Living on the Reservation
Mises Daily: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 by William L. Anderson
During a cross-country trip I took in early June, I drove past a number of Indian reservations in Arizona and New Mexico, and I must say that the sight was not exactly uplifting. I could see hundreds of tumble-down shacks and old trailers located on hillsides, and none of them were inviting places to live. It was obvious then that I was seeing something akin to a Third World scene with hundreds — perhaps thousands — of people living in great poverty.
American Indian poverty is not something on our "radar" for a couple of reasons. First, reservations are located in remote places and the largest ones are nowhere near major metropolitan areas. Second, because most Indians do not venture far from their reservations; the rest of us rarely come into personal contact with them.
Writes Peter Carlson:
Half a millennium after Columbus misnamed them, American Indians are the poorest people in the United States.
The country's 2.1 million Indians, about 400,000 of whom live on reservations, have the highest rates of poverty, unemployment and disease of any ethnic group in America. That might surprise Americans who have consumed countless cheery feature stories about Indians making big bucks on casino gambling.
What I saw from my car window in the arid highlands of the American West did nothing to dispel what Carlson wrote. There was no doubt that I was seeing real poverty, and there seemed to be few sources of commerce in the surrounding area. It was obvious that the majority of people who lived in these hovels and broken-down trailers did not work and had no potential sources of income aside from informal tasks and government checks.
In the early 1980s, then-US Secretary of the Interior James Watt commented that one did not have to go to the USSR or Eastern Europe to discover the failures of socialism. Those failures, he said, were evident on the reservations, which his department oversaw. Not surprisingly, the comments drew partisan attacks, and the press dismissed Watt as making "bigoted" comments.
(Watt apparently was guilty of making a "gaffe," which can be described as uttering an unpopular truth. Political figures, as you know, do not like to make "gaffes.")
When we speak of Indian reservations, we are dealing with areas of land set aside where American Indians live, areas that supposedly have "self-government," but are ultimately subject to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service of the US Department of the Interior. Because of their location and because of the fact that they are the ultimate welfare state, Indian reservations tend to be places where people simply exist on whatever subsidies the government provides, and little else. As Wikipedia notes:
Some Indian reservations offer a quality of life that's among the poorest to be found in the United States. Shannon County, South Dakota, home of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, is routinely described as one of the poorest counties in the nation.
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