Night Shield, Cinatra and Overflow look calm as they sign their names on CDs and clothing for a few young fans and smitten teenage girls at the All-Stop convenience store in Rosebud.

Truth be told, the trio of rappers is dragging.

It's about 3:30 p.m. on a Friday, and while they politely scribble their names during a modest and scheduled autograph session, the effects of the night before are evident.

They didn't get to sleep until 4 a.m. after performing and hanging at a party outside of Rosebud. Gabe Night Shield of South Dakota, Cinatra of Seattle and Overflow of Charlotte, N.C., spilled their rhymes in front of a hundred or so people under the morning's starlight.

Hip-hop's hold on the reservation is evident. The autograph session is the first day of the annual Rosebud Fair, and the fairgrounds are swollen with kids dressed in baggy FuBu wear, sports jerseys, folded bandannas and tilted baseball caps.

Next to them are people in traditional powwow gear - headdresses and dance outfits decorated with feathers and animal skins and jangly bits of metal.

As the Lakota try to preserve their traditions, some elders worry about reservation youths embracing a culture that historically has reflected the lives of African-Americans. They see it as the beginning of another cultural displacement.

Others dismiss it as the youths simply latching on to the latest trends as more and more Lakota people pick up microphones and set their lives to beats.

"I can't get down to the other music," says Kris Leroy, a 16-year-old from Rosebud who chooses to break dance instead of the traditional grass dancing. "With this, I can tear it up."

Since its '70s genesis in the ghettos of inner-city America, hip-hop has told the story, condition and plight of a minority class' struggle to survive. The tales of poverty and racial oppression might as well have been written about reservation life with its rampant addictions and unemployment.

"I think there is a definite connection to urban poverty," says Tara Browner, a Native American ethnomusicologist at UCLA. "There's a connection with 'we're here and we're poor,' and there is this music coming from people ... who are poor."

"This feels like the city" but worse, says Cleveland Kills in Sight, a 21-year-old Rosebud man.

Many young rappers are using their music to spread a positive message. For some, it's showing kids how music can lift them out of a life of crime. For others, it's about representing Native culture.

Sometimes, the two are combined. Nationally acclaimed artist Litefoot, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, raps over traditional intertribal rhythm tracks.

Like most corners of America, hip-hop has resonated with the reservations since the genre's gangsta rap went mainstream in the early '90s.

Now, some young artists have set up crude but effective recording studios in their reservation homes to create their own hip-hop.

Though he now operates out of Sioux Falls, Night Shield's presence on the Rosebud Indian Reservation is everywhere. His three CDs are ubiquitous, everybody knows who he is, and he regularly returns to perform and talk to kids about how getting an education allowed him to become a hip-hop performer and producer.

Even without the local success story, he's a role model, injecting a Rosebud perspective into danceable thug hip-hop songs such as "Call Me a Savage" and "Ride With Me."

"Hip-hop is the culture of the youth," he says. "They can still be true to Lakota culture but then follow the hip-hop culture as well."

During the autograph session at All-Stop, nobody talks about the powwow, and nearly everyone who encounters Night Shield claims to be a rapper, too.

"Everybody I know, all my friends do it," says Kills in Sight, himself an amateur rapper.

It's a fact not lost on the older generation.

"Just about every kid here is like hip-hop in some form, dressing or walking like them," says Danny Stevens, 41, a Rosebud native who now lives in Albuquerque. "Some of our elders have a problem (with the youth) looking like the black people on TV."

"They say, 'You're acting black; be more Indian,' " Kills in Sight says about the criticism.

Back in Rosebud to drum at the powwow, Stevens can sympathize with the dilemma. A former follower of what he calls the "hippie movement," he understands the call of an attractive and alien culture. But he also realizes the importance of preserving his past. "It's OK to have that music, but on the other hand, don't forget the Indian life," he says. "It brought us along for thousands of years."

It's difficult to predict whether hip-hop will survive on the reservations, but if it does, Browner is certain the music will be adapted to fit Native American culture.

"I think the idea of hip-hop is that you can customize it as you need," she says from her home in Los Angeles. "Eventually, it will be Indianized like the way horses and cars have been."

Browner isn't worried hip-hop will wipe away some facets of Native American life.

"If you take Indian music as an example, what people have done is continually add musical genres without, for the most part, losing the older ones," Browner says. "What is important is holding on to your core values that define who you are, and people living on reservations are not going to lose their inner sense of self, nor the fundamental connectedness to each other that makes them who they are."

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As if the stage name "Killah Chief" isn't gangsta enough, Tyler White has the past for hip-hop's iconic "thug life" image.

The 26-year-old Rapid City rapper has only days left on a parole that followed three years of incarceration in the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls.

"I was incarcerated and got out in '99," he says. "I got out and decided to reach the youth and give them a lesson before they find out the hard way like I did."

Unlike rap's current superstar 50 Cent, White isn't trying to cash in on an image. As part of the duo Warrior Society, he downplays his prison past.

Warrior Society's old school break-beat sound and stark commentary-style lyrics instruct Native Americans to recall their heritage.

"A lot of Indians try to be black. Why not be Indian?" White says. "We have our own culture and our way now. Why would we reach out to other cultures?"

