 i wanted to get back to this but didn t have the time i actually lived on a couple different indian reservations growing up in the pacific northwest and also spent a fair amount time in lakota sioux country as well and my parents have lived on an even more diverse range of indian reservations than i have my experience being a direct result of living with my parents i do get a lot of my information first hand or in some cases second hand from my father the income figures for the indians are somewhat misleading mostly because it is really hard to do proper accounting of the effective income while it is true that some indians live in genuine poverty it is typically as a consequence of previous poor decisions that were made by the tribe not something that was impressed upon them the primary problem with the accounting is that there is a tribal entity that exists separately from the individuals typically an indian corporation of one type or another where each member of the tribe owns a single share the details of when and how a share becomes active varies from tribe to tribe in most tribes a dividend is paid out to each of the tribal members from the corporation usually to the tune of NUMBER NUMBERk per person depending on the tribe the dividend money comes from a number of places with the primary sources being the federal gov t and various businesses assets owned by the indian corporation you have to understand a couple things first a great many indian tribes are run as purely communist enterprises everyone gets a check for their share no matter what one of the biggest problems this has caused is very high unemployment often NUMBER NUMBER for tribal members who are more than happy take their dividend and not work the dividend they receive from the corporation often constitutes their sole income for government accounting purposes unfortunately to support this type of economics when no one works they ve had to sell off most of their useful assets to maintain those dividends many of the tribes genuinely living in poverty do so because they have run out of things to sell yet nobody works one of the ironies is that on many of the reservations where the tribes still have assets to burn many of the people working in the stores and such are actually poor white folk not indians second even though the tribe members each get a cash dividend they also receive an enormous range of benefits and perks from the indian corporation to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per person annually by benefits and perks we are talking about the kinds of things no other ordinary american receives from either their employer or the government it should be pointed out that while many of these indian corporations are ineptly run and mostly provide sinecures for other indians a minority are very smartly managed and a few hire non indian business executives with good credentials to run their business divisions an example of this is the haida corporation which while having less NUMBER NUMBER tribal shareholders has billions of dollars in assets and the various corporations they own have gross revenues in the NUMBER NUMBER million range and growing yet the dividend paid out is strictly controlled about NUMBERk in this particular case and they engaged in a practice of waiting a couple decades before drawing money from any of the assets they were granted which has led to intelligent investment and use they don t eat their seed corn and have actually managed to grow their stash in contrast a couple islands over there is another tribe of NUMBER NUMBER people that has a net loss of about NUMBER million annually iirc while being regularly endowed by the federal government with several billions of dollars in valuable assets this particular tribe has a modest income in theory but the actual expenditures per person annually is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and many borrow money against future income incidentally in this particular case the people that are working frequently pull in a few hundred thousand dollars a year much of which goes back to the tribal corporation rather than their own pockets somewhat annoying the federal government semi regularly grants valuable assets to these tribes when they ve burned through the ones previously given where feasible typically selling the assets to american or foreign companies and the cycle continues so what is the primary problem for the tribes that have problems in a nutshell a thoroughly pathological culture and society few women reach the age of NUMBER without getting pregnant incest rape and gross promiscuity is rampant inbreeding heavy drug abuse during pregnancy and other environmental factors have created tribes where a very substantial fraction of the tribe is literally mentally retarded many of the thoughtful and intelligent tribe members leave the reservation at the earliest opportunity mostly to avoid the problems mentioned above on one reservation my parents lived the hiv infection rate was NUMBER many of these societies are thoroughly corrupt and the administration of the law is arbitrary and capricious they do have their own judges courts police etc in short many of these tribes that are still hanging together are in a shambles because they have become the most pathological societies that i have ever seen anywhere because of their legal status there really aren t that many consequences for their behavior there are many things that i could tell you that i ve seen that you probably would not believe unless you d seen it yourself there are always good people in these tribes but it has gotten to the point where the losers and idiots outnumber the good guys by a fair margin many times and this is a mobocracy typically btw if any of you white folk wants to experience overt and aggressive racism as a minority in a place where the rule of law is fiction and the police are openly thugs try living on one of these messed up indian reservations it will give you an interesting perspective on things there are only two real situations where you find reasonably prosperous indians the first is in the rare case of tribes run by disciplined and intelligent people that have managed their assets wisely the second is where the tribe has dispersed and assimilated for the most part even if they maintain their tribal identity in both of these cases the tribal leaders reject the insular behavior that tends to lead to the pathological cases mentioned above the indians are often quite wealthy technically and a lot of money is spent by the tribe per capita and the actual reportable income is quite high when you consider how many are living entirely off the tribal dole it is just that their peculiar economic structure does not lend itself well to ordinary economic analysis by merely looking at their nominal income the poverty is social and cultural in nature not economic this was my original point on a tangent one thing that has always interested me is the concept of quasi tribal corporate socialism many indian tribes implement a type of corporate socialism that is mind bogglingly bad in execution that they use this structure at all is an accident of history more than anything but what has interested me is that the very smartly managed ones do surprisingly well over the long run it is like a family corporation writ large it seems that in a future where familial ties will be increasingly voluntary the general concept may have some merit in general western society serving to create a facsimile of a biological extended family with the included dynamics but with an arbitrary set of self selecting individuals damn that was long and its late and it could have been a lot longer james rogers jamesr URL on NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER pm john hall johnhall evergo net wrote as i understand it there is a huge difference between native americans who speak english at home and those who do not i don t have figures that separate those at hand though NUMBER american indians us pop as a whole families below poverty NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER persons below poverty NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER speak a language other than english NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER married couple families NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER median family income NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER per capita NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER 