Craig, You're good at recognizing the symptoms, but when it comes to diagnosis, your inclination is to blame the patient for being ill. Of course reservation unemployment is high; there are no economies there. Those few hundred thousand acres are pretty desolate for the most part....
Wrong bill. Montana reservation land is some of the most beautiful and fertile in the state, well except for the burned out rusty cars. What you call desolate, a rancher calls perfect. Why would a tribe elder sell a tract to a small rancher on the rez? How come the rancher makes a go of it and the rez kids dont ask him for work, they break into the sheds and barns and steal chit?
The resources are amazing, the motivation is equally amazing. Hay, grain, cattle, maybe oil, casinos sans intimidation and pilfering, those folks could kick some serious tail if they wanted to.
You simplify and get a few things wrong Craig, Rez issues are very complicated to say the least.
It has not been legal to sell Rez land to non-indians since 1934. The Rez I spend a ton of time on has been buying back land from non-indians for years.
The allotted nature of much Rez land makes managing it very difficult. Imagine owning a 160 acre section with 37 land owners and running a successful ranch on it.
The check my friend gets is once a year, for grazing rights and it is a tiny amount of money. The shares have been in his family for at least 4 generations, that is not welfare. The tribe does subsidize housing, utilities and more but that is how the tribe works.
I know Rez kids who work on ranches and I know a few Indian ranchers that make more than a go of it.
After 20 years of spending much of my fall on the Rez I have a very different view of it than you do. I like it enough I bought a house a short distance away. There are some damn fine folks up on those reservations and I eagerly await my return.
