Ep 713 ｜ The Unspoken Truth About Indian Reservations ｜ Guest： Naomi Schaefer Riley
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Summary
Author Naomi Riley joins Allie to talk about her new book, The New Trail of Tears, about the devastating effects of progressive policies on Native American reservations and Indian territories, and how we can do something about it.
Transcript
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What's the truth about Native American populations and Native American reservations in the United
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States? Why are there rates of crime, of poverty, of abuse, of alcoholism so much higher than the
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general population? What policies, what court decisions are driving this? And is there anything
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that we can do to help? Today, I am talking to author Naomi Riley. She wrote a book called The
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New Trail of Tears. It is an absolutely fascinating, heartbreaking, but fascinating conversation
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about the Native American population and how progressive policy has driven these populations
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into destitution and how desperately things need to change. And we can be a part of that change. So
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we're going to be talking about that today with Naomi. And this episode is brought to you by our
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friends at Good Ranchers. You can go to GoodRanchers.com slash Allie. But before we get into it,
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I do want to say one more time that we have got, we've got new merch, we've got Christmas merch out
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to rock mine and know that you're going to like yours as well. All right, without further ado,
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here's our friend Naomi. Naomi, thank you so much for joining us again. Last time we talked about the
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foster care system. Such an interesting episode. I love when people uncover kind of the talking
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points and reveal what's really going on in a system. And you do that really well. And a few
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years ago, a few years ago, before your foster care book and about the adoption system, you did the same
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thing with our treatment of Native Americans and what's really going on there. So tell us about the
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book that you wrote a few years ago and why you wrote it.
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Sure. So the book was called The New Trail of Tears, How Washington is Destroying American Indians.
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And for a long time, I had been reading the stories that I think a lot of Americans read about just the
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tragedies of what's going on on Indian reservations and Indian territories, about the extreme poverty that
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exists in these places, about, you know, some of the abuse that goes on, the levels of alcoholism
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and substance use. And I really kind of wondered what what was behind that. You know, I think the
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narrative out there is that, you know, we took the land from these people, and we are not giving them
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enough in return. And so I, you know, eventually managed to sort of get some, some funding to do
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some traveling. I went to a bunch of different reservations all over the country, South Dakota and
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Montana and upstate New York. And I did a lot of interviews and a lot of research. And I came away
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with a much different impression about what are the things that are ailing American Indians. And so I,
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in the book, sort of divided them into three categories. I think the first and most important
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is kind of understanding the economic situation on reservations. So, you know, most people don't
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understand really what a reservation is. It means that the land is held in trust by the U.S.
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government for American Indians. Now, the only other people that we hold things in trust for
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are children or people who are mentally incompetent. So just sort of the infantilization that goes on of
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American Indians by the fact that we have these reservations, I think is important to understand.
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And while I think many on the left and many Americans generally have embraced the idea of
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reservations as a way of protecting Native American communities, unfortunately, they're actually a way
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of keeping them in poverty. So they don't own, they don't own the land, the U.S. government owns the
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land. Got it. They don't have any property rights, which as you and I know, is so important to economic
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prosperity. So not only do they own the land, it means that, you know, the same way you and I might get
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a mortgage from a bank, they can't get regular mortgages to build a home, for instance, because they
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don't own the underlying land. So there's no collateral. Similarly, if they wanted to open a small
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business, a lot of Americans use the land that they have or their house in order to take out a
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second mortgage or home equity loan in order to open a small business. Again, because they don't
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own the land, they can't do that. And so that lack of property rights really makes those communities
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much more like a kind of third world socialist country than a part of the United States. And that
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has ripple effects, which we can talk about on everything from education, to the way families
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operate, to the unemployment rate. It really does change the entire structure of the society.
