How we do it: Learning from the past
- 6 hours ago
- 2 min read
Jeri Baker founded One Spirit in 2005, after retiring from her lifelong career in social services. Wait, retirement? For Jeri that wasn’t an option; there’s always more you can do. Jeri shifted her focus to Pine Ridge shortly after visiting the reservation. There, she witnessed a rich and wise culture deeply wounded by centuries of displacement, cultural suppression, and immense suffering. One Spirit came to be from a deep-seated need to help. Jeri’s commitment to providing unyielding, unconditional support slowly permeated the whole operation as it grew. As the team, the programs, the partners, and the donors became more numerous, so did the hope to make lasting change.
“Lasting” is an indispensable detail that now drives our philosophy. At our founding, we started with food drives. We made a difference in assisting with an urgent need, but the waiting lines for food boxes didn’t seem to shorten—it was often the opposite. The solution we were providing was treating the symptoms, not the cause. To truly address the cause, we had to stop looking at modern reservation statistics and start looking at the 170-year historical ledger.
When you look at the 170-year history of broken treaties on the Plains, you realize a hard truth: standard top-down charity didn't fail Pine Ridge by accident. It failed because it was a continuation of the same vertical relationship. To break the cycle, our operational posture had to undergo a radical inversion.
The Restitution of Space
This does not mean the outside world has no place in Pine Ridge; it simply means the perspective of the outsider must undergo a radical inversion. True support cannot arrive in the traditional American package of top-down leadership, rigid curriculum, or pity. Pity fuels charity, and charity is the vertical relationship of a superior looking down at a victim.
What the Oglala require is the restitution of space. It means arriving not with a syllabus of outside solutions, but with the quiet discipline to ask a singular question:
"What must we get out of the way of?"
True partnership means accepting that the Lakota already know how to survive the winter. They have the vocabulary for their own healing and the architecture for their own society. At One Spirit, our role isn't to take the wheel. Our role is to put our shoulder to the bumper, look to the traditional leadership of Pine Ridge, and provide the unyielding push they need to drive their own future forward. Every single one of our programs is run by Native Americans.
When you support One Spirit, you aren't offering charity to a broken system—you are standing in solidarity with a sovereign people.
