Indian Country Poverty: Place‐Based Poverty on American Indian Territories, 2006–10

Abstract

This article examines place‐based poverty in Indian Country, emphasizing that reservation characteristics are influenced by the system of federal Indian policy that affects American Indian self‐determination and antipoverty strategies within reservation boundaries. Using data from the American Community Survey five‐year file, 2006–10, I model poverty rates using multivariate, nested regression along key dimensions associated with American Indian antipoverty strategies and place‐based poverty. The results indicate that rates of female‐headed households and opportunity structures, such as lack of work, contribute to higher rates of reservation poverty while gaming acts as a slight buffer against poverty. Surprisingly, natural‐resource‐related occupations, thought to be associated with expropriation of tribal resources, was not associated with higher poverty, while self‐governance compacts, acting as a proxy for tribal autonomy, had no significant impact on poverty rates. As tribal governments seek to address poverty through strategies enabled by self‐determination policies, there is a critical need for more comprehensive and reliable data to understand how and whether tribal governments can effectively adapt federal policies to specific reservation conditions.

The inequitable exposure of socially vulnerable groups to water shortages across the United States

“…Rural drinking water providers with small customer bases often lack the financial capacity to access alternative water sources [81]. Where rural economies rely on waterintensive agriculture, community members with limited financial resources and education may be less able to adapt to changes in income and employment should water shortages erode agricultural production [82]. These socioeconomic and demographic factors underlying measures of vulnerability often occur in tandem, and can exponentially intensify shortage risk [24].…”

Distributional Differences and the Native American Gender Wage Gap

“…Scholarship examining racial inequalities that includes AIANs has largely taken three different approaches: limit analysis based upon race and ethnicity to those who select only AIAN (Akee et al 2017;Greenman and Xie 2008;Feir and Gillezeau 2018;Leichencko 2003); concentrate on location and examine only those living in reservation areas (Akee and Taylor 2014;Kimmel 1997;Mauer 2017) or focus on the effects of identifying as a member of a marginalized group and expand analysis to include those who identify in combination with another racial group (Burnette 2017;Davis et al 2016). Recently, some studies have begun to apply an inclusive approach yet still distinguish between AIAN populations by reporting results separately for different self-identified AIAN groups (Huyser et al 2010(Huyser et al , 2014Wise et al 2017).…”