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Yeah. Before we get into some of those consequences, maybe that this is a dumb question,
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but why don't they, if they can't really own the property on these reservations and they can't gain
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equity the way you or I could, why don't they just move? Why do Native Americans stay on these
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reservations? So there are about two million American Indians in this country,
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and about half of them live on reservations and about half of them don't. There's nothing ever
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stopping them from leaving. They are American citizens. They are free to live anywhere in this
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country, free to move anywhere in this country, just like you or I could. Unfortunately, what happens
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is because there is so much in the way of kind of government subsidies and a kind of cycle of
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dependency and poverty, a lot of people do end up staying. You know, they are close to family there
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and they feel like, you know, that's, that's sort of what they know. And so, you know, a lot of
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Americans, you know, don't necessarily leave the place that they're living, even if it's, you know,
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an inner city or a dangerous neighborhood, because that's what they know and that's what they're used
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to. But, but the cycle of kind of government dependency also sort of keeps them in this particular
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place, you know, again, not legally, but sort of culturally. And I think that has the effect of,
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of continuing the cycle. And unfortunately, what happens sometimes also is that you get a little
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bit of a brain drain. So the people who are most competent and most ambitious and most interested
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in escaping the cycle actually leave. And then the remaining people there are caught even more
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in the cycle because there's no one there to kind of push them out of it. Right. Which is the same
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problem with a lot of global migration as well. Interesting. Yeah. Let's talk about some of the
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ripple effects, some of the repercussions of this. You've talked about the, the alcoholism and the
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abuse and the crime that goes on there really at a disproportionate rate compared to the rest of the
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population off of these reservations. Why does that happen? So just to sort of take it, you know,
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to take it from the economic part into the sort of cultural part. So one thing to understand is why
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education is so terrible on these reservations. Um, so because there are so few jobs, because there's
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no, you know, real private sector economy, the only real jobs are jobs that are government provided,
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you know, government subsidies and, and, and public school teaching, like teaching at a tribal school,
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um, or at a BIA Bureau of Indian affairs school is actually one of the few real jobs on the
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reservations. But those jobs are not given often based on competence or based on whether you're a good
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teacher. They're given based on whether you happen to have a relative who is on the tribal council.
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There's an enormous amount of nepotism that occurs there. And the schools are absolutely terrible. The
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outcomes for kids are again, you know, worse than what you imagine in the worst inner city public
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schools in America. Because there's just no incentive and there's no outside accountability.
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Are they, are the schools there, are they different? Are they apart from our public education system in the U.S.?
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Are they kind of their own entity? So there are different, um, there are different kinds of
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schools that American Indians can attend. So about 10% of the schools are federally run. They're called
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Bureau of Indian affairs schools. Those are some of the absolute worst of public schools. They're
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absolutely falling down. Um, and we spend many times the amount per student on those schools that we do
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on a typical American public school. Um, they, the Bureau of Indian education, I think has something
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like 26 different leaders in 24 years. Um, because, and so many of those people were pushed out because
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of corruption and incompetence. Um, and so that's one type of school. Another type of school is not
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sorry to interrupt, but just so people know, because we hear this a lot for our public schools, that it's
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lack of funding. It's lack of funding. That's what Democrats seem to always say. And yet that's not even
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true of our public education off of these reservations. I mean, we spend a ton of money,
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have increased our spending that unfortunately has just not gone to the students and has gone to
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bureaucratic bloat and corruption in a lot of cases. So you're saying that that is also true of these
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federally run reservation schools, but even worse because maybe, I don't know, I don't know why,
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Well, um, to begin with, there's almost no competition. Um, so there are almost no private
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schools around a couple of the reservations that I visited, like, uh, Pine Ridge, um, and one of the
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reservations in Montana, um, do have Catholic schools that are located on or near the reservation.
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Um, they're small, they are often, uh, criticized incredibly by the council, by the tribal councils,
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but frankly, those are the only schools that are actually giving a real education. Um, but they're,
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they're deemed too white. Um, and a lot of parents don't want to send their kids there because they
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don't feel like they're, they're authentically Indian enough, or that's what they've been told
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by their tribal leaders. Um, so there's no competition. Also, a lot of the states that
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have the largest American Indian populations don't, um, have charter schools allowed in their states.
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Um, so that, as we know, has provided competition and has improved public schooling in places like,
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you know, New York city or Los Angeles, you know, where there has been at least some competition
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that is often not allowed, uh, near reservations. So the combination of those things has made,
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um, you know, the education just deplorable. And what you get is a situation where, you know,
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again, you can't escape, um, uh, because you don't have the credentials, the competence in order to get
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out. Um, and that, that in, you know, the, the economics is in part feeding the cultural problems
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and the cultural problems are feeding some of the economic problems. So just as, again, just as you have
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in, in different inner city areas and in very poor rural populations, um, you have a high rate of
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unwed motherhood. Uh, you have a lot of broken families. Um, you have a great deal of crime and
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violence, uh, substance abuses through the roof, um, sexual abuse of, uh, both women, the, the rates
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of sexual assault by women, uh, of women and the rates of sexual abuse of young children are
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extraordinarily high. Um, so all of these things together, and that, that has to do with family
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structure. It has to do with, um, the history of the way, uh, these families have, have evolved.
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And in some cases it has to do with how they've been treated by outsiders, but the way that these
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things have been perpetuated now is, is almost entirely by, um, American Indians themselves.
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Um, 75% of the people who work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington are themselves Indians.
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So there is a complaint, you know, Oh, the white people are treating us badly. You know, these are,
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you know, tribal councils and Bureau of Indian Affairs are run by American Indians. Um, but they're
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perpetuating a lot of these harms on their own people.
