Hardship: Most towns in Ziebach County are just meagre clusters of homes between cattle ranches. Families tend to live in dilapidated houses or run-down trailers where repairs are made as cheaply as possible

Basic services can be vulnerable. The tribe's primary health clinic doesn't have a CT scanner or a maternity ward. An ice storm last year knocked out power and water in places for weeks. And in winter, the gravel roads that connect much of the reservation can become impassable with snow and ice.

Nearly six decades after the reservation was created, the federal government began building a dam on the Missouri River, but the project caused flooding that washed away more than 100,000 acres of Indian land. After the flooding, the small town of Eagle Butte became home to the tribal headquarters and the centre of the reservation's economy.

‘There are things that have happened to us over many, many generations that you just can't fix in three or four years,’ said Kevin Keckler, the tribe's chairman. ‘We were put here by the government, and we had a little piece of land and basically told to succeed here.’

But prosperity never came. The county has been at or near the top of the poverty rankings for at least a decade. In 2009, the census defined poverty as a single person making less than $11,000 a year or a family of four making less than $22,000 a year.







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