Poverty and the Original Americans: Pine Ridge

Poverty and the Original Americans: Pine Ridge
Native Americans as a group are the poorest race in America. This is largely due to the horrible conditions present on reservations. The average income for someone on a reservation is $29,097, compared to $41,994 nationally. The official poverty rate is 28.4 percent, compared with 15.3 nationally in 2000. I’ll be speaking about the Pine Ridge reservation specifically, which is one of the largest and poorest reservations, with 97 percent of residents under the poverty level. The unemployment rate is high but goes up by at least 30 percent in the winter months as the nearest town where one could find work is 120 miles away. Why is this? Looking into the factors behind why reservation life is so difficult, I’ll analyze this from a conflict theorist perspective.
As everyone knows, European settlers came in and occupied land once owned by the Native Americans. There were attempts to share the land but the cultural differences and different levels of respect for the land made this difficult. Eventually, the settlers ended up chasing the natives off their land into cordoned off areas in the West. When the settlers came in, they were all dying of disease and starving. It seemed like a good plan then to take whatever they could and felt they couldn’t afford emparthy. However, once their lives stabilized, they looked back on what they had done and felt bad, at least somewhat. They decided to give the natives areas of land back for them to make their own living. While the natives would get nowhere near their whole range back, they would be able to support themselves. At least, this was the theory. It turned out the government did not want to give them the most fertile land, or even somewhat fertile land. This was purely because of greed and not wanting to compromise their own resources. The natives ended up getting the worst areas of land that were not good for farming and barely useable for grazing. As you recall, they were a hunter-gatherer society who grew some crops, so what the government gave them was not suitable at all for their style of life.
The Native Americans were thus forced with a horrible choice: abandon their culture and way of life to survive, or slowly starve. The government had largely bowed out of their affairs after failing to convert them to mainstream society. Since they were autonomous nations, they were in charge of building their own roads and running their own schools. This sounds like a victory for them, but they had no resources and little help from the government to do so. They were also reluctant to ask for help from a government that had ruined their lives so many times before. So we have generations of people who are disillusioned, unemployed, and unprepared to support themselves who have turned to drastic means to cope. These hardships have only led to other hardships. The constant stress of trying to balance one’s culture with survival has led to a magnification of many of the problems mainstream America sees: rampant alcoholism, domestic violence, gangs, homelessness, and a high dropout rate. Their children face similar struggles: turn out as their parents have, bitter and stuck in poverty, or abandon their roots and flee the reservation to pursue a life elsewhere. This would be a hard choice for anyone, but for someone who is growing up amongst constant turmoil the stress is magnified. It has turned into a vicious cycle that is not being addressed enough. What little federal aid comes in is largely in the form of food but they supply mostly inappropriate foods (high in carbohydrate and/or sugar) which would be bad for anyone, but is especially bad for the Pine Ridge residents, as half the adult population over 40 is diabetic. The teen suicide rate is 150% higher than the national average, and the dropout rate is 800 times that of the national average.

No one should have to “blend in” to survive. Native Americans are expected to hold onto their culture yet fit into a society that doesn’t value the same things as them. Add that to a long history of mistreatment, and a mess of problems has been brewed with little being done to solve them. What could be done? Is the answer to improve life on the reservation, work towards helping those who want to assimilate, or some combination of the two?



Shwartz, Stephanie. "The Arrogance of Ignorance." Native VIllage. Native American Journalists Association, Oct. 2006. Web. 10 Nov. 2011.