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I think if I'm correct, these Native Americans populations tend to vote for the party that is
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guaranteeing kind of more government interference and protection and welfare, correct?
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Absolutely. And, and, and so you see, this is again, an interesting parallel with, you know,
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a lot of the civil right quote unquote civil rights leaders who are in America today, you know, they're,
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they're telling, you know, for instance, African American population, you know, vote for us and we
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will, you know, give you more money and more government benefits. And similarly among American Indians,
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you have these leaders who claim to speak for the population. But, you know, as I found,
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there were lots of people on these reservations who really questioned these ideas, but there wasn't
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a lot of a political alternative there. Um, and, and so all these leaders who say, you know,
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we'll bring home the bacon and that's, what's the most important thing. Um, you know, they promise
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year after year that, you know, all this, all this reservation needs is more money and that problem
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will be fixed. And, you know, we pour billions upon billions of dollars into these reservations
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and you don't see anything improving. Um, you know, it was really interesting. One of the places
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I went to was the Seneca territory, which is an upstate New York. Um, so they have sort of some,
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uh, I guess what you might call private industry in that they have a large casino there. Now,
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most Indian casinos don't make much money. And a lot of people have said to me like, Oh, why don't
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they just use their casino money to succeed? But, you know, if you open a casino in the middle of South
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Dakota, no one's there, no one's going to come. So it's not really very helpful. But the one in
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upstate New York has been very successful. And over the course of 10 years, um, Seneca has earned
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about a billion dollars, um, on their casino, which interesting is if you go, um, you know,
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to the territory, what you find is they're still living in a lot of poverty. And what has happened
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is that money, the proceeds from the casinos just get distributed the same way welfare checks get
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distributed. Um, you know, when I was there, I think the number was when you turn 21, they'll give
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you a check for $25,000 just, you know, for being a member of the tribe. And, um, you know,
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and you can imagine what a 24, 20, what a 21 year old does when you just hand them that kind of money,
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they blow it. And, and so it doesn't ever improve the economic situation on the reservation. It's
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just like money falling from the sky. My goodness. I have so many questions in that. Okay. Let's see.
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I guess my first, yes. My first question is, and I'm not sure how much you talk about this,
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um, how much you talk about this or have written about this, but can you talk a little bit about
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the history of how these reservations, how Native Americans came to depend on the gambling industry?
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Like where, where does that, where does that go back? Why is it that Native Americans run so many
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of these casinos? So what's, what's, what's happened is that you have had these, um, court
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rulings that have allowed American Indians to get into certain industries that, um, states may have
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deemed illegal. And so they've kind of, in various ways, they, they would corner the market on
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industries. Um, they're often, they often tend to be industries that you or I would not want in our
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backyard. So there was a time where they were able to sell cigarettes tax-free or sell liquor tax-free,
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um, or they were able to open these casinos when other people in the state could not.
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Is this just like a form of reparations basically?
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Well, it, it, I mean, it effectively has turned into that, but it started off as just kind of these
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legal loopholes that technically these were sort of sovereign territories in some ways. And so the
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state laws did not apply to them in the same way that they would apply to other residents of the
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state. And now they're actually getting into the marijuana business.
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Yeah. So again, you know, industries that you or I do not want in our neighborhood and, and they are,
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you know, really grasping and, and, and holding onto these, you know, because they are providing
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such an enormous flow of money, but they're not industries that help a community. Um, and often
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they encourage not only bad behavior on the part of the residents of the community. I mean, a lot of
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the people who frequent the casinos are Indians themselves. Um, but also they're bringing in even
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a kind of worse element of, you know, people, Oh, they're the people who want to come buy pot from
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us. Like that's, that's not what you want to encourage coming to your neighborhood.
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Yeah. So when we hear from left-wing activists and gosh, I mean, everything that you say,
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it parallels so much kind of like you were talking about the inner city communities,
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black lives matter advocacy. It's, they're so similar because we also hear, so we hear from BLM
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that more money needs to be poured into these communities and all of that disparities are evidence
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of racism. And then we also hear that when it comes to the native American population,
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that there needs to be more, there've been no reparations paid. Um, there's been no justice
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exacted for these people. And we hear like this phrase land back, they need to get their land back.
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So what exactly are these activists talking about? Like what do the left-wing activists say
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that native Americans deserve that in their mind would make things better?
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Um, well, more money to begin with, but they also talk about sovereignty in this particular way,
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um, that I think doesn't make a lot of sense, um, in the modern context. I mean, you know, I,
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I would go to some of these reservations and, and they would say, well, we want to be treated like,
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um, they had a, uh, one on one reservation. They had a team that had competed in like a worldwide
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lacrosse tournament. And they were like, well, you know, we were just treated like another country.
