Statistics of Reservations
How healthy is the average reservation?
As stated from the National Congress of American Indians, natives suffer from a 510% higher alcoholism, and a 189% higher diabetes rate than normal Americans. This is in part due to the inaccessability of good healthcare and addiction help on reservations. This also is due to the culture around reservations, which is mostly discouraging, and indirectly encourages alcohol use to help numb mental health issues. The Indian Health Services give comprehensive healthcare services to approximately 2.56 million out of the nearly 5.2 million Indians living on reservations all across America.
Poverty within reservations
There is a poverty cycle passed down from generation to generation within modern reservations. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Native Americans have the lowest unemployment rate of any racial or ethnic group in the United States. Since reservations are public, there is an inability to purchase private land on them. This makes investing in a home much less important, because you do not own the property anyway. Therefore, being an entrepreneur will come with many disadvantages within the reservation system. It diminishes their desire to improve the community around them when they aren't even able to own the land they spend time on. This also hurts the abilty to take out a loan, which proves why many American Indians are threatened by capitalism.
