Despite the erosion of discriminatory barriers that followed the moral awakening of the 1960s, the effects of past and present discrimination continue to take a heavy toll on Native Americans. The postwar economic history of Native Americans is a clear illustration. In the 2010 census, about 5.2 million people, 1.7 percent of the total population, identified themselves (either alone or in combination with other races) as American Indian or Alaskan Native. The Cherokee were the largest tribal grouping; over 800,000 Americans identified themselves as Cherokee as all or part Cherokee. Median household income was $39,664, about 73 percent of the median household income for non-Hispanic whites, and about 28 percent of American Indians and Alaskan Natives had incomes that fell below the poverty line.
The current reservation and trust territories are only a small fraction of the small remnant that still belonged to Native Americans in the nineteenth century. In 1887 Congress passed the Dawes Act, which provided that each registered American Indian would receive 160 acres that would be held in trust for 25 years. In theory, the idea was that by “privatizing” the land, an efficient economy of prosperous farmers would be created. Leonard A. Carlson (1983) and a number of other economic historians, however,
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledges the crowd at the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” in 1963.
Maintain that the program was structured to hinder the development of farming by Native Americans and to facilitate the transfer of American Indian properties to whites. Between 1887 and 1920, the land held by Native Americans fell from 138 million acres to 50 million acres. The allotment program was replaced in 1934 by the Indian Reorganization Act, which finally sought to preserve reservation and trust lands.
Many Native Americans choose to live their lives in accord with traditional values that reject the market, but many examples of an entrepreneurial spirit also exist. Often entrepreneurial initiatives have been deliberately frustrated by government policies intended to benefit white Americans at the expense of Native Americans. Lee Alston and Pablo Spiller (1992) reanalyzed a famous example from the nineteenth century, the Cherokee Outlet case. As early as 1867, the Cherokee had leased part of their land to white cattlemen. Leasing was backed by the federal government, which used the cavalry to keep squatters off the land. In 1888 the government ended the arrangement. The Cherokee were offered $30 million by some of the cattlemen for the land. Instead, the government, acting on behalf of white settlers, forced the Cherokee to sell the land to the government for $8.7 million.
In the postwar era the most visible sign of American Indian entrepreneurship has been gaming, which has been increasing at a rapid pace. In 2009, about 237 tribes sponsored gaming, which directly generated about $26 billion in revenues along with additional revenues from restaurants, hotels, and so on. However, much of the revenue was generated in a few large facilities. In 2007, the top 6 percent of Indian gaming operations produced 40 percent of the total revenue.118 In addition, serious questions have been raised about the extent to which gaming revenues “trickle down” and relieve the
Economic distress in the Native American community. Despite the prominence of gaming, it is wrong to assume that this is the only successful form of Native American entrepreneurship. Native Americans have engaged successfully in manufacturing, agriculture, tourism, and other industries, and have done so in widely diverse parts of the country.
World History
