland, who wears a dirt-covered jacket and repeatedly pulls up his oversized jeans as they sag from his waist, says he will never be able to pay the $2,000 in medical bills through the small amounts of cash he gets doing odd jobs for neighbours and ranchers. "I can't work until the spring now," he says.

Roland went to a voter registration booth in town last month to get free coffee, but the brothers say neither of them intend to vote on November 8.

The office of John Yellowbird Steele, the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe authorities in Pine Ridge, did not return Al Jazeera's numerous calls for a comment on this article.

The tribal government exercises jurisdiction over crimes committed by tribal members and other indigenous people on the reservation. Over the years, however, federal authorities have reduced tribal sovereignty on Native American reservations through various pieces of legislation.

'Intense conditions of colonialism'

More than 5.1 million people in the US identify as fully or partially Native American or Alaska Native, according to the US Census Bureau. Up to 2.5 million identify as fully indigenous Native American or Alaska Native. Of that total, more than half do not live on reservations.

Despite widely varying conditions in indigenous communities, the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs estimates that "per capita income in Indian areas is about half that of the US average, and the poverty rate is around three times higher".
READ MORE: Life in the colonias of Texas
Reservations, including Pine Ridge, also exercise varying degrees of semi-sovereignty under the US federal government.

Nick Estes, a University of New Mexico PhD candidate whose research focuses on indigenous history and decolonisation, argues that the persistent problems stemming from Pine Ridge's intergenerational poverty are rooted in America's colonial history.

Misunderstanding the ways in which Native bodies are made poor and [are] criminalised makes it impossible to understand the structure of settler colonialism as a precondition for that poverty

Nick Estes, a University of New Mexico PhD

Clinton, Trump and the rest of the American political establishment are incapable of providing lasting solutions for the Lakota of Pine Ridge or the rest of the 566 federally recognised tribal entities in the US, he says.

The present-day poverty gripping many indigenous communities - on and off reservations - is firmly rooted in the historical laundry list of massacres, ethnic cleansing, land theft and broken treaties endured by indigenous people in North America, says Estes. "The fact is that Natives are poor not because they failed at civilisation. Before colonisers came we were not considered poor. We had plenty," he argues.

On December 29, 1890, the US army carried out one of the bloodiest massacres inflicted on indigenous people in North America at Wounded Knee, where soldiers killed between 150 and 300 Lakota led by Chief Spotted Elk (also known as Chief Big Foot) for defying the reservation borders imposed on them by American authorities.

Civilians were subsequently hired to dump the bodies in a mass grave.

More than 100,000 indigenous people were forced to attend Christian boarding schools that started with President Ulysses Grant's 1869 Peace Policy and continued throughout the late 20th Century.

Separated from their families, children in these schools "experienced a devastating litany of abuses, from forced assimilation and grueling labour to widespread sexual and physical abuse", recounts a 2007 Amnesty International examination.

In 1973 on Pine Ridge, around 200 members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), a civil rights organisation founded in 1968, and Oglala Lakota activists occupied Wounded Knee to protest against a political crackdown by tribal president Dick Wilson.

Wilson, who had created a private militia to suppress dissidents, was backed by US law enforcement, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The activists demanded that Wilson resign and the US government respect treaties.
READ MORE: Standing Rock tribe protests over North Dakota pipeline
After a 71-day stand-off with law enforcement, the activists ended the occupation without securing Wilson's resignation. Dozens of the tribal government's opponents were killed in the subsequent years and the US government refused to interfere, arguing that it could not force the autocratic leader to step down.

In 1977, AIM activist Leonard Peltier was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison for allegedly killing two FBI agents in Oglala, a town on Pine Ridge, two years earlier. Amnesty International and other rights groups have cited "concerns about the fairness" of his trial and conviction, and many activists consider Peltier a political prisoner.

"Misunderstanding the ways in which Native bodies are made poor and [are] criminalised makes it impossible to understand the structure of settler colonialism as a precondition for that poverty," Estes says.

