INSIDE THE POOREST PLACE IN THE UNITED STATES: the Pine Ridge Reservation 🇺🇸

We’ve always pictured Native Americans riding galloping horses across endless prairies, dressed in traditional clothing and immersed in sacred rituals around a blazing fire among the tipis. But their reality is very different. Entire generations were brutally erased by white colonizers who came from the Old Continent: first they suppressed their identities, then they confined what was left to isolated pieces of land—the reservations—places where substance abuse, unemployment, and poverty now reign. Yet even among the rubble of a past that can be felt only as an echo, there are people who never gave up. They proudly reaffirm their roots, fighting to improve the lives of their communities. We entered the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation to seek the answer to a big question: what is happiness for the last Native Americans?