The Pros And Cons Of Indian Reservations

For years Native Americans have been some of the poorest people in North America. Is the U.S government to blame? The government took all of their land at the beginning and put them in reservations. They said that the Indians would get free health care and lots of other things, but they still haven’t gone through with this promise. Now Indian reservations are known for poverty, alcoholism, unemployment, bad education and abuse. How can we help them? First of all the government needs to give them what they promised. Also, the government needs to fund their schools and give them more job opportunities. This would give the reservation kids a much higher chance for success. Also this would raise their graduation rates, which would lower their poverty …show more content…
According to Camera, graduation rates in Indian Country are one the lowest of all areas. Lets say that you go to school and you're learning from books that are twenty years old and your teacher is not very smart. That’s how it is for most Indian reservation kids. With this happening, it is very hard to graduate and go to college and become successful. That is also part of the reason why there are very high unemployment rates on reservations. Overall on reservations the high school graduation rate is 49 percent compared to the rest of the U.S which is 81 percent according to The U.S Department of Education. This is a 32 percent difference which is a lot when it comes to the scale of people. The unemployment rate in the U.S is five point five percent and the reservation average is 28 percent according to Wikipedia. Both these rates are very bad for the Indians. The government doesn’t give them nice or expensive school supplies and this is part of the reason that these rates are this bad. The government is a big reason for this low education. They spend almost one trillion dollars on American education and only 850 million on reservation schools. This is not fair considering that we put them on reservations in the first …show more content…
The main character Junior leaves the reservation school for an off-reservation school because he wants to be successful when he is older. He knows that the reservation school will not help with that. Also in the novel, it talks about how much alcoholism and abuse happens in the reservation. For example, it says this in the book “Son, Mr. P said. You’re going to find more and more hope the farther you walk away from this sad, sad, sad reservation” (Alexie 43). This just goes to show how little chance for success reservation kids have. The government is a big part of the blame because these schools are bad because they aren’t funded enough by the government. Sherman Alexie even agrees with this. He thinks that the schools are bad and need to be fixed. This next quote shows how Native Americans are looked at he said “I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian.” This goes to show how Indians are viewed by society and funding will change