Today there are more than half a million Indians in the United States and millions more elsewhere in the Americas. Still trying to cope with adjustment to white civilization, they are in all stages of development, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated. In the United States, they still speak more than 100 different languages. Economically they range from pauperism to affluence. A few have made money from oil and other natural sources found on their lands, but many thousands live at near-starvation levels. Some are educated and completely assimilated in white society; many live in nearly complete isolation from non-Indian Americans. Relocation programs have taken hundreds of Indians to work in cities; thousands of others cling to the security of their reservations, hoping to gain education and assistance necessary to develop the resources of their lands and become self-sustaining. Generally, the Indians are still proud of their traditions and heritage, and many of them resist giving them up or allowing them to be submerged or corrupted by white civilization. But Indians generally also recognize that their standards of living must be raised. Without giving up their unique cultural heritage, they have organized into tribal councils to try to help the federal government settle on long-range programs of education, health services, vocational training, resource planning, and financial credit that will assist them to solutions of the problems that have beset them for so many sad decades.
Nowadays, there exist about 300 federal reservations in the United States, with a total of 52,017,551 acres held in trust by the federal government, the large majority west of the Mississippi. There are also 21 state reservations, most of these in the East. Some reservations are restricted to one tribe, others are jointly held. Some reservation land is owned, rented and occupied by non-Indians. The largest reservation is held by the Navajo tribe. Although the reservations are sovereign nations, the People are also considered U.S. citizens.
Indians are free to live anywhere
What is a federal Indian reservation?In the United States there are three types of reserved federal lands: military, public, and Indian. A federal Indian reservation is an area of land reserved for a tribe or tribes under treaty or other agreement with the United States, executive order, or federal statute or administrative action as permanent tribal homelands, and where the federal government holds title to the land in trust on behalf of the tribe
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Furthermore the lack of infrastructure (e.g., often no electricity, telephones or Internet connectivity) makes life difficult in the reservations and these drawbacks and the insufficient or partly missing links to the traffic system keep most foreign industry from installing sites in the reservations. The bad conditions complicate the foundation of American Indian businesses like casinos and tourism for some tribes, too, because they are not within easy reach from the next big city and the potential customers.
Considering these circumstances, it is not surprising that the rates of unemployment are between 50 and 70% (in some reservations they are higher than 80%), and that the American Indians have the lowest average income in the USA.
Furthermore the reservation schools have the highest rate of teacher turnover and they often lack the means for school supply and sufficient staff. Even those Native Americans students who could attend secondary education are inhibited by bureaucracy and the great distances to the universities.
This lack of formal education fuels other social problems like unemployment, poverty, teenage pregnancy, criminality and drug abuse and it forces the Native Americans to accept badly paid jobs. Therefore an improve of their life standards is not easy since they are also inhibited by the costs for food (which in reservations are absurdly enough higher than outside the reservations) and the financial burdens especially on City Indians, such as high rents and taxes (which they have to pay in full amount, unlike the Native Americans in the reservations).
As a result there are 24 to 25% of all American Indians who live below the poverty line and in the reservations the figure sometimes exceeds 40% of the residents. Especially poverty among children is an urgent problem, because for example in the Pine Ridge reservation (South Dakota) 46% of the American Indian children are considered poor, which is higher than the poverty rate among adults.
Social challenges[edit]
In the reservations but also outside the Native Americans have to deal with further worrying social developments: of all ethnic groups in the USA the American Indians have the- highest rate of school drop outs (about 54%),
- highest rate of child mortality,
- highest rate of suicide
- highest rate of teenage suicide ( 18.5 per 100,000),
- highest rate of teenage pregnancy,
- lowest life expectancy ( 55 years)
Caused or at least promoted by drug abuse, there is a lot of crime in the reservations and outside of which the American Indians (especially children) are victims and offenders (especially young adults) at the same rate: Domestic violence, rape, child abuse and child neglect are reported to take place very often in the reservations, with the estimated number of unknown cases being very high.
Furthermore in the recent years gang violence in the reservations has increased, fueled by weak law enforcement, youth unemployment and the lack of activities for young Indians and with the results of vandalism, theft, assaults (also sexual) and street fights.
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