What is the Point of Native Reservations in the 21st Century?

Remove all ads!

(I said "Native Reservations" because I'm well aware that there are reservations of native peoples not just in the U.S. but at least also in Canada. By no means is this threat supposed to be "about" North America).

So I've been doing a lot of reading over the last couple of years, and lately, I've read several books about Cochise, Geronimo, and the Apache nation. (Not only am I always interested in American history, but I'm also more generally interested in how and why groups resist being incorporated into bigger groups--and what bigger groups do about it). I don't know much about reservations in general, but reservations certainly do figure into the story of the Apaches (Geronimo, for instance, after surrendering the last time, was considered a prisoner-of-war by the U.S. government for the rest of his life, sent to reservations, and was never allowed to live in his native Arizona again).

So, besides the obvious reason (once a system exists--a gov't bureaucracy, nat'l/state/local law, reservation populations becoming used to it, non-reservation populations becoming used to it, etc--it is hard to do away with the system), why do we still have native reservations in the 21st century? In the U.S., the government doesn't force other disparate and disenfranchised populations into corners of the country to live. Should the U.S. government do away with them? Should they be expanded (all 300+ of the reservations in the U.S. constitute about 2.2% of the total land, I believe)? Do native populations profit by them, or would they be better served by entirely integrating into the population/nation at-large?

I don't know what to think about the questions above. I once took a wrong turn in Montana and had to drive across a reservation in order to get back in the direction of where I meant to go, and I can personally testify that the conditions, at least on that reservation, were obviously less developed than those of surrounding areas (heck, immediately, I had to slow down because the road went from paved at the border of the reservation to gravel through the 20 or 30 miles of the reservation). It just seems to me that reservations are at the least archaic institutions of the past, and I suspect they are more reprehensible than that.

Interested in what you guys think.

 

Sorry to come late to the party but have had a lot going on in my personal life.

I feel strongly that it is up to the Native Americans as to whether they wish to be "integrated" into the culture that prevails in the United States of American. Don't know enough about Canada to comment on that.

What culture, what society are we discussing? We have the Amish who choose to live apart from the general culture. We have Urban Culture which does differ from culture in the Appalachian Mountains.

When Europeans arrived in the Americas there were people living here. These people were forced onto reservations. These people had their own religions, their own culture. They were not a homogeneous group. Life styles varied greatly from the Eastern people to the plains people. I have not checked recently but at one time the Hopi natives kept themselves separate from the "white" culture. I believe that at one time they even considered forming their own separate Nation/country.

People have the right to choose their own way of living as long as it does not infringe on the rights of others. For the Government to close the Reservations would in my opinion only be another crime against Native Americans in a long list of crimes.

The Oneida Indians gave up their reservation but were not integrated into the "white" culture. Forcing people to accept what you think is right only creates more problems.

Since I know Beren has studied this subject and made it part of his career I hope he will post more on this.

 

I agree with Beren and Nakia on this. I don't know much about the issue, but it seems like eliminating reservations would simply hurt Native American populations and their unique cultural identity.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...16e-11e2-bdea-e32ad90da239_story.html?hpid=z2

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/u...d-fewer-prosecutions.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc121f.pdf

http://thegrio.com/2012/11/23/street-gangs-gain-foothold-on-native-american-reservations/

http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2012/finalwebsite/problem/waterrights.shtml

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkop...-reservations-so-poor-a-look-at-the-bottom-1/

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/10/17/indianfasd

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobell_vs._Salazar

Native American reservations have enormous issues, as perusing the above articles can prove. High rates of sexual assualt, heavy proliferation of drug and alcohol abuse, extremely low educational performance, high rates of domestic violence, high suicide rates, increasing gang activity, failures compounded by uneven rates of gov't involvement (including what appears to be negligent gov't law enforcment plus a lack of protection for victims of crime when one looks at the lack of prosecution rates and even lower conviction rates), and powerful, endemic rates of reliance on gov't subsistence programs and aid. The Forbes article does a good job of laying out reasons of why so many individuals live below the subsistence level on reservations--at least partially, because most of the reservations (set up in the 19th century) reject principles of capitalism (which are often wealth-generating), instead engendering a communal ownership of property (which makes it difficult or impossible for the property to generate wealth--which is in some ways the most important thing property can do)--which the federal government has compounded by (recently) mismanaging trust accounts, denying many natives access to billions of U.S. dollars that were rightfully theirs (see Cobell vs Salazar). The federal government cannot even ensure there is clean drinking water on many reservations.

