Property rights and full ownership would go a long way. Another fine example of what happens to a people that Big brother tries to take care of. I remember about fifteen years ago I was sitting in a diner near the largest reservation in Wyoming. An old cowhand sitting in the booth next to us explained what we saw coming into the area. We saw hundreds of acres of land recently devoured by fire. He explained that every now and again the local Indians would burn some of their forest so the government would reimburse them for the loss as required by treaty... The Indians willing to leave the reservation have equal opportunity and capacity to prosper.

Anybody who travels out west and has driven across any of the reservations know that the problem is initiative. It's the notion that we "owe" these people something because their great, great, great grandparents had to ride horses without saddles. Ok, it was for other reasons, most of which have not been valid for decades. They are not little children who we need to protect. And WE know that if the "reservation" looks like Starnsville, and they do, we need to act to close them down and turn the places over to developers. Con you imagine how big an amusement park would be next door to monument valley. Maybe not, but you get the idea.

Just because there are casinos on reservations, that does not mean that the Indians can't make a living any other way. We need to unleash the people there and make opportunity instead of compliance. Warehousing people on a reservation has to be one of our greatest sins against humanity.

Here is a link to a very wealthy tribe. One of the reasons this tribe is so wealthy is that it's an open Rez, non-tribal people can own land that is not in the Tribal Trust. That doesn't mean that the generational victimhood doesn't abound. When you get nearly everything for free it has little value.

http://www.visitmt.com/places_to_go/indi...

Thanks for the link. The tragedy is as commonly known as it pervasive. But if Microsoft will not stand up to the US government, why would a Microsoft employee care about Indian reservations? For us, here in the Gulch, this injustice is just another concrete example of an abstraction that we understand more fully that most other people, including those who are victimized.

A couple years ago, I was on an IT project and one of the security people was a Native who said, "Education was not valued on the reservation, so I left and got a degree." Right now, I am on a project with the Texas state police and two days ago, I sat next to a young colleague who had applied for a promotion, but who lacks higher education. She said, "I come from a traditional Hispanic family and education is not valued, so I am on my own."

I believe that it is clearly a consequence of structural-functional racism that 20% of African-American youth have primary contact with the criminal justice system: they are in jail, in prison, on release, or in a "juvenile diversion" program in some way -- but 80% do not. It always comes down to individual choices.