In 2010 the Census bureau reported that Buffalo County, South Dakota was the poorest in the nation, with well over half its residents below the poverty level. Buffalo County contains the Crow Creek Indian reservation.
Six of the other ten poorest counties in the nation also consist of Indian reservations: Pine Ridge, Cheyenne River, Rosebud, and Standing Rock in South Dakota; and Navajo and Fort Apache in Arizona. Wade Hampton in Alaska is also among the ten poorest counties, and over 90 precent of its inhabitants are Native Americans, mostly Eskimo. Nationwide, nearly a quarter of all Indians live in poverty, twice the national average.
In 1988 Congress proposed to alleviate the plight of Native Americans with the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. It allowed tribes to own casinos and other gambling operations. Within two decades, over 200 tribes had built 360 casinos and gaming establishments. By 2009, annual revenue from Indian casinos exceeded $25 billion, twice as much as the combined income of the National Football League (NFL) and Major League Baseball.
But little of the casino revenue has flowed to the poorest reservations. Foxwoods in Connecticut, the largest casino in the United States, generates about $1 billion
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¦ In The Picture Writer's Story (1884), George de Forest Brush shows an older Mandan Indian documenting the story of a battle. The futility of the struggle is reflected in the young Indian's disinterested face.
Annually, a windfall for the tiny Mashantucket Pequot tribe. But the Little Big Horn Casino, located in southeastern Montana near the battlefield where Custer lost his scalp, yielded a profit of only $100 a month during its first year of operation. Half of all reservation Indians live in Montana, Nevada, North and South Dakota, and Oklahoma, far from potential throngs of gamblers; those Indians remain mired in poverty.
The plight of most Indians today was determined by events that transformed the West after 1865. Ranchers and farmers acquired more Indian land. Railroad construction destabilized the habitat that sustained Indian life, especially the grazing lands of the buffalo, and brought still more settlers. The discovery of new deposits of gold, silver, and other valuable minerals caused miners and prospectors to swarm over and onto Indian lands. The federal government pushed Indians onto reservations, often on land unsuitable for cultivation, and sent troops to harass those who refused to abandon nomadic life. The new civilization that emerged in the West—initially the work of individual farmers, prospectors, ranchers, and businessmen—was increasingly controlled and organized by large-scale business enterprises.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the economic foundations of tribal life had been destroyed; relief, when it finally arrived many decades later, came in the form of slot machines. That so many Native Americans
Overcame the legacy of this past is testimony to their own initiative, and to traditional cultures characterized by both perseverance and adaptation. ¦
World History