Reservations may provide a refuge that somehow preserves a sense of native culture, but at what price? Leaving aside the very obvious question of how much that native culture may be degraded by decades of pressures and fragmentation created by the above problems, it seems to me that what the government has largely and effectively done, in many locations (I am generalizing and I'm sure there are inspiring success stories from some locations, though I find them hard to locate, not being an expert at native issues--when I Google, most "successes" relate to gaming), is create an isolated, poor, extremely dependent population which can barely participate in broader, Western, 21st century society and which is debilitated by social issues that create a permanent and growing stain on the ability of the U.S. to claim to be able to manage anything effectively. It is of course sensationalistic to say this, but is the reservation system, overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and futher administered by the bigger U.S. federal government, simply managing the lingering native population into slow, painful deaths?

In WW2 the U.S. government decided to imprison Japanese-Americans and German-Americans all across the country, building ghettos for them that were largely demolished at the end the of the war when these individuals were released. These communities, and many many others, have by and large integrated themselves with varying successes into American culture ("integration" being a broad term that I am not using in a particularly scientific manner). There may be enclaves of an ethnic, religious, or cultural nature in this country (not just the Amish communities, for instance, but places like "Chinatown," "Japantown," "Somaliland," huge Irish, Armenian, and Italian communities, and "Little Baghdad") but they are not overtly, completely seperated by law, agency, regulation, economics, geography, language, and culture (that is, these communites are seperated a little, but not to the extent that native reservations are almost, arguably, forcibly seperated). Comparing the Amish to natives living on a Crow reservation in Montana is comparing apples to oranges, in my mind.

Maybe closing the reservations isn't a good idea. I'm really unsure. What seems clear to me is that the reservation system has largely failed, in terms of enabling a healthy, happy population. I am not sure I buy the argument that providing a haven for traditional culture is worth the trade-off it has, apparently, come with in terms of the social ills endemic on native reservations--which have costs, we must remember, that are footed not just by the natives themselves but also by the larger population of taxpayers to the states and to this nation.

Furthermore, the belief that natives can only preserve significant elements of their culture in a reservation setting seems, to my mind, to lack empirical evidence or to even pass the common sense test. San Francisco's "Chinatown" is probably my favorite neighborhood in the city, I grew up in a family and town with close links to Germany, and I have worked closely in the past with Iraqi-Americans, for instance, and it seems to me that many immigrant communities have been very effective in maintaining the pieces of their culture that they thought were important.

 

In theory, a reservation is a great place for a Native to liv and do so on his own terms, the "Native Way", so to speak. Sadly, it doesn't seem to work all that well in many cases. What can happen is that Native elites can totally screw over the workaday Natives, and when the rest of society protests and tries to advocate for equality, we are told that it is none of our business and to stop being racist. Yet if we DON'T care about the starvation and suffering on a reserve, we are ALSO racist. For a non-Native like myself, it is frustrating -- whether I speak out or ignore the issue, SOMEONE is going to accuse me of being racist.

I think that the day of reservations should be done. I believe that Natives can follow their cultural practices and keep their rich heritager and identity intact without reservations and the immense problems they can cause. But the Elites benefit so greatly from them, and they have convinced many of their people that any changes would result in assimilation. So the issue will be around for the next 10000 years or so, until the Rapture, a Nuclear War, an alien invasion, or melting polar ice caps lead to Kevin Costner developing gills.

 

I was with you until you ruined it, right there^.