Citing "the intense conditions of colonialism", Estes links this history to present-day poverty, as well as increased rates of police killings and incarceration . "It's not just something [that happened] in the past. You can't heal from something that continually inflicts wounds upon you. The trauma is continually being inflicted."

Children pay poverty's price

Local teacher Cheryl Locke lives in a small wooden home, blue with a white trim, in a cul-de-sac at the top of a hill in the Evergreen neighbourhood north of Porcupine, a town situated 38 kilometres from the Pine Ridge's primary town and namesake. She shares the two-bedroom abode with her four adult children and two small grandchildren.

Cheryl, who has been a fifth-grade teacher for more than 16 years in Pine Ridge, has witnessed generation after generation of children pay the consequences of poverty, alcoholism and rising drug use.

As she speaks, her six-year-old grandson Tyrell sits on the gray linoleum living room floor and practices tying his shoes. Hanging on the wall behind him is a painting of Sitting Bull, an indigenous chief who united the Sioux tribes in the 19th Century.
READ MORE: The US homeless camps offering a lesson in democracy
Born in nearby Wounded Knee, Cheryl moved off the reservation for university and returned to help give back to her community through counselling and teaching. Explaining that many of her students live in crowded homes with multiple families and little parental supervision, she says: "There's overcrowding and no [study] supplies at home, or no beds. Some of them sleep on floors or wherever they can, and then they're expected to perform 100 percent."

During the first few years that she was a teacher, Cheryl would grow frustrated when students came to class tired and unprepared. "After a while, I understood where they're coming from because of what their conditions were at home."

To make matters worse, teachers like Cheryl often struggle with underfunding and a lack of school supplies, turning to nonprofit organisations for help.
READ MORE: Voices of the Heart
"Some of them - maybe their parents were out and they weren't supervised .... Some of them get themselves up and get on the bus .... One of them mentioned [recently] that there wasn't enough room in their house .... They said 'There are people sleeping on the floor of the kitchen'," she explains.

With many parents on the Pine Ridge Reservation suffering from alcoholism and a growing number of locals grappling with addictions to narcotics and stimulants, like methamphetamines, Cheryl has to play the role of social worker as well as teacher.

The hardest part of the school week, she says, is the first two days, when many students return from restless weekends.

"Thursday and Friday they dread so much - they don't want to go home; because some of them will be going back into homes [with] drinking or they'll be neglected and they'll be caring for themselves," Cheryl says, explaining that many students don't get a proper meal beyond the school cafeteria.

Teachers on the Pine Ridge reservation struggle to find ways of providing hope to younger generations amid the lack of educational and professional opportunities. The suicide rate in the reservation is twice the national average for all ages, and four times the national average for teenagers, according to Re-Member.

Cheryl says she felt an overwhelming sense of helplessness and heartache when a former student of hers committed suicide last year. The student, who had advanced to the eighth grade, was found by her younger brother, who was in Cheryl's class at the time.

"The student, who I'm not going to name, was a very smart girl. She was top of the class," she remembers solemnly. "Her brother found her ... it really affected him and he [later] tried to do the same thing."

Between December 2014 and February 2015, five local youth aged between 12 and 15 committed suicide, local media reported at the time. The streak of suicides prompted tribal officials to declare a state of emergency.

Yet the suicides weren't limited to the young.

Down the road from Cheryl's home, her brother Darrell works on his car as a powerful gust of wind blows dust across his barren lawn.

Darrell, who survives on disability cheques from the federal government due to a leg injury that rendered him unable to work more than a decade ago, saunters across the yard and sits on a plastic lawn chair.

He unfolds a newspaper from December 2014, pointing to the front page picture of his 30-year-old son Allen, who was shot and killed by police at his home in Rapid City, where he had moved 10 years earlier to find work.
READ MORE: The grandma feeding the North Dakota pipeline protest
Standing with his young son Sincere, Allen wears a backwards baseball cap, a striped blue polo shirt, black jeans and beige work boots. There is a smile on Sincere's face and an oversized shirt draped from his shoulders. "Another Native shot dead by Rapid City police," the headline reads.

