As local temperatures plunge ruthlessly below zero, most residents scurry indoors, taking comfort wherever possible to avoid the biting cold.
For Noah Tsika '05, however, the winter chill has turned his thoughts to the suffering of others.
"My goal is to get people to understand the levels of poverty that exist in this country," Tsika said. "Once they recognize and comprehend this, I can't imagine them sitting still."
Tsika has single-handedly organized a quiet relief effort to provide winter coats and other much-needed supplies to residents of the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota. The two counties comprising the territory are among the poorest in the United States.
Pine Ridge covers an area roughly the size of Connecticut, and inclutes the site of the infamous Battle of Wounded Knee. It is home to 40,000 Lakota Sioux and staggers under a startling 86 percent unemployment rate. The national average is about 5 percent.
Tsika's motivations for targeting Pine Ridge specifically are "deeply private," he said. "But my goal, quite simply, is to encourage a public effort to assist a needy community."
He began collecting coats last fall and gathered 200 in his first weeks of effort.
Tsika has resumed his quest this term, collecting supplies from friends, and investing much of his own time and money. He has done his work without fanfare, and largely on his own. Marilyn Ewing and Colleen Murphy, who work in Parkhurst Hall, have helped him with posters and storage space, but other than that, this is a one-man show.
Tsika's biggest concern is that his project may be "perceived, ironically, to lack a degree of cultural sensitivity. I have the nauseating fear that I'm perpetuating the myth of the 'impoverished Indian;' of the Native American community as hopelessly deprived," he said.
As a result, the shy junior from Maine has declined to rally support from the Native community at Dartmouth, nor did he mention the drive in his Native American studies course last fall.
Dartmouth's sole Pine Ridge resident, Branden Ecoffey '06, declined to comment on the drive, stating simply that he saw the posters around campus. To date, Tsika has not been contacted by any members of the Native community at Dartmouth.
Tsika is not shy, however, about showing his concern over students' "indifference" to others' suffering. "Dartmouth students
are, on the average, preposterously wealthy, and while many of them are given to altruistic efforts, others are nonchalant, or simply uninformed," he said.
"If you know about a need and are in a position to do something about it, can you really live with yourself if you pooh-pooh the specifics of American poverty?" asked Tsika.
Tsika said he continues to seek help on an individual basis by asking friends, and telling them to ask their friends. He sent an email to pals at Cornell, spawning a series of campus-wide messages.
"This could be reaching even more people than I know," he said. "I'm really counting on the domino effect."
For now, Tsika will keep working quietly to provide relief to a community thousands of miles away, as they struggle to get through the cold winter. He said he hopes that as students shiver outside their dorms, they will be inspired to help others, and the domino effect that he set off last fall will continue.
