[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 30 (Thursday, February 25, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2000-S2002]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        OPERATION WALKING SHIELD

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this Congress, now that it will turn its 
attention to the committee structure and the agenda that will be 
developed in the authorizing committees and Appropriations Committee, 
will talk about a lot of different issues, will describe many different 
priorities. Among those priorities will be, for example, a piece of 
legislation we just passed in the Senate dealing with military pay. I 
assume that very soon there will be a national missile defense bill 
that will come to the floor that will be subject to dramatic and 
interesting debate, and there are a range of these kinds of issues. I 
want to raise one issue today that I think we ought to act on with some 
priority.
  There is a program that not many people know of called Walking 
Shield. It is a program to move houses that are surplus houses 
scheduled to be demolished on our military bases when those houses are 
to be replaced with more modern houses. Instead of demolishing the old 
houses, they are now moved out increasingly under the project Operation 
Walking Shield and moved to Indian reservations where there is a 
desperate need for good housing.
  Operation Walking Shield is a wonderful program that takes houses 
that would have been demolished and moves them to a foundation 
someplace on an Indian reservation to provide housing for those 
Americans who do not have housing.
  We have a real emergency in this country, particularly on Indian 
reservations, dealing with housing, health care, and education.
  I want to read a few paragraphs from a letter to describe this 
emergency and why this Congress must respond to it with some priority 
and why I hope the President will do the same.
  I want to read about a woman named Sarah. Her name was Sarah Swift 
Hawk. Sarah died January 2. Sarah Swift Hawk died on the Rosebud Indian 
Reservation in South Dakota. She froze to death. Let me read to you a 
letter that describes the circumstances leading to Sarah's death:

       The night of January 2 was truly a dreadful night for the 
     Swift Hawk family. They had run out of propane to heat their 
     house. They also had no wood for their wood stove, although 
     they tried desperately to obtain some wood, but without any 
     success.
       The Swift Hawk house is but one of 100,000 terribly 
     substandard houses that exist on our nation's Indian 
     reservations. The house had only thin plastic sheeting 
     covering two large openings where windows were supposed to 
     be. As night fell, and the temperature plummeted from 16 
     degrees below zero to 45 degrees below zero, Sarah's daughter 
     and her son-in-law, who live in the same house with their six 
     children, put two blankets on Sarah in an attempt to keep her 
     warm. The mother then took the other two blankets they had, 
     and placed them over her six children who were all huddled 
     together on the floor where she and her husband would also 
     sleep. Since there was only one cot in the house, that bed 
     was given to Sarah who was the grandmother in the family. 
     Everyone else in the Swift Hawk family has to sleep on the 
     floor because the family is too poor to buy any furniture.
       When the Sun came up on Sunday morning, January 3rd, the 
     daughter got up from the floor to check on her mother, and 
     she found that her mother had died during the night, frozen 
     to death as a result of exposure to extreme cold. 
     Fortunately, the body heat from the parents and the children, 
     all huddled together on the floor, kept them alive that 
     terrible night.
       Sarah Swift Hawk's needless death is repeated again and 
     again on our nation's Indian reservations, particularly those 
     in the Northern Plains States.

  This is a letter from Phil Stevens. Phil Stevens runs the program 
called Walking Shield. I have met with him a number of times, helped 
them on legislation to try to move some houses to Indian reservations. 
I have seen the joy on the faces of those who received a home--one put 
on a foundation for them--a home that they could move into for the 
first time, a home for their children. But, frankly, there is just a 
trickle--a few hundred homes here and

[[Page S2001]]

there to meet the needs that are so desperate of people like Sarah 
Swift Hawk and her family.

