Pine Ridge , the second largest Indian reservation in the United States (after Arizona's Navajo Nation), overlaps the southern Badlands. It is also located in the nation's poorest county. Its prefab homes and beat-up trucks blend sadly and uneasily with the surrounding dry grasslands, rocky bluffs and tree-lined creeks.

The largest town, also called PINE RIDGE , comprises a collection of shabby, paint-stripped structures. Though the emergence of the profitable Prairie Wind casino in Oglala has improved life here, in many ways the reservation towns are an even more bitter pill to swallow than places like the nearby site of the Wounded Knee massacre: nowhere is America's disparity of wealth and opportunity so evident as in this area, which posts the highest poverty- and alcohol-related death statistics on the continent and where the average lifespan is just 52 years. Internal strife continues to plague the tribe; in 2000 the entire tribal council was ousted and some members jailed in a money laundering scandal that put the reservation $5 million in the hole. A group of vigilante elders temporarily took over the tribal HQ but were later forced out by a court decision. The locally produced Black Hills People's News ( ) follows the on-going dispute.

Red Cloud Indian School , four miles north of the town of Pine Ridge on US-18, is named after a former chief whose fight against the US forced the closure of military forts on Sioux hunting grounds. The school holds an Indian art show each summer featuring work by tribes in the US and Canada; it also has a permanent display of star quilts (a Sioux tradition), paintings and a gift shop (daily 8am-5pm; free). Red Cloud, who later signed a peace treaty with the US and invited Jesuits to teach his tribe "the ways of the white man," is buried in a cemetery on a nearby knoll. The Oglala Nation Fair , on the first weekend in August, features a powwow and rodeo. For details, contact the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Box H, Pine Ridge, SD 57770 (tel 605/867-6121). For news and both traditional Lakota and contemporary American music, tune in to KILI 90.1 FM, "the Voice of the Lakota Nation."