Copyright © 1999 NLThomas
All Rights Reserved

Whiteclay, Neb., located 400 yards south of the Pine Ridge reservation, is a town with a registered population of 22 people and has four stores with one major line of business: the sale of beer to Indians.

One day during the summer of 1997, Frank LaMere, a Winnebago, who is executive director of the Nebraska Inter-Tribal Development Corp., visited Whiteclay. He counted 32 intoxicated Indians on the streets of Whiteclay at 5:15 a.m., and 47 drunks on the streets in the afternoon, some of whom were fighting each other. Several other Indians were passed out at the intersection of Nebraska Highway 87 and the road that leads to the reservation. Others were urinating on the street.

Shortly after he visited Whiteclay, LaMere asked the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission to shut Whiteclay down.

"I don't know what constitutes infractions of liquor laws in Whiteclay, but my good sense tells me there is something terribly wrong ... ," LaMere told Toni Heinzl of the Omaha World-Herald. "What I saw ... in Whiteclay would not be acceptable in Omaha or Lincoln," LaMere continued. "If we walked down O Street in Lincoln and saw 47 students (of the University of Nebraska) passed out in the streets or engaged in violent situations, we would consider jerking the licenses of those liquor establishments," he told the Liquor Control Commission.

The commission's executive director, Frosty Chapman, told LaMere that none of the four Whiteclay beer stores has been cited for liquor-law violations during the past 12 years. Commissioners said they cannot suspend liquor licenses without concrete evidence of violations.

LaMere next took his case to the state's governor, Ben Nelson, Sen. Bob Kerrey, the head of the state patrol, and the heads of several state agencies involved with social and health services. Col. Ron Tussing, superintendent of the Nebraska State Patrol, pledged to increase police presence in the area after visiting Whiteclay.

LaMere said he visited Whiteclay and decided to complain to the Liquor Control Commission on request of the Oglala Lakotas at Pine Ridge who felt that they had no voice in Nebraska politics.

The Pine Ridge reservation in 1996 had an alcoholism-related death rate of 61.9 per 100,000 people, twice the average for reservations, and nine times the national average of 7.1. LaMere said that $12.1 million a year is spent at Pine Ridge on health care for alcoholics, as well as on victims of alcohol-related traffic accidents.

The four beer stores in Whiteclay sold 4 million bottles or cans of beer in 1996, taking in $3 million, a 46 percent increase since 1994. Why the enormous jump in Whiteclay's clientele? One reason may be the rising population of Pine Ridge, swollen by Native Americans returning to the reservation following cutbacks in welfare benefits in many states.

In the meantime, the owners of the four Whiteclay beer stores stood solidly on what they believe to be the American right to get drunk. Don Schwarting, owner of the Arrowhead Inn, told Heinzl, "It's not the liquor stores. It's the individual person. It's their choice to do what they want to do."