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And we were just like France and said, well, legally, that's not what you are. No one thinks
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that American Indian reservations are like a separate country, um, because American Indians
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are American citizens. And that's something that's important to remember both in terms of how we treat
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the leadership of these, uh, of these reservations, but also in terms of how we ensure the protections
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for their citizens. Like if, if there is all this crime and violence and substance abuse and child
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abuse going on, on these reservations, you know, they, these American citizens are owed the same
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protections that you or I are. And we can't pretend that they're like France and that's their problem.
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Right. But they're not, they're not offered the same protections. Women and children are not,
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or even men, anyone who is really a victim of a crime there is not afforded the same protections.
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Can you talk a little bit more about that? I mean, how did that happen and what does that look like?
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Well, just to sort of give you one story, um, I went to the Pine Ridge reservation,
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for instance, in South Dakota, which is basically the poorest County in the United States. Um, and I
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went to visit a school there and the principal of the school was talking to me about how on one weekend
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a month, um, the school has, uh, what they call a lock-in, but she sort of made it sound like it was
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this sort of cultural festival. The kids stay for the weekend. It's very exciting. They celebrate all their
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traditions. And, and I said, um, you know, like, tell me more, why, why do the kids have to stay over
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for the whole weekend? And she explained that they keep them there because that is the weekend that their
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parents receive their checks from the government and often get drunk and abuse their children.
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Wow. So I just, you know, I, I tell that story because I think people don't understand when I'm talking
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about the level of abuse that's going on and how deeply connected it is to the cycle of dependency, um,
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from the government and the substance abuse that's going on there. Um, and we are not, you know, there is
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not enough law enforcement on these reservations. There's often jurisdictional confusion about who is in
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charge. I mean, I remember sitting down with, um, with three guys who, uh, you know, were involved
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in the education system on Indian territories. And I asked one of them, like I asked all three of them,
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who would you report it to if you thought a child was being abused? And one person said he would report
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it to the tribal authorities. One person said he'd report it to the state authorities. And one person
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said he'd report it to the federal authorities. So there's so much confusion about who is in charge
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that it leads to a kind of wild west situation where, you know, the most vulnerable people are not getting
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One thing that was brought to my attention a few months ago, um, by Governor Sitt from Oklahoma was the McGirt
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decision by the Supreme Court in July of 2020, a 5-4, uh, ruling that basically said,
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a large chunk of Eastern Oklahoma remains in American Indian reservation. And the reason, um,
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why this went to the Supreme Court. So in 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction of child
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rapist Jim C. McGirt on the grounds that the Creek Nation's reservation was never disestablished for criminal
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jurisdiction. State courts no longer have the authority to prosecute crimes committed by or against
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Oklahomans who are also tribal members. Now, until the governor talked to me about this, I had no idea
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that this was the case. And you might have heard in the news recently, um, there was a debate, a gubernatorial
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debate when the governor was campaigning, um, where his opponent said, you know, actually Oklahoma's crime
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is even higher than New York's crime, um, per capita, which is not necessarily true based on FBI reporting and things
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like that. But what a lot of people don't realize is that one of the reasons why Oklahoma's crime rate is so high is
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because such a large chunk is reservation Native American territory, and they are able to commit these crimes with
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near impunity, correct? That is absolutely true. The crime rates on the reservations are, are just,
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they're mind boggling. And the McGirt decision is just, it's outrageous. I mean, the idea that, um, you know,
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we want a large number of non-Natives to be under the jurisdiction of, uh, you know, of a, of an Indian
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territory and that we can't prosecute natives for crimes, um, especially these very serious crimes, um, is,
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is crazy. And I have talked to a number of, of women who are sort of activists on these reservations
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who are deeply concerned about what this is going to mean for prosecuting sexual assaults, um, for
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prosecuting child abuse, because what they have seen is the corruption that often happens in the tribal
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courts, um, of their, again, the nepotism is there to a large extent, but it's not just that. It's also
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that the, you know, the, the, the punishment for serious crimes is often, you know, sort of what
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they would call culturally appropriate, you know, that you're, um, that you're asked to, uh, you know,
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to, to do things that, that don't involve jail time, um, that are supposedly, you know, going to put
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you more in touch with your tribal traditions. Um, but, but again, American citizens, American laws,
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American protections, that's what we are losing sight of. Um, and the most vulnerable Indians are
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the ones who are suffering as a result of our desire to be somehow more politically correct and
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sensitive, um, about the needs of these communities. And what do you say to those who say, okay, yes,
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all of these are problems, the abuse, the alcoholism, the crime, but all of these are just
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inherited from the oppression that was inflicted on them by the United States. The reason why they've
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never been able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is because, you know, we conquered and
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took their land. I mean, I have my own thinking in response to that, but what do you say? Cause I'm
00:24:16.360
sure you're kind of confronted with that accusation. Yeah. I mean, I don't really believe in historical
00:24:22.140
trauma. I mean, I think if you look at groups in this country around the world, you know, it, it,
00:24:29.300
what, what is traumatic is what happens to you as an individual. And so the idea that, you know,
00:24:35.840
we would look to, you know, something that happened to your family three generations ago
00:24:41.220
to explain some of the, the behavior, some of the dysfunction that is going on in your life today,
00:24:47.480
I think is, is a cop-out. And I don't just mean it's a cop-out in the sense of you should take
00:24:52.540
responsibility. I'm saying we're not looking at the more proximate causes of the dysfunction.
