A bit of wisdom from a Lakota woman



Elsie Meeks is a Lakota woman who would prefer to work with her husband, Jim, on his ranch on the Pine Ridge. She'd rather be on a horse than in a business suit. But when she realized she had "people skills" that could help to improve the lives of her poverty-stricken neighbors she (sometimes grudgingly) became one of Indian country's top economic development leaders.

Elsie had an interesting comment the other day. She says the reservations have found that poverty became a commodity .... something poor communities could sell for money. But she says success would be a better commodity.

Elsie Meeks, who is now the executive director of the national First Nations Oweesta Corporation, recently received a $2 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to spur growth of private business on the Pine Ridge and Cheyenne River reservations in South Dakota and the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.



"We're all first-generation entrepreneurs," Meeks said during a Four Bands event at Eagle Butte. "In a way, we sold poverty. Tribes sold poverty, because that's how we got our funding."It takes a shift in thinking to sell success, and it can be a painful transition from relying on poverty to get grants and program money to relying on individual economic development to develop a community, tribe and reservation, she said.

"We can only have a better economy than we do now ... by teaching our kids about business and finances," said Meeks, who has spent two decades in programs aimed at developing business in Indian Country.

Her thoughts probably apply not just to Indian communities, but to rural America in general. Some of the most practical people we know are continually seeking federal government answers (as in money whenever they or their community experiences a bad break. Maybe if we emphasized success more often than "selling" failure for our own short-term gains, our own people (especially our young people) wouldn't have the idea that you have to leave rural America to succeed.