Growing up in Red Shirt, White lived amidst depressed conditions that resembled the ghettos he heard in rap songs, but he doesn't aim to re-create them in verse.

Listening to Warrior Society songs such as "Lakota for Life" and "Warriors," it's easy to see what Browner means by "Indianizing" hip-hop. The group's other member, Jerry "Derelict" Craddock, is part black, and Warrior Society favors a romantic pride about its Native American heritage.

"Ask yourself who is the real savage/It's the white man who has the advantage/And you wonder why I'm filled with anger/

That's why I'm a warrior, not a gangbanger. ... Come be a souljah in a warrior society," White raps in the song "Lakota Souljah."

"We're hoping the music that they're portraying is making the children see it's cool to be Indian," says Wilson "Buzi" Two Lance, program director at KILI Radio on the Pine Ridge Reservation. "We need to get them thinking differently other than it's all right to be a drunk or all the other negative stuff that's in the music."

Even though KILI Radio regularly plays local rappers with inspirational messages, on Pine Ridge, it isn't always easy to be optimistic.

Shannon County is continually rated as one of the most impoverished places in America. And while the unemployment rate for Native Americans living on or near reservations is 50 percent, that number climbs to 73 percent on Pine Ridge, according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs' 1997 Indian Labor Force Report.

Situated among shapely hills and bluffs covered with pine trees, Pine Ridge resembles a bit of an inner-city ghetto. Nondistinct HUD housing is a common sight among the outskirts of the 2,500-person town, and graffiti is a regular decoration on the city's stores, restaurants and public buildings.

Given the almost urban atmosphere, reaching out to hip-hop seems like a natural reaction for the residents.

"Yeah, it's the closest thing that we could latch on to," White says. "Black ghetto people, their struggles are pretty much the same as us. The poverty, the alcoholism - it's the same."

The similarities aren't lost on Josh McGee. A Sioux Falls rapper who grew up exposed to the ghettos of Kansas City, Mo., and Omaha says a trip to Rosebud convinced him that reservation life can be just as tough.

"When you go there, you see the same things, broken down houses," McGee says. "That's why I can relate to them."

Though it gives a sense of communion for reservation life, there is some concern that hip-hop exposure has reinforced negative ideals such as gang life, alcoholism and violence.

"All the gangster activity you hear about here is because of what they see in the movies and hear in the music," Two Lance says.

"Yes, but let's be honest here. Guns, violence and drugs, in the form of alcohol, are already on the reservations, and people already rationalize them," Browner says. "What worries me more are rez kids coming to places like L.A., thinking they are tough, wearing colors of gangs like they see on TV, and then getting killed for it."

Inside a weather-worn trailer house south of Oglala on the Pine Ridge reservation, Native Era's recording studio is nothing more than a small room with a computer, an entertainment center, some speakers, stools and a microphone stand using old nylons stretched across a rounded coat hanger as a makeshift voice filter.

As far as studios go, it's nothing special. But in Shannon County, it is seen as an opportunity to remind people that reservation life can be positive.

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Inside the cramped room, Native Era's Billy Janis and Hope Brings Plenty chronicle their musical message. "It's about positivity for everybody but mainly geared toward the youth," says Billy "Futuristicmista" Janis.

In talking with the two dating twentysomethings, "the youth" seems to be their favorite topic. Virtually any conversation about Native Era's music and lives veers back to their mission of providing a positive message for the youngsters.

But Native Era isn't afraid to touch on the dark side of life. In their rhymes, Janis - who sounds a bit like Ja Rule - and Brings Plenty confront social demons such as suicide, teenage pregnancy, poverty and depression.

Janis can relate to the downtrodden. At age 11, he became homeless until a local pastor took him in at age 12.

"Some people think we're a Christian rap group," the deep-voiced Janis says. "We're just ourselves, a positive group."

Native Era doesn't swear in song, and along with words that preach a drug- and alcohol-free lifestyle, religion has a prominent presence. "A lot of people judge and look at Pine Ridge and say how there's nothing but winos there," Janis says. "We might as well come out of Pine Ridge drug and alcohol free."

"I think they're going beyond the limits set for people here," says Two Lance, KILI program director. "We have barriers and boundaries, and they're going beyond it with their music."

Two Lance and other area leaders like to point out that Native Era paints a positive alternative by informing kids that addiction and self-loathing aren't mandatory. The message may be worthy, but convincing hip-hop fans to listen to it isn't exactly easy.

Because so much of rap is predicated by a rough, lascivious and dangerous lifestyle, a "positive" hip-hop product often is about as cool to the kids as parent-approved parties.

"Hip-hop trying to be positive, I don't think that's right," says Joe Brave, a 16-year-old standing outside the Shell station in Pine Ridge.

"The kind of the music that we have, because we're not cussing around, people get mad because it's not like other rap," Janis says.

It creates a bit of a paradox. Native Era wants to give youths a positive message. But in doing so, they lose a part of the audience they're trying to reach.

"If you want to be a Native American rapper, I think you should be representing our people and yourself," Janis says.

Given that rationale, Janis and Brings Plenty have no problem with their mildly controversial methods. They'll continue to do what they feel.

"Just because we're Native American ... we don't want every lyric to have 'reservation' in it," Janis says. "We want people to know where we come from, but we want to represent everybody."

Reach reporter Robert Morast at 331-2313.