00:24:57.960
You know, there was a story I remember, uh, on NPR when I was, around the time I was writing a book,
00:25:02.620
that was talking about some of the drug smuggling that was going on, uh, across some of the
00:25:08.040
reservations close to the Mexican border. Um, and, and so it, the story was ostensibly about some of
00:25:14.440
the high crime rates and abuse rates. Um, and, and the first explanation they had was historical
00:25:20.340
trauma. But later in the story, you find out about all this drug smuggling that's going on,
00:25:25.260
on these reservations. You say, well, you know, maybe it's a substance abuse. Maybe it's the high
00:25:29.880
crime rates. Maybe it has nothing to do with the fact that your grandfather, you know, was forced
00:25:34.760
to go to a boarding school, uh, you know, by, by the American government. I mean, I think that the
00:25:40.660
way that that oppression, the way that that dysfunction does get passed on sometimes is
00:25:45.580
through child abuse. I mean, I, you know, if, if you have been abused as a child, you know,
00:25:50.600
it's not unlikely that your parent was abused as a child and their parent was abused as a child.
00:25:54.820
But then the answer is, you know, how do we stop that? I mean, one thing we need to do is by
00:25:58.740
prosecuting it and ensuring that people who are, you know, committing these horrific crimes against
00:26:04.240
women and children, you know, need to be taken away and put in jail or rehabilitated in some way.
00:26:09.700
Not that we ignore it because we're trying to be sensitive and we just say, well, you know,
00:26:14.380
you don't know what happened to them a hundred years ago. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's again, just so
00:26:19.000
similar to the social and racial justice narrative that we hear outside of these reservations that in
00:26:24.840
order to create equal outcomes, when it comes to like incarceration populations, we have to simply
00:26:31.440
not jail people of certain races or not arrest them. And we think that that is going to create
00:26:37.540
equality of outcomes. But in the case of the black population, you're just creating more black victims
00:26:42.440
because intraracial violence is the most, you know, likely kind of violence. And it seems to be the
00:26:48.340
same in the Native American population. You're not protecting them from compounded trauma or whatever
00:26:56.160
the left wants to say that it is. You are just creating more victims. It's a giant virtue signal,
00:27:02.080
like what all of social justice is. It's a way to throw money at the problem and then to say that,
00:27:08.520
you know, you're fighting for the rights of these people when really you're not, you're hurting them.
00:27:15.640
Um, yeah, perfect. I wanted to say the perfect example of this, you know, the Supreme court last
00:27:20.520
week heard a case about the Indian child welfare act, um, which is really just should outrage all
00:27:25.980
Americans. I mean, so the Indian child welfare act was passed in the 1970s. It was specifically to
00:27:31.160
apparently address, you know, this historical trauma. Um, but the result is that today, you know,
00:27:36.580
if a child who is of Indian descent is removed from their home because they have been abused or severely
00:27:42.460
neglected, um, we have a standard in court that is different for, you know, proving that abuse than
00:27:49.580
we have for white children or black children or Asian or Hispanic children. It's higher. It's harder
00:27:53.280
to prove. It is higher. Yes. We, we leave these children in unsafe homes longer because of our desire
00:27:59.360
to be sensitive. And we make it almost impossible for them to be adopted because the tribes get to say,
00:28:06.300
if that child has a drop of Indian blood in them, the tribes can say, no, no, no. We want them to be
00:28:12.320
with an Indian family. And so if there's no Indian family, we will leave that child in foster care
00:28:17.640
indefinitely because again, Oh, we're being sensitive to their historical trauma. What about
00:28:23.040
the trauma that child is experiencing today on a personal level? Why are we concerned about what
00:28:28.840
happened to that child's great grandfather and not what is being perpetrated against him or her today?
