But even as she looked out on her neighborhood strewn with abandoned cars, better housing wasn't foremost on her mind. Jobs were. Jobs to buy clothes and food. Jobs to get off welfare.

The national unemployment rate is below 5 percent, the lowest in three decades, but it's about 75 percent on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the poorest region of America.

"We have to find a way not only to fix the very difficult housing circumstances, but to get them jobs," the president said after leaving Blue Bird's house.

Clinton's visit to the Oglala Sioux nation was the first to an Indian reservation by a president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed through Cherokee country on vacation.

Signs of neglect where everywhere.

Boys in dusty clothes shot baskets on a tilting rim as Clinton, accompanied by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo, FannieMae chief Franklin Raines and South Dakota's two senators, visited the Igloo neighborhood — a collection of foam-green shacks with splintering stoops that spoke to the despair of the people who lived inside.

Harold Salway, president of the Oglala Sioux, said that Igloo was typical of housing on the vast reservation that had been the site of the Wounded Knee massacre.

"In the wintertime, the hardships put on our people are increased ten-fold," he said.

Clinton made an impromptu visit to Robert Red Shirt's home, where five used tires were stacked beneath a broken window.

"I just want to get my house fixed. It's falling apart," Red Shirt said after Clinton left.

A reserved 47-year-old with stooped shoulders, Red Shirt said he didn't speak to the president and couldn't say how Clinton might help. "I wouldn't know how, sir," he said. "Somehow, anyway. Anyway he can."

Alighting from his helicopter, Clinton, wearing a gray pinstriped suit and cowboy boots, was greeted by a dozen tribal leaders wearing ceremonial headdresses of feathers from the American Bald Eagle. A knot of musicians beat a cowhide drum and chanted a song.

After a ceremony officially designating the reservation as a federal empowerment zone, Clinton addressed more than 800 people under a scorching sun at the local high school.

"I ask you today, even as we remember the past, to think more about the future. We know well what the failings of the present and the past are," the president said. "We know well the imperfect relationship that the United States and its governments have enjoyed with the tribal nations. But I have seen today not only poverty, but promise. And I have seen enormous courage."

The visit to Pine Ridge was one of the most dramatic of Clinton's tour, a campaign from Appalachia to inner-city Los Angeles aimed at encouraging investment in communities that haven't shared in the nation's good economic times.

After Igloo, Clinton toured part of the reservation where new houses were being built with loans secured by HUD and announced several public and private initiatives to begin building basic infrastructure.

With infrastructure, he said, the reservation could try to build a tourism industry around visitors to Wounded Knee and Mount Rushmore each year.

According to the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1.43 million Indians live on or near reservations. Roughly 33 percent of them are children younger than 15, and 38 percent of Indian children aged 6 to 11 live in poverty, compared with 18 percent for U.S. children nationwide.

Only 63 percent of Indians are high school graduates. Twenty-nine percent are homeless, and 59 percent live in substandard housing. Twenty percent of Indian households on reservations do not have full access to plumbing.

Clinton said the Indians had heard enough "pretty words" from U.S. leaders in the past and so he was bringing some concrete assistance.

He announced a partnership among HUD, the Treasury Department, tribal governments and mortgage companies to help 1,000 Indians become homeowners over the next three years — a small number that nonetheless would double the number of government-insured home mortgages issued on tribal lands. Under the effort, "one-stop mortgage centers" would be opened at Pine Ridge and on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona to help streamline the mortgage lending process.