Preserving poverty?


Do American Indian reservations prolong poverty in the name of preserving culture?
This deserves a closer look. It's a radical solution, but if John J. Miller is right, we need to fix it.

A subtheme of the controversy involves not a shakeup but a shakedown--of Indian tribes by Mr. Abramoff, who used casino cash to throw money around town as well as to line his own pockets richly. The common perception is that once again the white man has cheated the red man.

Perhaps a few expressions of sympathy are in order. Yet Indians would benefit much more from their own sweeping reforms. The Abramoff rip-off should be the least of their worries. The time has come to abolish reservations for the good of the people who live on them.

In the American imagination, grinding poverty is often a picture of urban slums full of broken families, abandoned apartments and back-alley drug deals. But an equally valid portrait might focus on the rural squalor of the rez. Of the 10 poorest counties in the U.S., seven of them are contained wholly or largely on reservations in Arizona, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Professional victimologists offer no shortage of explanations for this miserable state of affairs, but most of their analysis boils down to a core grievance: The federal government stole land from the Indians by conquest and treaty. Although Indians once were able to obtain title to specific parcels within reservations, this practice ended in 1934--an act that essentially turned the reservations into not-so-little housing projects on the prairie.

The main problem with Indian reservations isn't, as some argue, that they were established on worthless tracts of grassland. Consider the case of Buffalo County, S.D., which Census data reveal to be America's poorest county. Some 2,000 people live there. More than 30% of the homes are headed by women without husbands. The median household income is less than $13,000. The unemployment rate is sky high.

Just to the east of Buffalo County lies Jerauld County, which is similar in size and population. Yet only 6% of its homes are headed by women without husbands, the median household income is more than $30,000, and the unemployment rate hovers around 3%. The fundamental difference between these two counties is that the Crow Creek Indian Reservation occupies much of Buffalo County. The place is a pocket of poverty in a land of plenty.

Maybe we should give land back to the rez-dwellers, so that they may own private property the way other Americans do. Currently, the inability to put up land as collateral for personal mortgages and loans is a major obstacle to economic development. This problem is complicated by the fact that not all reservations have adopted uniform commercial codes or created court systems that are independent branches of tribal government--the sorts of devices and institutions that give confidence to investors who might have the means to fund the small businesses that are the engines of rural economies.

I was not aware of the 1934 law, although it explains a lot. Certainly preventing individual Amerindians from holding title to property will prevent them from developing wealth, at least according to de Soto and the Institute for Liberty and Democracy. As it is, the Federal government has mismanaged tribal assets so badly that the Navajo tribe sued to protect mineral and water rights.

Remember that when someone says how well government can take care of people.

The 1934 also explains some of the more collectivist tendencies. For example, right now the the Navajo reservation is about equally divided on the notion of reservation gaming, with the western half saying "nope" and the eastern half proclaiming the need for cash. Right now, the "gaming-yes" group has a bigger say on the Navajo Tribal Council, but all the best locations (Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Lake Powell) are on the western half of the reservation. I didn't understand all the whys and wherefores because I didn't know about the 1934 law, but in my experience what the Council says is usually what happens.

So the real question is did the United States government prevent wealth and sentence reservation Amerindians to a perpetual state of poverty?

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - January 27, 2006 at 04:24 AM  Tag


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