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As the Eagle Soars, So Do Cheyenne River Sioux's Hopes to Build Solid IT Services Business

At first I think they're fake.

We're cruising highway 212 in Ziebach County,

South Dakota, smack in the middle of the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation. Technically, it's mid-December—not officially winter—but in reality the freeze-dried prairie (we're talking a minus-50 wind chill) is already snow-covered, the rolling ribbon of white demarcated only by the wood-and-wire fences that separate adjoining ranches. It's atop the wooden fence posts every half-mile or so that I first see the birds—eagles and hawks, big ones—perched like taloned totems, which is what I think they are until my companion sets me straight.

"Oh, they're real all right," says JD Williams, the denim-clad CEO of Lakota Technologies Inc. (LTI), an Indian-owned IT services company that's trying to bring hot new jobs to this frozen reservation. A Sioux native of "the rez," as it's called, Williams is giving me a windshield tour of the east side of the rez, and he, like I, has never seen so many birds of prey on the prowl for stray rodents or rabbits. "I've lived here all my life, and I've seen maybe six hawks and eagles at most on a given day, but this is incredible," he says as we spot our 10th, 12th and 15th bird, the latter of which soars skyward with a wingspan that could almost envelope our Chevy Blazer. "It's a sign to Indians, you know," Williams says. "When you see an eagle soar like that, it's a sign of good luck, of prosperity to come. There must be something brewing."

Lord knows the rez needs it. Isolated in central South Dakota, 90 miles northwest of Pierre on a chunk of land about the size of the State of Connecticut, the 9,000-member Cheyenne River Sioux are rich in spirit and tradition, but dirt-poor by any traditional measure. Unemployment ranges from 65 to 80 percent—high even for Indian country—and a drive down Main Street in Eagle Butte the tribe's headquarters, shows why. There are no cash-cow casinos or tourist-trap giftshops here. Instead, one finds a bank. A grocery store. Two restaurants, a smattering of gas stations, specialty stores and bars. Many residents work for the tribe or the US government (the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian Health Services both have offices in Eagle Butte), but too many others choose to sit home and collect government handouts. And then there are the stereotypical Indian woes: alcoholism, diabetes and domestic violence. It isn't fair to say that the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe is infected with these social afflictions, but neither is it immune.

This isn't the way life used to be for the Cheyenne River Sioux. These are, after all, the same fiercely independent people who in 1876 followed Sitting Bull into battle against Gen. Custer at Little Big Horn. These Sioux refer to themselves as "the last-to-cut-our-hair people." They were reluctant to lay down arms and acquiesce to life on the rez, slow to suppress their native Lakota language and surrender to the forces of assimilation. "We were a prideful, warring society that dealt in a buffalo economy," says Williams, whose grandmother was an 11-year-old girl watching on the riverbank at Little Big Horn. Williams still lives in the family homestead built near the town of Faith in 1903, and although he did move away long enough to earn a four-year college degree in business administration, he's resisted all temptations to leave the reservation permanently. "I've had opportunities to go elsewhere for lots more money," says Williams, who's worked for the tribal-owned telephone company for nearly 20 years, but for reasons that even he can't explain, he's always declined. "Destiny puts you in places for a reason, I guess."

Today, Williams' destiny is tied to Lakota Technologies' promise to bring high-tech, high-paying jobs to the Cheyenne River Sioux. Established four years ago in the basement of the tribal-owned Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Telephone Authority (which Williams also chairs), LTI is essentially an outsourcing vendor that offers tactical IT services—data processing, imaging, and call center support—to larger companies looking to get this work done quickly and inexpensively. Williams' premise is simple: big businesses everywhere are suffering from the IT staffing crunch; why not send some of the lower-end IT work to LTI, with its large, untapped labor pool of people hungry for such job opportunities? Why send these jobs offshore to India when they could stay here and help support the native American Indians?

LTI isn't the tribe's first attempt to get a piece of the IT services pie. About a decade ago, the tribe courted a major credit card company that sought to build a 250-job data processing facility in South Dakota. But ultimately the company built elsewhere, telling the tribe its labor force lacked sufficient IT skills. "I was livid," recalls Gregg Bourland, the tribe's tech-savvy chairman (essentially, its mayor), whom I met a day earlier. "I was furious at us—that we'd not had the foresight to train people in our own schools." Subsequently, he issued an IT skills mandate to ensure that tribal members left school with sufficient computer skills to land entry level IT jobs. "I don't ever want to be told again that we don't have a capable workforce," Bourland says.

Upon opening LTI in 1997, Williams had literally hundreds of qualified applicants pounding on his door, but he had little to offer. Business was slow building—LTI just got its first contract last year, converting medical literature data for the National Library of Medicine. But that worked turned out so well that the Library awarded two additional contracts to LTI, and just recently the company entered an agreement with Computer Generated Solutions, a long-established, New York-based IT services company that wants to use LTI as a subcontractor on some potentially lucrative deals. Today, Williams oversees a 28-member LTI staff that still works out of the Telephone Authority basement, but ground will be broken this spring on a new 10,000 sq. ft. facility that could house as many as 200 LTI employees by 2002.

"It's been a slow building process," Williams says on the drive back to Eagle Butte. "All our folks are unproven. These are first jobs for many of them, and they're technology jobs to boot. But these kids downstairs are super workers; they just need to have the opportunity."

Another eagle flies overhead. It's probably the 16th we've seen, so the novelty has worn off. I don't mention it, and neither does Williams. But I know what he's thinking.  « Back to In The News