Today's shooting in Minnesota highlights the lack of economic justice on most Native American reservations in this country. According to CNN, the Red Lake Reservation has a poverty rate of 39%.
Consider the following snapshot of 40 "high poverty" rural Native counties:
The poverty rate of Native Americans in these counties was 41 percent, a level greater than that of the dominant minority in other types of high-poverty counties. The Native American counties did not simply have a greater incidence of poverty--they also had the highest proportion in deep poverty
Reservations suffer from the same problems as rural areas, but they also lack arable land (the Europeans got that) and have deep seated social problems from centuries of discrimination. For instance, until the 1960's, familes were often split up and children sent to boarding schools where they were forced to be "white". The social fabric of the community was destroyed.
below the fold, the casino myth...
Despite the stereotype, casinos have made only a tiny percentage of Native Americans "rich". As the Washington Post
noted in this 2000 article :
Two-thirds of the American Indian population belong to poverty-striken tribes that still don't have Las Vegas-style casinos. Some, like the Navajo, culturally oppose gambling, while others, like the Hualapai, are too far away from major population centers to benefit.
and even for those tribes with casions:
unemployment on reservations with established casinos held steady around 54 percent between 1991 and 1997, according to data the tribes reported to the Bureau of Indian Affairs
Meanwhile, politicians like Arnold demagogue the few "rich" Native Americans to win elections.