Check out the new National Geographic story about the Great Plains. Excerpt:
If there was any surprise in the findings of the 2000 U.S. census, it wasn't so much the loss of population from half the counties in the Great Plains; those numbers had been ebbing for decades. The surprise was the disproportionate gain in counties that contain the region's Indian reservations, a growth that could not be pegged entirely to higher birthrates, better health care, casino jobs, and the availability of federally subsidized housing. Thousands of Native Americans long off the "rez"—Blackfeet, Crow, Flathead, Northern Cheyenne, Sioux—were putting the white man's cities behind them and heading for home. "A lot of these people returning from the cities are retirees," says Fred DuBray, a Sioux who manages the InterTribal Bison Cooperative near the Black Hills. "This is where they want to be. This is where their heart is." The heaviest surge of reverse migration has occurred on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, home of the Oglala Lakota people and already the most populous of the many reservations scattered across the Great Plains. Though tribal and federal officials disagree on the Pine Ridge numbers, Shannon County, where most of the Oglala Lakota live, registered a gain of 26 percent in the 2000 census, second highest for ten-year growth in the entire state.
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