American Indians: Washington Post Misses the Real Story

TheWashington Post magazinehas a lengthy piece on American Indian policy, focusing on the challenges faced by people living on reservations. The cover story by thePost ’s David Montgomery highlights the lack of decent services on reservations and discusses federal responsibilities to the tribes that stem from 19th century treaties.Montgomery describes some of the hardships on the reservations and conveys that federal health, education, and infrastructure services are, frankly, poor. The Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Servicehave long been some of the worst-run federal bureaucracies.The problem with thePost article is that it does not consider why American Indian reservations do not prosper. It looks backward to broken treaties and lousy federal services, and it quotes tribal leaders complaining about Washington ’s broken promises.But the article does not probe why there is a dearth of self-generated growth on the reservations. It does not ask why reservations are still so dependent on D.C. decades into the modern era of American Indian “self-determination.” ThePost story focuses on federal aid, not on reforms that would allow Indian communities to aid themselves.I discuss some of the institutional reasons why many reservations are poorin this study. Reservations generally lack individual property rights in land, and some lack efficient and impartial government administration. As a result, many reservations have little entrepreneurship, business investm...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs