Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Barriers to economic development

According to the 2000 Census, an estimated 400,000 Native Americans reside on reservation land. While some tribes have had success with gaming, only 40% of the 562 federally recognized tribes operate casinos. According to a 2007 survey by the U.S. Small Business Administration, only 1 percent of Native Americans own and operate a business. Native Americans rank at the bottom of nearly every social statistic: highest teen suicide rate of all minorities at 18.5 per 100,000, highest rate of teen pregnancy, highest high school drop out rate at 54%, lowest per capita income, and unemployment rates between 50% to 90%.
The barriers to economic development on Indian reservations often cited by others and two experts Joseph Kalt and Stephen Cornell of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development at Harvard University, in their classic report: What Can Tribes Do? Strategies and Institutions in American Indian Economic Development, are as follows (incomplete list, see full Kalt & Cornell report):

Lack of access to capital.

Lack of human capital (education, skills, technical expertise) and the means to develop it.

Reservations lack effective planning.

Reservations are poor in natural resources.

Reservations have natural resources, but lack sufficient control over them.

Reservations are disadvantaged by their distance from markets and the high costs of transportation.

Tribes cannot persuade investors to locate on reservations because of intense competition from non-Indian communities.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs is inept, corrupt, and/or uninterested in reservation development.

Tribal politicians and bureaucrats are inept or corrupt.

On-reservation factionalism destroys stability in tribal decisions.

The instability of tribal government keeps outsiders from investing.

Entrepreneurial skills and experience are scarce.

Tribal cultures get in the way.

 “A general lack of education and experience about business is a significant challenge to prospective entrepreneurs,” also says another report on Native American entrepreneurship by the Northwest Area Foundation in 2004. “Native American communities that lack entrepreneurial traditions and recent experiences typically do not provide the support that entrepreneurs need to thrive. Consequently, experiential entrepreneurship education needs to be embedded into school curricula and after-school and other community activities. This would allow students to learn the essential elements of entrepreneurship from a young age and encourage them to apply these elements throughout life.”

One publication devoted to addressing these issues is Rez Biz magazine.

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George Carlin speaking on the topic "Indians"

"Now the Indians...I call them Indians because that's what they are. They're Indians. There's nothing wrong with the word Indian.
First of all, it's important to know that the word Indian does not derive from Columbus mistakenly believing he had reached ' India .' India was not even called by that name in 1492; it was known as Hindustan. More likely, the word Indian comes from Columbus 's description of the people he found here. He was an Italian, and did not speak or write very good Spanish, so in his written accounts he called the Indians, 'Una gente in Dios.' A people in God. In God. In Dios. Indians. It's a perfectly noble and respectable word.
As far as calling them 'Americans' is concerned, do I even have to point out what an insult this is? ----- We steal their hemisphere, kill twenty or so million of them, destroy five hundred separate cultures, herd the survivors onto the worst land we can find, and now we want to name them after ourselves? It's appalling.
Haven't we done enough damage? Do we have to further degrade them by tagging them with the repulsive name of their conquerors? You know, you'd think it would be a fairly simple thing to come over to this continent, commit genocide, eliminate the forests, dam up the rivers, build our malls and massage parlors, sell our blenders and whoopee cushions, poison ourselves with chemicals, and let it go at that.... But no! We have to compound the insult.'...
I'm glad the Indians have gambling casinos now. It makes me happy that dimwitted white people are losing their rent money to the Indians. Maybe the Indians will get lucky and win their country back. Probably wouldn't want it. Look at what we did to it."