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| Life on the Rez: Pine Ridge |
by Ray
Jones
Most
people in Britain will have become aware of Native American Indians via Western
films – from the out and out racist to the patronisingly liberal to the
progressive.
They will know something of the
wars when white settlers came to take their tribal lands, and their eventual
defeat and forcible removal to Reservations on land the Whites did not want,
and the horror and pain caused. But what about the situation of Native
Americans today?
Today there about three-million
people who register as Native Americans (NA) and about 2.25 million who
register as partly of Native American origin, with about a million living on
Reservations widely spread about the country, according to Federal Government
stats based on census reports that missed a further 82,000 Native Americans
living in remote areas when it was last taken in 2010.
The Native American population is
made up of 574 tribes recognised by the Federal Government. Tribes are
sometimes said to be “sovereign” but, if so, it is extremely limited. They do
not own their land. The Federal Government owns the land, which it manages
through the US Bureau of Indian Affairs, and all development of land must be
authorised by the Government.
The Federal authorities deal with any relations between the
tribes, and between the tribes outside countries; and in some ways, for better
or worse, they stand between the tribes and the US States that surround the
Reservations.
All Native Americans are subject to
US laws, as are all US citizens. The tribal courts only deal with ‘minor’
matters, ‘major’ things go to Federal courts. Tribal courts only have
jurisdiction over Native Americans and the only remedy they have to bad
behaviour by non-Native Americans is to expel them from the Reservation.
Reservations differ widely in size
and type of land, but life is not easy for the Native Americans who live on
them.
The Pine Ridge Reservation, for
example, covers 2.1 million acres and includes Oglala Lakota County and half of
Jackson and Bennett counties in the State of South Dakota. It has a population
of roughly 19,000 with a median age of 25.4 years (which is younger than the
rest of the State).
The official poverty rate is 53.75
per cent (other sources say it’s up to 80 per cent) compared with the US
average of 15.6 per cent. It has the lowest per capita income in the USA and
the school drop-out rate is 70 per cent.
Health on the Reservation is poor.
The TB infection-rate is 800 per cent higher than the USA as a whole; infant
mortality is 300 per cent higher and teenage suicide is 150 per cent higher.
Around 50 per cent of adults have diabetes and 85 per cent of families are
affected by alcoholism.
Homelessness and overcrowding are
such a problem that things are said to have reached a crisis point. What is the
cause of this poverty?
John Koppisch writing in the US
business magazine Forbes claims he
has the answer. It is not, he says, about the poor education, the long
travelling distances to jobs or the poor quality of the land. It’s about
property rights. If the land was owned by individuals rather than the
Government, or the tribes, he thinks, they could raise capital on the strength
of it. They could then invest in businesses and thus give jobs to others and
make themselves wealthy – problem solved!
But the residents of the
Reservation have no money. They would have to be given the land by the
Government and, presumably, equally; so, lots of people would be vying for
capital from outside sources. The outcome would surely be that a lucky few
would make a living in the grip of big capital. Others would try to sell their
land to outside investors and the tribal lands would be broken up, with the
majority left even worse off sitting on worthless plots with less tribal
solidarity to help them.
Another alternative for Native
Americans is to uproot and move to the cities. This is not a new idea of course.
Since the early days when there was forced apartheid, some of the White ruling
class have favoured this approach – which they hoped would lead to assimilation
into the rest of the population.
In the 1950s the Government
launched a 20-year programme to solve the “Indian problem”. Native Americans
were offered a one-way ticket, a small amount of money and made a lot of
promises, to get them to move out of the Reservations in the hope that the
Reservations would crumble away.
Some took the offer but, as usual,
many of the promises were not kept and they ran into a wall of racism. Over
half of Native-American women have suffered sexual violence and 70 per cent of
the attackers have been White. According to the Center on Juvenile Crime and
Justice, Native Americans are the group most likely to suffer police violence
in the USA.
You could argue that the programme
has worked to a degree because two-thirds of Native Americans now live in
cities, although the Reservations continue to survive.
In the cities, some of them have
achieved ‘middle class’ levels of living but many of them have merely exchanged
rural poverty for urban poverty. In the Bay Area of California, for instance,
18.5 per cent of Native Americans live below the poverty line compared with
10.4 per cent of Whites. Housing and homelessness are still at the top of the
problem list.
Native Americans have fought back.
They have formed tribal and cultural groups, and political organisations such
as the formidable American Indian Movement (AIM), which have even taken up the
gun when necessary to protect lives and rights. But few would claim that living
in the cities has solved their problems.
Another route some tribes have
taken to improve their situation is the gambling business. In 1970 the US
Supreme Court ruled that States did not have the right to tax Native Americans
on Reservations nor regulate their activities – only the Federal Government
could do that. This opened the way for tribes to open casinos and bingo halls
whilst the States that surround them continued to severely restrict gambling.
For a few tribes this has meant a
massive windfall. In some very small tribes, every member has become wealthy.
But for many other tribes it has not been successful. On the Pine Ridge
Reservation the casino has only created 80 jobs and has not done very well,
quite possibly because the nearest major city is 350 miles away.
Location seems to be the major
factor in success or failure, and many Reservations are, of course, in remote
parts. Digital gambling has adversely affected profits and the local States are
constantly attempting to undermine their activities, so Native-American
gambling ventures only bring in 17 per cent of all gambling revenue in the USA.
Sadly, there is little doubt that
Native Americans will continue to face problems and there seems to be no easy
solution. They are in the grip of an imperialist America that has been trying
to destroy them as an entity for over 150 years – the fact that it has failed
speaks volumes for the strength of their culture and tribal system.
Their best defence, as many of them
know, is increased unity around that which unites them and solidarity with
other groups and communities that face the same enemies – US imperialism will
not last forever.
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