The leader of a South Dakota tribe is expected to declare an emergency on the state’s largest Native American reservation because of rampant crime that he said hasn’t been curbed due to the U.S. government’s inadequate funding for law enforcement.
I thought the whole point of the reservation was to be separate from the US so they can run their own government. I honestly didn’t even know they would get federal funding of any kind.
They are autonomous to a point, but every tribe gets federal funds. It is usually focused on quality of life issues like health, nutrition and that sort of thing. Reservations are, with some exceptions, very poor and don’t have tax bases. Back in the day, they were given crap land which is the main reason.
Considering the long history of Americans fucking over indigenous people, murdering them en masse and stealing their lands even after treaties had been signed, they deserve all the U.S. funding they can get. And they don’t get enough.
Because: A) poor nations all over the world receive funding from the United States in order to help secure our interests and stabilize regions of concern to us, that’s particularly significant when those regions include areas entirely surrounded by a state. B) They aren’t separate to a degree that matters for economic development. Many reservations are bound to some US or even state laws in exchange for certain things. They can’t decide to radically change their governance the way like Mexico can especially when it comes to things like building a modern standing army. They can’t create a hard border with the US. And C) their land sucks because whenever it turns out we accidentally built a reservation on land which has economically valuable resources we move the reservation to land that doesn’t or we starve and buy them out of it or something similar. We have created a system of hopelessness and routinely undermined their ability to create a society that can economically sustain itself without us.
I thought the whole point of the reservation was to be separate from the US so they can run their own government. I honestly didn’t even know they would get federal funding of any kind.
They are autonomous to a point, but every tribe gets federal funds. It is usually focused on quality of life issues like health, nutrition and that sort of thing. Reservations are, with some exceptions, very poor and don’t have tax bases. Back in the day, they were given crap land which is the main reason.
Considering the long history of Americans fucking over indigenous people, murdering them en masse and stealing their lands even after treaties had been signed, they deserve all the U.S. funding they can get. And they don’t get enough.
I agree. Which is why i understood them to be so poor, that being a lack of governmental funding.
Because: A) poor nations all over the world receive funding from the United States in order to help secure our interests and stabilize regions of concern to us, that’s particularly significant when those regions include areas entirely surrounded by a state. B) They aren’t separate to a degree that matters for economic development. Many reservations are bound to some US or even state laws in exchange for certain things. They can’t decide to radically change their governance the way like Mexico can especially when it comes to things like building a modern standing army. They can’t create a hard border with the US. And C) their land sucks because whenever it turns out we accidentally built a reservation on land which has economically valuable resources we move the reservation to land that doesn’t or we starve and buy them out of it or something similar. We have created a system of hopelessness and routinely undermined their ability to create a society that can economically sustain itself without us.