It will be a long, hard winter for the unhoused and unsheltered community in Rapid City, SD, as a new mayor declares war on homelessness.
On December 8, 2023, Rapid City’s only day-time homeless resource center closed. On its final day, the Hope Center served over 300 individuals from 8am-4pm, according to volunteers. The closing of the Hope Center came as no surprise, given that it had outgrown its location at the First United Methodist Church in downtown Rapid City.1 What came as a surprise was the early September vote by the city council to deny the Hope Center’s rezoning request to allow it to move to a new location at 630 Northeast Boulevard, which had been recommended by the Rapid City Planning Commission and approved by the out-going Mayor and city council before the municipal elections on June 6, 2023.2
“There’s a misconception that it’s somehow my fault,” said Rapid City’s new Mayor, Jason Salamun, who also serves as Chief of Staff and Executive Pastor at Fountain Springs Church. “It’s not. I’m bummed for them.”3 Mayor Salamun, as a member of the city council, was once an advocate for the unhoused and unsheltered. At the Hope Center’s 5th Annual Homeless Person’s Memorial and Candlelight Vigil, then-councilman Salamun opened the event by lamenting the 44 lives lost to homelessness in Rapid City, demanding, “We’ve got to do better.”4 A month later, Salamun told KOTA it was his family’s 21-year tradition to cook breakfast for the homeless on Christmas morning. Salamun said his 17-year-old daughter “would be upset if cooking a meal for the homeless wasn’t the first thing we did on Christmas morning.”5 Six years later, the unhoused and unsheltered of Rapid City will be searching for a warm place and a warm meal on Christmas morning thanks to new policy initiatives implemented by now-Mayor Salamun’s administration.
According to a Point-In-Time Count, taken in January of 2023, there were 499 unhoused and unsheltered men, women, and children in Rapid City.6 While Rapid City accounts for only 16% of the population of South Dakota, the unsheltered community represents 39% of the state’s total homeless population. But the actual population of Rapid City’s unhoused community could be higher. According to statistics from the Rapid City Board of Education, over 812 students in grades K-12 were homeless or at risk of being homeless in the 2022-2023 school year, and more than 400 have experienced housing insecurity this school year.7 These numbers do not include young people ages 18-24 or those youth not enrolled in the school district.
In the face of these startling statistics, Mayor Salamun has declared his war on homelessness. Salamun, according to local news outlets, advocates that “Rapid City should discourage poor people from coming to town and make it harder to be homeless.”8 For instance, one of his administration’s first priorities has been to remove park benches along Rapid Creek to prevent the unsheltered from finding respite there. In a recent press conference announcing $2 million in funding to combat homelessness, Mayor Salamun remarked, “eventually the word will get out, ‘This isn’t the best place for you. It gets cold in the wintertime.’”9 Salamun later clarified, “As a community, we need to ensure our good intentions don’t make it too comfortable to choose that harmful path” of homelessness.10
As the Native Sun News Today observes, Mayor Salamun’s approach to combating homelessness in Rapid City “[f]eels a lot like Government efforts to finally solve the ‘Indian problem’ by targeting and destroying food sources.”11 Just as the U.S. Government declared war of the buffalo in the late 1860’s – because in the words of one army colonel, “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone”12 – so is Mayor Salamun’s war on homelessness really just a war on the homeless, the overwhelming majority of whom are Indigenous, by eliminating the resources that provide them basic necessities like food and shelter. But, unlike 160 years ago, churches and community organizations are stepping into the gap to make sure the government’s attack on a vulnerable Indigenous population does not go unanswered.
Woyatan Lutheran Church, an urban Lakota church, is serving as a mail collection point for the unsheltered, one of the critical services lost with the closure of the Hope Center.13 Woyatan Pastor, Jonathan Old Horse, remarked, “It’s making sure that those tools that they have, that they can hone them, so they can get those homes, so they can get some control of those finances and not have to live in that world where they are criminalized.” Under the expansion of services at Woyatan, unsheltered relatives are welcomed Monday through Friday at 8am with a morning devotion and coffee hour to follow, and a midday Eucharist in which the ceremonial meal is blessed and shared with the entire community gathered. In the first two weeks, businesses, non-profits, and other churches have joined with Woyatan to prepare and serve the ceremonial midday meal to as many as 84 people a day.