"Allen was a working man ... he loved his family," Darrell says. "I thought I'd be the first one to go - at least before my kids. I didn't think this would ever happen. Nothing like this. It was a big shock to me."

The police had been called to the house by Allen's wife, who was worried because he was intoxicated, under the influence of drugs and sitting on the kitchen floor with a knife.

A statement later released by the police claimed that Allen was holding a knife and charged the officer. Witnesses admitted that Allen had a knife.

"It's a good day to die," the report claims Allen said. It also described the incident as "suicide by cop" and said a toxicology report found alcohol, marijuana and methamphetamines in Allen's system.

'A liquid genocide'

Along the winding roads on the outskirts of the village of Oglala, there are small neighbourhoods of a dozen or so shacks and ramshackle trailers. Many of them are federally-funded developments.

Cars pause by the side of the road and wait for a row of vehicles led by men on horseback. The men hold flags of the Oglala Lakota Nation, the American Indian Movement and Turtle Island, a name many indigenous people use when speaking of North America.

Alcohol was used as a tool of manipulation to take our lands, take our resources - they needed to keep us drunk and deluded

Olowan Martinez

Olowan Martinez sits on the back porch of her aunt's home in Oglala, as the setting sun gradually disappears behind the hilltops.

Olowan, a 43-year-old mother of three, isn't paying attention to the current presidential elections.

"Politicians give big words and big promises," she says. "When it comes down to it, the people back here on these dirt roads are forgotten."

Olowan says she struggled with alcoholism for years before eventually giving up alcohol 11 years after her mother's death.

Alcohol has inflicted tragedy upon her family time and again. Both of her parents died of alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver. Her brother was killed by a drunk man. Her 16-year-old daughter's boyfriend was killed by drunk driver in a head-on collision last year.

Describing alcohol as "the white man's piss", she argues that widespread alcohol and drug use were used to prevent indigenous people from organising politically: "Alcohol was used as a tool of manipulation to take our lands, take our resources - they needed to keep us drunk and deluded."

Since the death of her parents, Martinez has become one of the Lakota activists leading the charge against beer stores in Whiteclay, a town on the South Dakota-Nebraska border just three kilometres from the Pine Ridge village.

Whiteclay is a single road bisecting two columns of decrepit stores, most of them shuttered. Among the closed businesses are four small beer stores that sell a combined average of 13,000 cans per day, or upwards of four million a year, according to the Alcohol Justice watchdog group. Most is believed to be smuggled into Pine Ridge, where alcohol has been banned by the tribal government.

With a population of 12, Whiteclay is actually a shell entity registered as a town, with a few small buildings and no neighbourhoods. The closest police station is located more than 30 kilometres away.

In 2013, Martinez was arrested in Whiteclay as protesters blocked off the road into town to prevent delivery trucks from taking beer to the stores. She was dealt a series of charges related to allegations of vandalism, criminal mischief and making threats. The legal proceedings are ongoing.
READ MORE: Dakota pipeline - 'It's our right to live unharmed'
Citing the high rates of alcoholism and foetal alcohol syndrome, she says Whiteclay's beer stores are creating a "liquid genocide" against the Lakota people in Pine Ridge by selling alcohol to people who suffer from intergenerational alcoholism.

"Whiteclay has been there for more than 100 years with one intention - to sell us alcohol. And that's what it does," she says, laying the blame for increased violence at the feet of the storeowners.

In August, Sherry Wounded Foot, a Lakota woman from Pine Ridge, drove into Whiteclay. The next morning, the 50-year-old was found beaten to the brink of death. Police suspect she was attacked and assaulted, although no officers were in Whiteclay at the time of the incident.

Wounded Foot died 12 days later. Her family worries that the mystery surrounding her death will go unsolved, according to local media.

To make matters worse, the advent of drugs, namely methamphetamines, in recent years have left Olowan horrified. Over the summer, she says she ran down dealers in her neighbourhood and nearby villages to warn them not to speak to her children. "We were going to houses and made sure they knew not to speak to my children," she says.
READ MORE: The Fight for Native Families
On October 16, Olowan's nephew, Vinnie Brewer, was shot dead in what was believed to be a dispute over a methamphetamine deal. Several men walked up to him in the parking lot of a youth centre and opened fire, killing him on the spot.

