Wind River; Not even vaguely close to a true story

Its not a bad movie. Not gonna complain about the acting or really anything about it other than the number of people thinking it has some connection with reality.

This is the Wind River reservation. Home of quite a bit of oil and some casinos; ranging from tiny ones built into gas stations to giant vegas-style hotel + casino combo, appropriately named the 'Wind River Casino'. Also home of the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes.

Before getting started on this, lets get the history out of the way; these tribes once dominated an enormous section of territory spanning into multiple states, a region larger than many european countries and some smaller states. Like many of the native tribes, they were once a huge deal, highly populated, relatively prosperous, and in the case of one of these two tribes, generally living in 'harmony' with nature. The growing colonial powers stole, lied, and murdered their way into possession of most of this territory, and the locals are intimately aware of this, taught about it before they even go to school in many cases, and are generally raised to distrust/dislike other races, whether its an asian family owning a fast food joint or a black guy behind the counter at wal-mart or the white guy selling them a car, a certain level of racism is considered normal when dealing with them, and they have their own versions of ethnic slurs to go along with it.

That dot over in the bottom right corner of that picture, Riverton? Its considered legally to be outside the reservation thanks to old laws/treaties, and the Wind River casino is immediately outside city limits, across the street from what might have been suburbs built in part to house employees of the casino.

This lovely little section here is the Wind River hotel and Casino. At the bottom are the houses. If you drive down those streets, you'll see a microcosm of the situation on the reservation; houses that were once nice, expensive homes, with broken windows covered with blankets, trash-strewn yards, naked children running around playing amidst the trash. And a hundred thousand dollars worth of vehicles parked in the driveway and abandoned in the yard. 60,000$ trucks on the driveway with a few abandoned older ones about in the yard; some of which, if you talk to the owner, still worked but were simply replaced. And when you go inside? Big-screen TVs, expensive furniture, and holes in walls and floors repaired with whatever was available to hand; not in one of these houses, but elsewhere on the res, I saw cardboard duck-taped over a hole in the wall; don't remember exactly what it was, possibly a pizza box. At another house elsewhere on the res, (This story was from a native, not a news story, and might have been told to get a reaction when I asked what was up with the floor) a child had died locked in a closet, and had partially fused with the floor in the months she was left there, resulting in a giant chunk of floor being torn out when she was discovered, which was replaced with a roughly-sawed piece of plywood. You get the feeling like you're looking at the house of a middle class person who likes moderately expensive things and a third-world country where they don't have the money to fix anything at the same time. Now, why would this be?

If you looked at just the numbers from outside, you might assume Riverton was a racist hellhole that hated the natives as much as the natives hated them. The native unemployment rate was over 60% when I last checked, among an overall unemployment in riverton that was less than 20. You didn't see that many natives working at the businesses, though you did see plenty of them shopping.

Then you look at the criminal activity there. There are some numbers in Riverton itself, but not really for the outside reservation; you pretty much need to talk to the tribe to learn anything. There's quite a bit of crime there, of course. Rape, murder, theft; natives as both the criminal and the victim for the overwhelming majority of it, aside from the theft. You don't have outsiders doing much of that, oilrig workers or otherwise.

Prosecuting and suing the natives when something happens is a bit of a thorny issue. Out on the reservation, the state police and riverton police can't really do anything, only the feds, without going through the tribe. If a native stops paying for a car he has a loan on, the repo man can't go out to his house and get it back without permission from the tribe; and if its the only car they have, that permission isn't gonna happen. Warrant out for something he did in Riverton or elsewhere in the state? If its not a federal issue, you'll have trouble ever doing anything about it unless its something serious, a la rape or murder.

Then you have the final and most important reason for all the issues in Wind River. Money. The tribe has plenty of it; from the oil rigs to the casino, they make a fair amount of money, and pay it out to the natives every month in the form of a 'Per Cap' check. They subsidize home loans, generally not doing anything when the loans are defaulted on, pay for college, even if the native never actually attends. Some of the natives live in homes without paying rent or utilities, receiving food stamps from the state; and then get a per-cap check that is more than most of the riverton residents make in income.

People who don't have to work a day in their life, know that prosecuting minor offenses is troublesome and lawsuits are laughable, and are paid primarily based on the number of people in the family. You have elderly people and children legally taken in so a head of household can claim their per-cap check; and then abandoned to die. People living in houses they don't pay for or care about with piles of expensive things they don't pay for or care about, driving expensive trucks they don't pay for or care about(This last bit isn't -quite- true; some of them love their vehicles and all of them know if they don't take care of them they can't drive). All of this combines with being raised to consider outsiders as villains and massive problems with drugs and alcohol to create what can best be described as terrifyingly bad, and difficult to fix.

Then we get to how the current situation can effect the tribe. Things aren't in their worst-case scenario yet; but oil prices and lost casino business will eventually cause the per cap checks to shrivel up if the crisis doesn't resolve itself; and domestic abuse, already drastically higher among the natives than outside, may have already claimed lives without us knowing about it; and with the per-cap checks on the line, its fully possible that, like has happened in the past, we never will.

There are multiple police agencies operating in the area, including the BIA and other local departments, both tribal and the non-tribal ones out of Riverton. While the depiction of the harsh conditions of wyoming may be accurate, what it shows of tribal poverty, the police, the oil rig workers, none of it bear any resemblance to real events or people, nor is there, as the movie implies, a rash of natives being raped, abducted, and murdered by outsiders.