00:28:33.660
Yeah, it's exactly what you said a couple minutes ago. You are focusing on these intangible and far
00:28:40.620
off potential, but unlikely causes of trauma for today. Uh, and then ignoring the proximate cause
00:28:48.900
of trauma and the very tangible cause of trauma. And it's, it's really hard for me to understand what
00:28:54.840
the motivation is behind that. I think we both understand kind of how left-wing social justice
00:28:59.360
ideology works. And that's that effect on many kinds of communities in the United States,
00:29:05.320
but it's still hard for me to understand how a human could see, okay, this child is being abused.
00:29:12.200
It is, it is more important that this child stays in foster care and with a potentially abusive or
00:29:19.460
negligent tribal family than it would be for them to, you know, be adopted by maybe a white family
00:29:27.260
who actually loves them. I just don't under, I don't understand what's behind that. It's really
00:29:33.400
I know. I mean, I think there are very powerful, special interests at work here. I mean, the tribes
00:29:37.320
were the one who were ones who were in court arguing for the Indian Child Welfare Act this week. And
00:29:42.460
they were really sort of, you know, they're the ones who you think would be protecting, you know,
00:29:46.960
their own most vulnerable children, but they're not. And it's, um, it is hard to understand,
00:29:51.220
but you have to understand like all sorts of other organizations, including the American Academy
00:29:56.340
of Pediatrics actually signed amicus briefs to side with the tribe saying, again, we should leave
00:30:02.900
children in abusive homes longer, and we should make it harder for these kids to be adopted. The,
00:30:07.480
the pediatricians of America. So, you know, it's hard to, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to understand
00:30:12.700
on the one hand, why ordinary Americans would think this law is a good idea, but a lot of Americans
00:30:17.480
think, oh, well, pediatricians think it's okay. So why not? Of course, what is their interest?
00:30:22.300
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's what, that's what I don't know. Like, what is their interest? But I
00:30:26.080
guess, you know, we ask the same questions about, well, what is their interest in pushing puberty
00:30:30.560
blockers? What is their interest in pushing mask mandates without any data? I guess it's just,
00:30:35.460
you know, institutional capture that's happened to a lot of institutions in America.
00:30:41.500
Political virtue signaling. Absolutely. That's what it has in common. You want to know why the AAP
00:30:46.020
wants masking? You want to know why the AAP wants puberty blockers? You want to know why the AAP wants
00:30:50.700
ICWA? It's all because they have been captured by political interests. They are willing to sell their
00:30:56.080
name, basically, in order to participate in these cases. And, and the victims are the children.
00:31:02.660
Yeah, but we're told to trust the science. And if we don't trust them,
00:31:05.960
then we're seen as some kind of conspiracy theorist.
00:31:16.020
I just want to put a fine point on what you're talking about, about the violence and the proximate
00:31:26.600
trauma that these communities are facing. Indian reservations nationwide face violent crime rates
00:31:31.180
more than 2.5 times the national rate. And some reservations face more than 20 times, 20 times the
00:31:37.780
national rate of violence. More than one in three Indian women will be raped in their lifetimes and two
00:31:43.020
in five will face domestic or intimate partner violence. So most people do not know that this is
00:31:51.540
happening. I mean, they have no idea. When I talk to friends in Oklahoma, you look at the crime rates
00:31:55.740
is terrible. But if they live out, I mean, they all live outside of these reservations, Oklahoma City,
00:32:00.500
Tulsa, things like that. They don't feel unsafe. They feel like they have a very safe and secure
00:32:06.180
home and they don't even really know. They might live right next to these reservations and they don't
00:32:11.120
know. It's almost like the best kept secret. Well, yeah, I mean, one of the things I started
00:32:16.780
thinking about as I was going to these reservations, particularly, you know, I remember thinking this
00:32:21.180
while I was in Montana, I was I visited the Crow Reservation there. You know, inner city poverty and
00:32:29.880
dysfunction is something that at least in New York and other cities like that, you know, people at least
00:32:36.920
sort of drive through or see or, you know, even if you're taking the train from Westchester to New York
00:32:42.720
City, you go through the Bronx like you have some idea of what happens there. But it's very easy to
00:32:49.080
ignore some of these rural communities that are just so impoverished, so filled with crime and
00:32:56.020
dysfunction. But the flip side of that, I think, is also important, which is that American Indians are
00:33:02.100
also very isolated. And so they don't often have a sense of the way the rest of the country operates,
00:33:09.000
that this is not the way most Americans live. This is not the education system most Americans have.
00:33:16.680
Most Americans go to work every day. I mean, if you're a child growing up on the Pine Ridge
00:33:21.600
Reservation, the likelihood is that there's no adult in your life who has a steady job.