In response to Brewer's death, tribal police put curfews in place for those under 18 - 9.00 pm on school nights and 10pm at the weekends. There are just 24 police officers on the reservation, but an additional 20 officers have been requested from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an agency within the US federal government.

Speaking at a press conference following the killing, tribal president John Yellowbird Steele said: "If a person sits down here, he can connect the dots. It's several incidents of our tribal members being murdered. And it's all related to drugs."

Back in her home the day after her nephew's killing, Olowan smokes a cigarette as she speaks about his death. "I'm scared for my people. I hope we come together and start policing our own neighbourhoods," she says.

"With the Whiteclay issue already being [present], I'm hoping there is enough awareness about saving the minds of the young people [in regards to methamphetamines]."

'What can I do to make it better?'

Jerome High Horse, a 66-year-old from Pine Ridge's Wanblee village, helps his elderly neighbours by standing guard outside their homes when there seems to be a peak in robberies by drug dealers and criminals.

He is a tall man with a single braid that protudes from beneath his cowboy hat. On his left forearm, he has a homemade tattoo, faded from black to grey over the past four decades: "Jethro N' Theresa", it reads.

Jerome sits on his porch smoking a cigar. Behind him, a horse head is painted on the sidewall of his house.

The father of seven believes that standing guard is part of his duty to create a safer environment for people already struggling with poverty and other problems.

His adult life has been split between working as an engineer off the reservation and returning home for lengthy periods to carry out charity projects.

Along with his parents and nine brothers and sisters, he grew up in a two-room shack with a dirt floor. Although he was able to pull himself out, he says the level of poverty and institutional neglect gripping the reservation makes it impossible for most people to be as lucky as he's been.

When Jerome was a teenager, he was sent to a Christian boarding school. On the first day, he says the teachers and nuns forced the students to dip their heads in vats of chemicals.

"They took all the boys behind one of the buildings by the garage [at the school]. They dipped our head in [the tubs]. They thought, as Indians, we are lousy and have bugs," he recalls, shaking his head.
READ MORE: Native Americans to Pharrell: We're #NotHappy
The next morning, they shaved the students' heads. Whenever he spoke in Lakota, the nuns would slap the tops of his hands with a ruler.

"When I was 14 years old, I decided there's got to be a better way to live; because I've seen the struggles, the disrepair. The thing that kept us together was [doing things like] cutting wood for the community."

After graduating from high school and moving off the reservation, Jerome served two years, from 1970 to 1971, in the US army during the Vietnam war.

In 2010, Jerome and his wife Theresa retired and moved back to Pine Ridge. Within two years, they founded Families Working Together, a local charity to help impoverished residents of the reservation. "I asked, 'What can I do to make it better?'" he says.

Families Working Together collects donations from around the nation, including money, food, building supplies, medicine and other necessities. They are currently building a home for a homeless father and son in Wanblee on a lot of land acquired from the tribal government.

"We are always bringing back truckloads of food and anything and everything you can think of. And we have a lot of people who don't have electricity and water,"Jerome says. His organisation also builds tiny homes and does home repairs for people living in crumbling shanties.

"That's how we operate. We all take care of each other. I grew up with that concept. I was always led to believe that, as Indian people, we're going to be treated different because of who we are. If there's one value we have, it's to look out for each other. That way of life is a good way of life."

Back in her home, Olowan Martinez says the Pine Ridge reservation shouldn't be the subject of pity. "People look at our communities here on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation ... and all you see is the poverty, the violence and the bad. But there's so much good that came from here - not only for our homeland but for all indigenous nations," she says.

