In March 2019, HuffPost sent me to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota, to cover the work of an affordable-housing program. My editors had a particular story in mind, and so I was dispatched to source the material to write it. The article would be a piece of “solutions journalism,” positive in outlook and neatly framed, part of a philanthropically funded series called “This New World.” My assignment letter included potential headlines: “How The Poorest County In The U.S. Is Solving The Housing Crisis”; “How The Poorest County In The U.S. Is Breaking The Poverty Cycle.”
But a week before I arrived in Pine Ridge, a different story began to unfold. The reservation was pummeled by a blizzard. Gusts reached seventy miles per hour. The snowbank along the highways towered over the cars driving past. Then the storm became a bomb cyclone, the snow melted, and the reservation’s creeks overflowed. Pine Ridge sits on plains that are typically arid, so these extreme weather events were unusual—a result of shifting jet streams and increasing ocean evaporation driven by climate change. They were also catastrophic. Roads became impassable, cutting families off from medicine, food, and outside assistance. Water lines across the reservation broke, depriving eight thousand people of drinking water. At least four deaths were reported.
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