Kennedi Decorah rides her bike in front of a neighbor's house in Oglala on the
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota.
In October, I
reported on the grim unemployment situation for American Indians, focusing in part on Algernon Austin's
analysis at the Economic Policy Institute. The general picture has been apparent for a very long time, but it's always important to understand the details clearly because therein lies any solution.
Austin has written a new, more comprehensive report for EPI. It certainly doesn't make the situation look any better, far from it, but it does provide a wealth of valuable detail. Austin also offers, in a separate section, some recommendations on how to improve matters. The situation:
• Over 2009–2011, the American Indian employment rate among 25- to 54-year-olds (i.e., the share of that population with a job) was 64.7 percent—13.4 percentage points lower than the white rate.
•Of the 34 states examined for Native American employment over 2009–2011, the highest American Indian employment rates were in Nebraska (73.4 percent), Connecticut (72.0 percent), and Texas (71.3 percent).
• In all of the 34 states examined, there was a large, very large, or extremely large Native American–white employment rate disparity in 2009–2011. The largest disparities were in the Midwest among the states with some of the highest white employment rates.
Even when Native Americans are similar to whites in terms of factors such as age, sex, education level, marital status, and state of residence, their odds of being employed are 31 percent lower than those of whites.
• High educational attainment is the factor most likely to increase American Indians’ odds of securing employment.
The poverty rate for Indians and Alaska Natives is also vastly worse than for the white population. In 2011, 26.4 percent of them lived in poverty compared with 11 percent of non-Hispanic whites. Indians' median wealth equaled just 8.7 percent of the median wealth among all Americans.
More analysis can be read below the fold.
Austin points out what lies behind much of this situation:
The land that is the United States, of course, once all belonged to indigenous peoples. This land, and its resources and assets, were taken by European immigrants through conquest, expropriation, theft, and broken treaties. In addition to this tremendous loss of wealth, Native Americans also lost political autonomy. Political and economic subjugation would, in and of itself, produce tremendous cultural damage, but Native Americans were also repeatedly subject to forced cultural assimilation.
While that is often presented as something from the distant past, it has plenty of current impact. More than 120 years since the end of a century of U.S.-Indian wars, the legacy of conquest, theft, racism and exploitation continues to keep Indians from as full of participation in the economy as enjoyed by other racial and ethic groups. While some tribes—the thousands of Chickasaws of Oklahoma and the hundreds of Kumeyaays of southern California being two notable examples—have made considerable economic progress, the majority have not.
Despite the stereotypical image, few tribes have become wealthy as a result of owning casinos that have been allowed under a federal deal in the late 1980s. Some know-it-all non-Indian critics still follow a sanitized version of the late 19th Century philosophy of "kill the Indian to save the man." In other words, make Indians not be Indians and their economic situation will improve. For instance, move off the reservation and don't follow tradition. That view is, obviously, one that many Indians find contemptible and one whose roots can be found in the boarding school curriculums, land allotment programs and termination policies that replaced the physical genocide of earlier years with efforts to extirpate traditional culture, religion and language.
Among Austin's recommendations for improving Indians' economic circumstances are increasing the number of community development financial institutions and strengthening those that exist, investigating the role of racism in employment (or lack of it) among Indians and getting a better understanding of the labor market for Indians as provided by the American Community Survey that asks detailed questions of a sample of the whole U.S. population each year.
Given the view that Indian economic outcomes will be most improved through better education, Austin focuses extra attention on that. He recommends giving improving maternal and child health, providing high-quality early childhood education, maximizing the number of regular high school diplomas obtained by Indians and increasing the number and size of tribal programs supporting higher education.
Several similar ideas have been proposed previously, some of them repeatedly over five or six decades. But budgetary limits, incompetence at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a failure by most in Congress and most presidents to take Indian concerns seriously and outright racism have brought us to the current circumstances. One change President Obama has instituted is something rare when it comes to Indian affairs: He actually listens and has produced some good results in a few areas. In particular, thanks in great part to his intervention, the U.S. has settled some long-standing legal disputes that included distribution of significant sums to some ripped-off tribes and individual Indians.
As I've previously recommended, Indians, like other Americans, would greatly benefit from a serious focus on rebuilding, upgrading and innovating the crumbling U.S. infrastructure. Nowhere is its decrepit nature more obvious than on the nation's Indian reservations. Infrastructure banks, a good idea for the nation, for the states and for the reservations could go a long way toward improving matters without forcing Indians to be something they are not and do not wish to become.