"They tried to wipe us out, they stuck us on this reservation, this POW camp, and thought we're going to die off. But this is our land. We were made from this land. So, we survive and here we are today. We're still here."
Find Patrick Strickland on Twitter: @P_Strickland_

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Life on the Pine Ridge Native American reservation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, United States - Donald Morrison's one-room home, hidden behind a row of trees, can only be reached via a half-kilometre dirt path. He lives on his family's ancestral land. His uncle's and brother's trailer homes are nearby. Donald's yard is dotted with rusting automobiles - decaying and half-dismembered, excavated for car parts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Our trainwrecks, ourselves: Why women hate on hot messes and other toxic female tropes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Award-winning news and culture, features breaking news, in-depth reporting and criticism on politics, business, entertainment and technology.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Good dads -- the real game changer | Dr. Meg Meeker | TEDxTraverseCity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Dads, says Meg Meeker, are the real gamechangers for kids and the culture, because they are the KEY in developing a child's healthy self esteem, in keeping kids in school and seeking higher education and in staying out of trouble.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In theaters now! http://www.thehuntinggroundfilm.com/#screenings From the team behind THE INVISIBLE WAR, comes a startling exposé of rape crimes on U.S. campuses, institutional cover-ups and the brutal social toll on victims and their families. Weaving together verité footage and first-person testimonies, the film follows survivors as they pursue their education while fighting for justice - despite harsh retaliation, harassment and pushback at every level.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We took a look at income equality by highlighting how much more (time and money) it costs to be a woman vs. a man. Model: Rayna Starr (@raynastarr) Still haven't subscribed to Glamour on YouTube?►► http://glmr.me/ytSUBSCRIBE Beauty tips straight from the pros.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"In all of our years of tracking, we've never seen this many [hate] groups," Heidi Beirich told CBS News correspondent Tony Dokoupil. Beirich is the director of Southern Poverty Law Center's (SPLC) Intelligence Project, which monitors hate group activity online. "We've never seen their ideas penetrating the mainstream the way they are. I would say most Americans don't realize how much of this there is."

It's been a little over a week since neo-Nazis marched in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting "Jews will not replace us." In the intervening days, debate has raged over just how America's national conversation has become a real-time discussion of white supremacy and its place in the U.S., muddied by President Trump's ambiguity on the matter. The groups in question -- who openly espouse racist views and have felt newly emboldened since the recent presidential campaign -- find themselves pushing into the mainstream.

Dokoupil traveled to Alabama for "CBSN: On Assignment" to speak with Beirich, before heading to Boston for last weekend's rally.

The flashpoints of this debate have been, for once, out in the open -- manifesting as public protests and counter-protests in the streets of major cities. Saturday saw a so-called "free speech" protest on Boston Common, organized by right-wing elements but dwarfed by its anti-supremacy counter-protest from the left. A similar, if smaller, pair of gatherings clashed in a shouting match in Laguna Beach, California.

The nation witnessed what's considered one of the largest white supremacy marches in decades as hundreds of demonstrators gathered in Charlottesville. During the rally, a car rammed into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters, injuring dozens and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. All this against a backdrop of a national debate around the rights and wrongs of maintaining statues that celebrate the Confederacy.

The SPLC estimates that there are currently more than 900 hate groups -- organizations with beliefs that attack an entire group of people -- operating in the country. Many of these hate groups subscribe to the ideals of white supremacy.

In fact, Beirich says the number of hate groups has doubled over the past two decades -- a trend that appears to follow the impact minorities, financial crisis and political elections have on society.

According to the SPLC, there's a new generation of so-called white nationalism being run by millennials. Matt Heimbach, one of the main organizers of the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, is the face of this movement.

"Well, we have energy, I think, because Donald Trump's election showed that the majority of white American's social, working class America believes in sovereignty," Heimbach told "CBSN: On Assignment."

Heimbach represents a minority who feel strongly that "white America" is under growing threat. A recent HuffPost/YouGov poll found that Trump voters are more likely to believe that discrimination against whites is worse than discrimination against any other group. In the aftermath of Charlottesville, white supremacists feel re-energized. Their goal: to infiltrate the mainstream.

Heimbach, along with many other self-proclaimed white supremacists, deny that the Holocaust ever happened. He says his intent is to create an all-white nation -- excluding African-Americans, Jews and homosexuals.

