The Forgotten Minority
A fierce debate is raging in our country’s capital. Local papers are taking sides, and the Washington City Paper is going as far as to refuse to call a group by its official name. The continued use of the Redskins mascot by Washington D.C.’s professional football team is a disgrace to our nation. To end any arguments before they start: while the Vikings and Trojans refer to specific ethnic groups, neither have been oppressed by the U.S. government, neither are pejorative, racist terms, and there are no longer people who identify as Trojans or Vikings. For Redskins to remain an acceptable mascot shows how ignored Native Americans are in this country.
According to the New York Times, the 310 Indian reservations in this country have violent crime rates more than twice as high as the national average. Native American women are ten times as likely to be murdered and four times as likely to experience sexual assault as other U.S. women. The Department of Justice is supposed to prosecute violent crimes on reservations, yet it files charges in only about half of murder investigations, and only investigates about a third of sexual assault cases. The sovereignty of reservations is complicated, but under federal law, the longest a person can be sentenced for committing a crime on a reservation is three years. For obvious reasons, tribes try to get federal prosecution for more serious crimes, but as the above statistics show, these efforts have been unsuccessful.
Last year, Forbes published an article about the economic problems on reservations. The author tried to argue that a lack of privatization was the main factor causing the extreme poverty that affects so many Native American reservations, and that banks are afraid to make loans to Native Americans because of a lack of accountability. This analysis ignores many historic and cultural forces at play, and also makes ethnocentric assumptions. While the lack of a strong court system may well be a problem on reservations, the sovereignty of the reservations makes it a difficult problem to fix, and given how the justice system has treated Native Americans in the past, there is little incentive for them to adopt what the author considers a more reliable system of private property. Land reform may help, but when the government began “giving” land to individual Native Americans with the Dawes Act in 1887, it was a continuation of the trend of giving them the worst, least useful land. The haphazard way in which land was dealt out has had long lasting effects greater than the lack of current privatization. To deny the historical forces at play is ignorant at best and dangerous at worst.
On the Blackfeet reservation in northern Montana, as on many reservations, much of the land is held collectively by the tribe. Fairly representative of the problems on reservations, unemployment may be as high as 70% there and the reservation needs to do whatever it can to gain some economic vitality. In the past year, these attempts have included leasing one million of the 1.5 million acres of land on the reservation to oil companies in the form of drilling rights. The reservation has oil trapped in shale deep underground, and as prices have increased for petroleum, the hydraulic fracturing process that would be necessary to extract the oil has become economically viable. The immediate money from drilling, $30 million already, was enough to get the tribal leaders to approve drilling, and thirty wells were dug in 2012. Not everyone is happy with the decision to allow oil companies onto the reservation though. Many people have environmental concerns, partly because the Blackfoot reservation is right next to Glacier National Park. Localized environmental problems often affect poverty-stricken areas because of a lack of political voice or information. The tribe did make this decision on its own, but given the levels of poverty, it is understandable that they would try anything to increase the cash flow, even if fracking will have negative environmental effects.
The U.S. has a long history of ignoring minorities in the country, but as the D.C. football team shows, the plight of Native Americans has been nearly forgotten. The government should be responsible to help vulnerable populations in the country. There are solutions to the many problems reservations face, but there needs to be a massive attitude shift if anything is going to happen. Overcoming the numerous historical forces at play will require great effort. What better place to start than in the capital, with its favorite sports team?