00:33:26.200
Wow. And so what is the what are the chances that you will look around and think there could be
00:33:32.480
something better for me? And so I just you know, I just want to make the point that the isolation
00:33:37.520
kind of goes both ways. It's in terms of the way we ignore the problems. But it also makes it much
00:33:43.100
more difficult for American Indians to pull themselves out of any of this. One one kind of
00:33:49.300
inspirational story. I mean, there has been talk about trying to open some of the high performing
00:33:56.020
charter schools near Indian reservations. And there was one charter school group that actually
00:34:03.000
flew a few adults on the Pine Ridge Reservation out to Denver to see some of the charter schools
00:34:09.320
there and how well they were doing. And I interviewed some of the folks who went on that trip, and they
00:34:14.500
were just aghast. They could not believe that there were kids in Denver who come from poor families,
00:34:21.640
some of whom, you know, don't even hear English at home. And they were able to achieve these
00:34:26.720
extraordinary academic results because these Indians had been told by their leaders for so long
00:34:32.180
that it was impossible for them to get these results, that it was just it was poverty that was
00:34:36.860
keeping them down, that it was a lack of money and resources. And when they understood that other
00:34:41.800
models were possible and that there are ways of teaching poor children from, you know, difficult
00:34:47.940
upbringings and broken families, how to teach them to successfully, they thought, well, why can't we
00:34:54.700
have that? And I think, you know, fixing these problems is going to take a lot of that attitude,
00:35:01.200
a lot of a sense of what what else is possible for us. Yeah, that is inspiring. And I hope that that
00:35:07.520
leads people down a path of difference making. Because I mean, it could just giving the opportunities to
00:35:15.520
people that they have always been told that they can't have, or maybe that if they took those
00:35:19.020
opportunities, that they're abandoning their culture. I think there's a lot of emotional
00:35:22.740
manipulation there, too. One thing I wanted to talk to you about before we kind of close out,
00:35:27.140
I do want to hear a little bit more about what we can do and what we should know about this. But
00:35:32.140
you wrote a new forward to your book after COVID. And you just point out using statistics that things
00:35:39.060
really have only gotten worse during COVID. Were these reservations, I mean, were they under the
00:35:45.800
same kind of lockdowns and things like that? I mean, what caused some of these disparities to
00:35:52.180
widen during the COVID era? So one of the biggest reasons for the difficulties that these reservations
00:36:00.060
experienced was that the health system on Indian reservations is called the Indian Health Service.
00:36:06.200
It is a federally run health program. And if you ever wanted to know why we should not let the
00:36:11.240
federal government run healthcare in this country, go visit an Indian reservation. They are terribly run
00:36:18.700
and managed. Again, you see instances of doctors and nurses engaged in abuse. The Wall Street Journal
00:36:26.920
did a whole expose with PBS in the last few years about moving around how just different doctors who they
00:36:35.180
knew were engaged in horrible behavior were moved from one clinic to another. Some of these places
00:36:41.340
don't even have computerized records. And again, by the way, it is not because we've not given up money
00:36:46.940
to the Indian Health Service. It's just, it's terribly run. And so the outcome, the health outcomes on these
00:36:54.580
reservations are in part because of that. And in part because of all of the other, you know,
00:37:00.720
co-occurring, you know, illnesses and health out and health problems that American Indians have, which
00:37:07.040
you also saw in poor communities in America, you know, high rates of obesity, high rates of substance
00:37:12.720
abuse, you know, diabetes, heart problems, all those things that made COVID much worse, combined with a
00:37:20.260
health system that didn't know how to adequately serve these people, I think made that much, much worse.
00:37:25.500
The lockdown issue was kind of less of an issue, in part because these are very rural communities.
00:37:31.740
But really, just because the health outcomes start in such a bad place to begin with, COVID made it much worse.
00:37:49.020
Wow, so many people don't know anything about this. I really didn't. I'm thankful for your work on it.
00:37:54.640
I think a lot of people just don't say anything because, well, one, we don't really know, but also we are
00:38:01.420
either consciously or not. I mean, we're kind of pummeled into silence by saying, you know, you don't
00:38:08.220
understand. And even kind of given this romantic history of Indigenous life in the United States, that there are
00:38:15.920
Indigenous ways of knowing, there are Indigenous ways of education, there are Indigenous ways of doing, and all we can do
00:38:22.740
is honor those. And any kind of interference by state law enforcement is seen as just, you know, reactivated
00:38:30.900
trauma or oppression or white supremacy. So I think some of us have even, like, imbibed those narratives
00:38:36.660
without realizing it. But what should we be doing is people who are aware that, wow, there are a lot of
00:38:42.740
women and children who are subjects of violence, victims of violence with impunity. Is there anything that we
00:38:49.220
can do, especially now that the Supreme Court has ruled that basically they can commit these acts
00:38:54.560
of violence and state law enforcement can do nothing?