Starting this fall, Heimbach will begin recruiting candidates to run in local elections. At this time, he claims about 1,000 people have joined his political party.

"We're going to be running through our local school board, for county council," he said. "Being able to have an influence in the community to show nationalists can have better governments than the two broken political parties."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hate Rising: White supremacy's rise in the U.S.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"In all of our years of tracking, we've never seen this many [hate] groups," Heidi Beirich told CBS News correspondent Tony Dokoupil. Beirich is the director of Southern Poverty Law Center's (SPLC) Intelligence Project, which monitors hate group activity online. "We've never seen their ideas penetrating the mainstream the way they are.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Me Too': How Alyssa Milano's Two-Word Protest Against Sexual Harassment Went Viral

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Actress Alyssa Milano called for women to post the phrase amid debate about sexual harassment and sexual assault.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Former neo-Nazi and current anti-hate activist, Christian Picciolini, explains why the threat of white extremism must not be ignored.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
Post by Vox.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Nev Schulman may be known for hosting the popular MTV show Catfish, but he just tackled another jaw-dropping societal issue: the need for better parental leave policies in the United States. In a video made with ATTN, Nev and his fiancée, Laura Perlongo, detail the very different policies that currently exist for maternity and paternity leave, which basically imply that it's the mother's responsibility to stay home after giving birth. The couple, who are expecting a baby girl, talk about how important it is that both parents are there for not only the newborn, but for each other.

"Globally, moms get an average of 106 days of paid leave for a new baby, while dads only get an average of seven," Nev says in the video. Then Laura is seen putting together a crib with a power drill and comments, "These policies are totally sexist." The video has racked up over 35 million views on Facebook, and we can't help but thank Nev and Laura for highlighting this issue.

Nev Schulman may be known for hosting the popular MTV show Catfish, but he just tackled another jaw-dropping societal issue: the need for better parental leave policies in the United States. In a video made with ATTN, Nev and his fiancée, Laura Perlongo, detail the very different policies that currently exist for maternity and paternity leave, which basically imply that it's the mother's responsibility to stay home after giving birth. The couple, who are expecting a baby girl, talk about how important it is that both parents are there for not only the newborn, but for each other.

"Globally, moms get an average of 106 days of paid leave for a new baby, while dads only get an average of seven," Nev says in the video. Then Laura is seen putting together a crib with a power drill and comments, "These policies are totally sexist." The video has racked up over 35 million views on Facebook, and we can't help but thank Nev and Laura for highlighting this issue.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This Eye-Opening Video About Paternity Leave Is Guaranteed to Leave You Scratching Your Head

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nev Schulman may be known for hosting the popular MTV show Catfish, but he just tackled another jaw-dropping societal issue: the need for better parental leave policies in the United States.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Another Wave Of Bomb Threats Target Jewish Centers Across The U.S. | NBC Nightly News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On Tuesday, 14 bomb threats were made by phone or e-mail in ten U.S. states, bringing the total threats since January to 135, as all 100 U.S. senators called for "swift action" from the Trump admin. " Subscribe to NBC News: http://nbcnews.to/SubscribeToNBC " Watch more NBC video: http://bit.ly/MoreNBCNews NBC News is a leading source of global news and information.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Watch the moving trailer for Katie Couric's 'Gender Revolution' documentary

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The National Geographic special explores the complexities of gender through a social and scientific lens

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In a new video, HuffPost Rise invited four Muslim Americans to talk about what it's like to be a Muslim in America today.

The interviewees spoke about how simple acts of devotion -- like wearing a hijab, growing a beard, or fasting -- can be misconstrued and misunderstood by those who are biased against Islam.

Rowaida Abdelaziz, a social media editor at The Huffington Post, spoke in the video about how these material signs of faith have become politicized. During the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings, broadcast stations rummaged through the home of the suspected shooters, pointing out items like a prayer rug and a Quran.

"If someone went through my apartment they'd see those exact same things," Abdelaziz said. "These are things that I use for my personal life, to get me through my day to day, that emphasize my spirituality."