  When you hear stories like this you think, well, that happens in a 
Third World country someplace, someone laying down and freezing to 
death in their home. This wasn't a Third World country, it was in our 
country.
  The poverty in these areas is so desperate, housing so inadequate, 
the health care so minimal and the education needs so substantial. And 
frankly, we have so many other priorities that folks come to the floor 
of the House and the Senate and they debate this or that with great 
gusto, and as we do, Sarah Swift Hawk dies, frozen to death in a house, 
a house without windows, a house with thin plastic sheets where windows 
should have existed at 45 degrees below zero.
  Is that a shame? Yes. I think it is shameful that this happens in our 
country. This is not some mysterious illness for which there is not a 
cure. We know this happens, and we know how to address these questions.
  I hope President Clinton and the 106th Congress will decide that 
these are emergency conditions that exist in housing, health care, and 
education on our Indian reservations and that we ought to address them.
  I have spoken on the floor previously about a third grader in a 
school in Cannon Ball, ND, a young Native American girl who said to me, 
``Mr. Senator, will you be building us a new school?'' Because that 
young third grade Indian child goes to a school that is not fit. It is 
not a school that Members of the Senate would send their children to, 
and it is not the fault of the school board, not the fault of the 
superintendent, and not the fault of the teachers who are trying very 
hard.
  This is a school without a tax base, 150 kids, one water faucet, two 
bathrooms. They cannot connect to the Internet because about half the 
school is too old, too condemned, not able to access the wiring. This 
is a school that is in desperate need of repair. One of the rooms has 
sewer gas seeping up into it that requires the room to be evacuated 
occasionally because they can't keep children in a room where the sewer 
gas keeps backing up. That is the kind of school we have a third grader 
walk through the door of, and we say to that third grader, ``This is 
your school.''
  Are we proud of that? I don't think so. Ought we do something about 
it? Does that young third grader's life depend on us doing something? 
It does, and we should.
  We all know the problems in health care. I just met with a group a 
few minutes ago, this afternoon. Let me just tell you about health care 
for a moment. This group was talking about foster children. On one of 
the reservations, a young 4-year-old boy had been in two foster homes 
and was being moved again, and the caseworker noticed some substantial 
stench when he was in the vicinity of the 4-year-old boy.
  What was it that smelled so bad? A 4-year-old boy wearing a cast on 
his arm because he had a broken arm, but through two foster homes no 
one had bothered to take him back to the doctor and the cast had been 
on 6 months. He had gangrene on his arm. Now, is that an emergency in 
health care? I think so. It is just a symptom, just the tip of the 
iceberg of massive problems --massive problems--that exist in health 
care, education and housing.
  You know, I am talking now about the problems on Indian reservations. 
I want to tell you about pinning medals one day on the pajamas of an 
Indian named Edmond Young Eagle, a Native American who grew up on the 
Standing Rock Reservation, Fort Yates, ND, a proud member of the 
Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
  He went overseas to fight for this country--Africa, Europe--fought 
for America in the Second World War. And if you look at the Indian 
population of this country and the percentage of veterans they have and 
who fought in our country's wars, you will find a very high percent of 
the Indian population went off to fight for this country. Edmond did--
fought across the world in the Second World War.
  When I met Edmond, he was dying, laying in a VA hospital. His family 
had contacted me and said Edmond had never received his medals for his 
service in the Second World War. They wanted to know if there was any 
chance to get these medals he was owed from the Defense Department 
before he died. I got the medals and I took them to the VA hospital on 
a Sunday morning in Fargo, ND.
  Edmond Young Eagle had lung cancer. I did not know it that Sunday 
morning, but 7 days later Edmond Young Eagle would die from lung 
cancer. But that Sunday morning they cranked up his bed to a sitting 
position, and he was wearing his pajamas. And in a ceremony, witnessed 
by his doctors and nurses and his sisters and some people who had come 
from the Old Soldiers Home, I pinned medals on Edmond Young Eagle's 
pajamas, the medals he had earned for his service to our country in the 
Second World War.
  And this man dying of lung cancer said to me, ``You know, this is the 
proudest day of my life.'' I thought to myself, what a paradox it is 
that this man, who served his country honorably in the Second World 
War, fought for America's freedom, and then never had much the rest of 
his life, at the end of his life, lying in the hospital, suffering from 
lung cancer, felt so strongly about his service to his country and was 
so proud of receiving medals from his country for his service to 
America that he said it was one of the proudest days of his life.
  We have a responsibility, it seems to me, to the memory of Edmond 
Young Eagle, to the third grade girl that I talked about going to a 
school that ought to be improved, to the memory of Sarah Swift Hawk, 
who goes to sleep in a house at 45 below zero, and dies in her sleep, 
freezes to death, we owe it to these folks--to their memories, to their 
children--we owe it to them to do something about these issues on an 
emergency basis.
  There are a lot of things that we will debate back and forth on the 
floor of this Senate, as I said--defense policy, education policy, 
health care policy--so many issues day after day. But these are the 
kinds of things that we must put at the front of the line, to say 
people ought not to be freezing to death in our country because they 
run out of fuel in the winter, because they live in houses that ought 
not be inhabited in the winter, because they do not have housing, 
because they do not have health care. We can do something about this.
  Let me conclude again by saying, I am trying to see that the White 
House determines this is a priority and an emergency, that we have an 
emergency, a housing emergency and health care emergency on our Indian 
reservations that we ought to address.
  This isn't a case where any of us can just say, well, gosh, that is 
somebody else's problem. It is not somebody else's problem.
  When we have young children who are not receiving the medical 
attention they need, who are put in foster homes that are unsafe and 
where they are beaten--I ve told a story about a young girl with her 
nose broken, hair pulled out at the roots, her arm broken in a foster 
home, placed in a foster home by one worker who had 150 cases to work 
on.
  So you put a child at age 3 in a foster home without understanding 
what kind of home this is. And then there is a drunken party, and a 3-
year-old girl gets her arm broken, her nose broken, and her hair pulled 
out by the roots. Is that what we want in this country? Of course not. 
It is our responsibility to address these issues. And it is, indeed, an 
emergency when a 3-year-old girl is beaten, when a third grade girl is 
denied an adequate education, when a grandmother named Sarah Swift Hawk 
freezes to death. These are emergencies. And we need to do something 
about them.
  I am hoping the White House will declare these as emergencies. And I 
am hoping the Congress will understand that we can, with a small 
investment, make life so much better for a lot of folks who matter in 
this country--folks like Edmond Young Eagle--who have served this 
country with great distinction and great honor. In their memory, and 
just because it is the right thing to do, our country has a 
responsibility to decide this is a priority.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. GRAMS addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
  Mr. GRAMS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed 
to speak for up to 15 minutes.

[[Page S2002]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (The remarks of Mr. Grams pertaining to the introduction of S. 487, 
S. 488, S. 489, and S. 490 are located in today's Record under 
``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

                          ____________________