Fr. Joe Hubbard, who serves two of Woyatan’s partner churches, St. Matthew’s and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Churches, noted, “This is what church has been about since the beginning. We gather to share sacred stories, to share ancient prayers, to share a ceremonial meal, and through this gathering, we are fed in heart, mind, and body to become the hands and feet of God in the world. Then, as we are sent forth, we carry with us the divine dream that we are all related through the Spirit that binds us together and gives us life.” Hubbard noted that the gatherings at Woyatan are the single largest ongoing religious gathering in Rapid City. “And, this isn’t about a single denomination or tradition,” he said, “This is an ecumenical and even an inter-religious community of faith that is more fully embodying the teachings of Jesus than any other community of faith I know of in Rapid City.”
Even so, the services offered at Woyatan remain at risk. Pastor Old Horse and other organizers were warned that the services they are providing fall outside the scope of a religious organization and, instead, constitute the activity of a “Mission,” under Rapid City’s ordinances. They were encouraged by city leaders to request re-zoning that would declare Woyatan a Mission rather than a church, which they refused to do upon advice of legal counsel. Organizers at Woyatan have been warned that Mayor Salamun has authorized the police to shutter any churches acting outside municipal ordinances and to fine or arrest and church leaders who are involved in violations of city zoning, code, permitting, or licensure. This double-talk, according to Pastor Old Horse is no surprise. “When we bring those solutions to the table, those weren’t the solutions they’re looking for,” he said. “We get punished when we help our people.”14
As Christmas approaches, Mayor Salamun’s war on homelessness now seems to be shifting to a new front, the churches and pastors who are caring for Rapid City’s homeless relatives.
Joe Hubbard is the Rector of St. Matthew’s and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Churches in Rapid City, SD, a covenant partnership between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities of faith. He was ordained to the priesthood on Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, and he spent the first two years of his ministry learning alongside the Diné of Navajoland. Joe served as the Vicar of St. Christopher’s Mission and the Ministry Developer and Priest-in-Charge of the Utah Region of the Episcopal Church on Navajoland. Joe is originally from Montgomery, AL, where he founded a regional Civil Rights and Litigation law firm and served in the Alabama House of Representatives.
Would you or your community of faith be willing to join with us in accepting Jesus’ invitation, “if you love me, feed my sheep” (Jn 21:17)?
Please call 605.348.0247, or visit our website: https://urbanrootsancientwisdom.org/healthy-communities
Apart, none of us have everything we need to survive and thrive, but together, we have all the things we need.
Footnotes
2https://www.kotatv.com/2023/09/06/rapid-city-council-blocks-hope-centers-move-threatening-closure/
3https://listen.sdpb.org/2023-10-17/a-bad-situation-hope-center-in-rapid-city-to-close-doors
4https://www.nativesunnews.today/articles/44-lost-their-lives-on-the-streets-of-rapid-city/
5https://www.kotatv.com/content/news/Councilman-cooks-breakfast-for-the-homeless–503477481.html
6https://www.kotatv.com/2023/10/14/rapid-city-pennington-county-leaders-work-homeless-crisis/
10http://www.kotaradio.com/2023/10/16/rapid-city-mayor-address-homelessness-issues/. As a candidate for Mayor, Salamun was quoted at a candidate’s forum as saying, ““Our compassion is hurting people.” He said the homeless were “choosing the lifestyle” and he does not entertain any possibility it could be otherwise…”
https://unitedresourceconnection.org/cannon-ball-nd-58528/grading-the-mayoral-candidates-on-their-grasp-of-native-issues/
11https://www.nativesunnews.today/articles/solving-the-indian-problem-in-downtown-rapid-city/
12https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/