"And all of a sudden, they are being equated to the tools of a terrorist," she continued.

Imam Khalid Latif, chaplain of New York University's Islamic Center, said that many Muslims have to choose between practicing their faith and "just being able to live day to day."

"This is a population that has been marginalized in every sense of the word," Latif said.

The question many American Muslims are asking themselves, according to Latif, is: "How do I fit into a society that is not always accepting of me?"
Watch the video above for more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Muslim Americans Open Up About How Islamophobia Has Affected Their Lives

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a new video, HuffPost Rise invited four Muslim Americans to talk about what it's like to be a Muslim in America today. The interviewees spoke about how simple acts of devotion -- like wearing a hijab, growing a beard, or fasting -- can be misconstrued and misunderstood by those who are biased against Islam.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Inside The $5bn Industry Of Child Beauty Pageants

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pink and Blue: Communicating Gender to Children | Anthony Schullo | TEDxNorthCentralCollege

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Each of the charities charged were the subject of extensive reporting by CNN in 2013. And in each instance, none of the four charities would comment. We were ordered out of the building at the Cancer Fund of America in Knoxville, Tennessee, and were the object of an obscene gesture by the CEO of The Breast Cancer Society in Mesa, Arizona.

The Cancer Fund of America is run by James Reynolds Sr. His son James Reynolds Jr. is the CEO of the Breast Cancer Society. Another charity, the Children's Cancer Fund of America, is run by Rose Perkins, the ex-wife of the elder James Reynolds. He's also the CEO of the fourth charity, Cancer Support Services.

The government says the charities claimed to provide direct support for cancer patients, breast cancer patients and children with cancer.

"These were lies," the government's complaint says.

Jessica Rich, chief of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, says that in all, the charities spent about 97% of donations they received either on private fundraisers or on themselves. Only 3%, she says, went to help actual cancer patients.

According to the complaint, funds donated to help cancer patients instead went for personal use, in often lavish ways.

"[D]onated funds were used to pay for vehicles, personal consumer goods, college tuition, gym memberships, Jet Ski outings, dating website subscriptions, luxury cruises, and tickets to concerts and professional sporting events," the complaint says.

"Most of what we are doing is bringing actions against fraud," says Rich. "And this is as about as bad as it can get: taking money away from cancer victims."

There was also what the FTC calls "rampant nepotism" at play in all of the charities. For instance, at the Breast Cancer Society, James Reynolds Jr. hired his wife, Kristina Hixson, to be his public relations manager. The complaint states that he also hired Hixson's two sisters, her son by a previous marriage, her mother and her step-nephew. According to the complaint, Hixson's mother had been a caterer. At the Breast Cancer Society, she was hired to write grant applications.

Moreover,on their tax returns, each charity claimed millions of dollars in donated goods shipped to overseas locations on behalf of cancer patients. The complaint says the charities never owned any of the goods in question and simply paid a fee to a private firm in South Carolina to ship the goods, called gifts-in-kind. CNN went to Guatemala in early 2014 to investigate anyone who may have received those gifts and could find no evidence that they even existed.

As a result of the complaint, two of the charities say they will close their doors. Both the Breast Cancer Society and the Children's Cancer Fund of America are being dissolved, according to the complaint. James Reynolds Jr. faces a judgment of more than $60 million in fines and Rose Perkins, who runs the Children's Cancer Fund of America, faces a judgment of around $30 million.

Under a proposed final order, the judgment against Reynolds Jr. will be suspended when he pays $75,000. The judgments against Children's Cancer Fund of America will be partly met upon liquidation of its assets, and the judgment against Perkins will be suspended due to her inability to pay.

The FTC's Jessica Rich, however, said there are few assets left. Government regulators will be lucky to recover $1 million, she told CNN.

