Indian Reservations
I’m on vacation in Arizona and New Mexico for the week. The picture above? I took it at a pow wow I went to a couple of years ago. I don’t want to go into the history of reservations and why Native Americans were forced onto these plots of land. Instead, I will focus on reservations today: August 7, 2008.
- 310 Native American reservations exist in the United States.
- 550+ Native American tribes exist in the United States.
- The quality of life in some reservations is likened to that in developing countries, with some reservations being considered the poorest counties in the nation.
- The unemployment rate is high on reservations and many of the NAs exist solely on government subsidies.
- Why don’t they just get a job, you ask? Reservations are located in some of the most remote, barren regions of the country. They’re far from centers of commerce and there’s not much they can do with the land.
- Not all reservations are such bleak places. According to a poorly written article plagued with misspelled words and poor grammar, the reason such poverty exists is because of corruption and poor tribal handling of the money and the land.
- After rereading the above mentioned article, I realize I was rash in my judgement regarding spelling and grammar - only one word was misspelled.
- The tribal councils are supposed to have jurisdiction over their tribe’s reservation.
- In reality, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service of the US Department of the Interior have a hand in what goes on on reservations.
- Of the approximately 2.1 American Indians that live in the United States, 400,000 live on reservations.
I was looking for more facts to bullet-point - things along the lines of education/ careers, things kids do for fun, crimes committed, etc. Sadly, those things were nowhere to be found (nowhere on the first couple of pages of google search results, at least). Did I ever tell you about the time I saw a praying mantis get hit by a car and explode?
