WHITECLAY — The sky was a washed-out gray over this tiny community Wednesday morning as the news began to trickle in.
Regular patrons of Whiteclay's four beer sellers drifted beneath awnings and on the rutted dirt shoulders of Nebraska 87, some with sleeping bags wrapped around their shoulders, others with chilled cans of beer concealed in the sleeves of their hoodies.
State regulators in Lincoln had voted earlier to deny licenses for the four beer stores in Whiteclay, a village located across the border from South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
“I don’t know why they want to take it away,†Alvin Hard Heart said, shaking his head. “White people are the people who introduced us to alcohol in the first place.â€
Grinning, Hard Heart pointed to his cracked lip and the brown stains on his shirt. He’d had too much to drink the day before, he said, and taken a hard fall.
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“I don’t think it’s going to make a difference,†he said of the Liquor Control Commission’s decision. “It’s probably going to make things worse.â€
Beer will still be sold illegally by bootleggers on the reservation, Hard Heart said, and if he can’t get it that way, he will simply go to the next-closest place where he can.
Benji Clown Horse, 46, of Pine Ridge was walking the road with his cousins. He comes to Whiteclay, he said, for camaraderie, and to pass the time. It’s boring on the reservation, beer or no beer, he said. “We will still be here. This is our town.â€
Alan Waters said he sees the people who work the beer counters as friends. “Those guys are all good people,†he said. “They always take care of us.â€
Like many others, Waters insists the main reason he comes to Whiteclay is to see his friends or to look for work, not to get beer. But if the alcohol stops flowing, he said, he supposes he will have to sober up.
A woman who wanted to remain anonymous said she believes taking beer out of Whiteclay will just result in people moving 20 miles down the road to Rushville, or to Gordon. Either way, she’s worried that the roads will be less safe.
“You’d have to shut down every liquor store within 200 miles of here to stop an addict from getting what he wants,†she said. “They’re not going to not get it. It’s sad, very sad.â€
The woman said creating a rehabilitation center for the wanderers of Whiteclay would do more good than ending alcohol sales.
Colleen Marshall, 49, of Pine Ridge thinks the commission’s decision is a good thing. Alcohol, she said, “is killing a lot of Native Americans. It’s caused a lot of tragedies. It’s better for the people this way.â€
Outside Arrowhead Inn, Russ Knight, sales manager of Dietrich, a beer distribution company based in Scottsbluff, was busy unloading cases of beer from a delivery truck.
Knight’s company is one of three distributors that regularly deliver beer to the town. A single weekly shipment, he said, usually consists of 600 to 800 cases of beer. Taking that away will definitely affect his bottom line.
“That’s 10 percent of my company,†he said.