As for James Reynolds Sr., he will contest the charges in the complaint, the government says. CNN hasn't yet been able to reach attorneys for Reynolds Sr., his son or Perkins for comment, but in a message posted on the Breast Cancer Society website, Reynolds Jr. said:

"While the organization, its officers and directors have not been found guilty of any allegations of wrong doing, and the government has not proven otherwise, our Board of Directors has decided that it does not help those who we seek to serve, and those who remain in need, for us to engage in a highly publicized, expensive, and distracting legal battle around our fundraising practices."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
government says four cancer charities are shams - cnn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Government says four cancer charities are shams - CNN

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Each of the charities charged were the subject of extensive reporting by CNN in 2013. And in each instance, none of the four charities would comment. We were ordered out of the building at the Cancer Fund of America in Knoxville, Tennessee, and were the object of an obscene gesture by the CEO of The Breast Cancer Society in Mesa, Arizona.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We move to an ABC news investigation. Chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross takes us inside programs that claim to perform gay conversions and here with a preview of his "20/20" special. For the last year we've been investigating places that many claim no longer exist. Camps where gay teens are sent by parents who want their children to change their sexuality. So watch this video. Take a slight left turn on to rural road. Reporter: We found what we were looking for down a dirt back road in Alabama. The blessed hope boys academy. ??? Reporter: A place where a Christian pastor will tell our ABC news undercover team that with the bible and sometimes a belt -- You know, this boy here claims to be homosexual. Reporter: Along with a $21,000 yearly fee, he knows how to deal with teenagers who consider themselves gay. It's going against the word of god. It is not bib likely right. Reporter: And he told our team that he gets written permission from parents to strike their child if they act up. I wouldn't do it just because for one just because he says he's queer. Reporter: This is just one of a number of places discovered by ABC news in a year-long investigation practicing a notion denounced by leading medical groups gay teens can choose to change their sexuality. For every camp like this there are a hundred more that nobody knows about that nobody's exposing on TV. Reporter: Including one place outside mobile, Alabama, unlicensed and surrounded by barbed wire, run by this man, William knot who calls himself a Christian pastor but has a track record of physical abuse and cruelty. Everybody was scared of him. Reporter: Lucas Greenfield a gay teen from Florida was sent to knot's camp at the age of 14. Isolation and beating and everything else. Because? They were assumed to be gay. Reporter: Gay was a sin. Gay is a sin. Gay is evil. Gay is the worst abomination of god. Reporter: Karen was a counselor at the camp who says she quit when she saw how pastor knot treated the teens. Knot is a sadist. You think so. I know so. Anybody that has names for their belts to chip children with on their bare bottoms is a sadist. We saw how this Christian pastor reacts to someone he does not like. I'm with ABC news. What did you do to those boys? I don't want to talk to you. Because I don't like you. Get away from me. This is how you treat the young boys. This is how I treat you. Get away from me. Reporter: What that so-called pastor did not know when we met him was he was about to face his own day of reckoning in the wake of our ABC news investigation, six of the teens who said that knot abused and tortured them agreed to testify and just two weeks ago after being found guilty he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the sentence the judge says in Alabama he hopes sends a message across the country. Wow. Names for his belts. Do parents know these things when they force their kids to go. Sometimes the cruelty only emerges after the parents leave but the parents sometimes have a hard time dealing with the sex sex sexuality and told with a bill of goods, the bible or belt they have a way to change their children. To one was more religious than my parents and I'm so grateful especially after seeing this how supportive they were of me as a gay woman and my family and friends and I'll never forget my mother saying, god loves you because of who he is, not because of anything you do or don't do. And I know you'll have much more. Essence of christianity right there. Love is love. More tonight on "20/20" and see how pastor knot treats those children.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Video: Undercover at a so-called gay conversion camp

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We move to an ABC news investigation. Chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross takes us inside programs that claim to perform gay conversions and here with a preview of his "20/20" special. For the last year we've been investigating places that many claim no longer exist.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Miss Representation is a 2011 American documentary film written, directed, and produced by Jennifer Siebel Newsom. It explores how mainstream media contribute to the under-representation of women in influential positions by circulating limited and often disparaging portrayals of women." Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Representation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The official trailer for White Like Me featuring Tim Wise, available Fall 2013. Help support the film (http://WhiteLikeMeMovie.org).