00:38:58.140
Yeah. So I just I want to emphasize your point that we have a vast misunderstanding in this country
00:39:03.100
about what American Indians mean. Like, there's this there is this myth out there that they're the
00:39:11.040
Yeah. And, you know, if you talk to American Indian leaders, they're like, you know, we are just we are
00:39:16.880
like any other people. We many of them, like have long records of property rights before white people
00:39:23.880
came here. So it's not like they were, you know, oh, we're just we all just all share tribes were, of
00:39:29.640
course, warring against each other before we got here. They're American Indians are just like other
00:39:35.160
Americans. And and the idea that somehow, you know, they they love the environment more than we do and
00:39:41.880
they share and care and are collected more than we are, I think, is just this myth that really was
00:39:47.440
propagated a lot in the 1960s and 70s and kind of took hold in terms of what we can do. I think it's
00:39:54.380
it's very hard to come up with positive solutions for this. I mean, I I think from a legal perspective,
00:40:00.760
we should be exploring ways to give more Native Americans property rights. We should be interfering
00:40:06.660
less in their economic development. I mean, first of all, you know, a lot of these reservations,
00:40:11.020
when Indians were first pushed onto them, were kind of worthless pieces of land. Now, of course,
00:40:16.320
we've discovered the level of natural resources of oil, of fracking that can go on on these
00:40:22.760
reservations. And we should be opening these things up instead of blocking pipelines, because some
00:40:28.400
leader says like, oh, you might come within 100 miles of, you know, my ancestors burial ground
00:40:35.040
is just hurting Indians today. So getting the federal government out of the business of micromanaging
00:40:41.160
American Indians, I think, is very important in terms of education. I would love to see more
00:40:46.000
competition changing charter school laws. You know, if you're an American and you want to, you know,
00:40:52.500
want to help, want to give a small donation. You know, there are some some Catholic schools like Red
00:40:57.960
Cloud, which is on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which actually try to educate these kids, and I think
00:41:03.100
do an enormous job, and they're entirely privately funded or funded by the church. So I think, you know,
00:41:08.880
that's sort of one small way you can try to ensure that there is some good education going on in these
00:41:15.080
places. You know, the laws, it's, it's very hard to change the laws that protect American Indians. And, you know,
00:41:22.320
it, it, it, it concerns me that more Americans don't understand the McGurk decision, and they don't
00:41:27.980
understand the fight over the Indian Child Welfare Act, because, you know, those are not only are those
00:41:33.360
important decisions for protecting American Indians, but there are left wing activists who want to use
00:41:38.600
those kinds of things to change the entire legal system. Like, there are people who want an Indian
00:41:44.400
Child Welfare Act for black children, so that we can treat black children differently than everyone else.
00:41:49.200
Again, it's prioritizing sensitivity over child safety.
00:41:54.140
Yeah, and wow, we could have a whole other extended conversation about that. I know that the term critical
00:41:58.840
race theory can be, or some people think it's overused or misapplied, but that really is this ideology that
00:42:04.900
in order to make up for what is perceived as past racism or discrimination, or real past racism or
00:42:10.320
discrimination, you have to then kind of, you have to do the same thing today, but in a different direction. You have to
00:42:18.400
make up for that today, with present discrimination going the other way. So because they would say
00:42:25.120
black and indigenous families were broken apart by the white man, well, now we have to rewrite the
00:42:31.740
law so it goes a different direction, so that you cannot adopt them, and you cannot punish them for
00:42:36.620
crimes, as if that's going to help anyone. And wow, there seems to be a lot of intersection,
00:42:41.620
by the way, between your most recent book about, you know, no way to treat a child.
00:42:45.600
That's how I got started on the most recent book. Yes. Yes. I mean, it's just so much corruption at
00:42:50.200
the expense of the most vulnerable in our society. So thank you. Thank you so much for the work that
00:42:56.080
you do on that. I really, really appreciate it. Everyone can go out and buy both of your books.
00:43:00.620
Highly recommend. Anywhere books are sold, and where can they follow you, and all that good stuff.
00:43:05.360
So yeah, the books are The New Trail of Tears and No Way to Treat a Child, and they can follow me on
00:43:11.700
Twitter at Naomi S. Riley, and get all the stuff at the American Enterprise Institute, which is where
00:43:17.740
I am based. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Naomi. I really appreciate it. Thank you.