Stuff You Should KnowToday we dive into the history and current state of Native American reservations. This serves as a nice follow-up to the Trail of Tears double-ep from 2017.
Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and that makes this stuff you should know that, doodle Lee do.
That's great.
Thanks, You're welcome. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about. I don't believe, but it was worth saying.
I think, uh, do you know what does what? The season three of Reservation Dogs.
Yeah, that's why I figured you were Probably you suggested this topic.
It's not why actually, because I suggested this a long time ago.
I've been sitting on this one. I kind of forgot.
But then Reservation Dog season three, the finale season started, and I know talked about the show a lot, but big recommendation. A show shot and crewed up and written and directed and acted entirely by Native Americans. I believe it's shot inside the Muscogee Nation Reservation.
And it's great. It's one of the best shows ever. Wow.
That's full throated endorsement. Man, I'll have to check it out.
It's awesome.
It's funny and heartwarming and sweet and meaningful, and it's just really really good.
I would also direct people to the movie Smoke Signals that was made not too long ago. That, oh, yeah, reservation life in a fairly lighthearted manner, but pretty accurately too.
Yeah.
And we also want to caveat this by saying, this is a very broad overview of Native American or American Indian reservations. There's a lot to it, and certainly could have been you know, like five or six episodes long. But as we do, we try to give a good broad overview.
That's how we do.
That's right.
And if this episod, so does band in schools in Florida listened to it outside of school.
Just go travel to Valdosta and download it and go back to Florida exactly. That was an odd thing to say. What's said is I have no idea what you're talking about, but I can totally believe what you just said is real.
Well, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, is on a push to keep children from being indoctrinated by true history of our country. I see, and so he has, and I believe it was in the Guba editorial debate, the last one, he was saying that his opponent said it was okay to teach that you know, some of the land in America was stolen from the native indigenous people, and he said, that's not appropriate for our schools, and it's not true.
Yeah, that's not true at all.
No, it's not.
And I'm not sure how you get away with just saying completely entruy things on a debate stage.
But yeah, that's where we are these days, for sure.
So the very fact that reservations exist prove that that's true. Because the entire reservation system that we still have today that dates back to the nineteenth century and actually earlier, it was and is entirely a way of removing Native Americans from their traditional lands, putting them somewhere they probably had never been and didn't know anybody, and then taking that land away and increasingly shrink the land that they have so that European colonists and then eventually Americans settlers colonists could take that land for themselves. And the reservation system is just proof that that is this. It was this ongoing century plus long process that still has just very fresh wounds today, like it's not like, Okay, that happened in the past and things are good now. That is not the case. In a lot of a lot of places. It's that happened in the past and the effects of it are still being felt generations later.
Yeah, for sure, and before we get emails from people that say, you know, much of much of that land was negotiated for and there were treaties over it and deals made. That is that is certainly true, but much of it was also outright seized. And that's that's just a fact of what happened here.
You know, dude, we don't need to debate somebody who's trying to tell us that the Amerenta didn't steal land from the Native America. They don't even deserve our attention, let.
Alone our breath, I agree these days.
Just to start off with a stat for you, and big thanks to Olivia for helping out with this one. In the twenty twenty census, nine point seven million people in these United States, yeah, identified as either Alaska Native or American Indian.
And although we'll talk a little bit about.
The fact that the census isn't always accurate when it comes to Native populations. Yeah, but one point two million, thirteen percent of those people live on reservations today as of you know, a few years ago.
Right, So we have yeah, a big population of Native Americans. I think there's something like five hundred and thirty four tribes recognized by the federal government as their own tribe. But yeah, the vast majority do not live on reservations. The reason that some people live on reservations because they were born there, their parents were born there, that's just where they were raised. But another reason that a lot of Native Americans live on reservations is because that is the place where they can still do whatever they can to keep their culture alive in whatever ways that they can, and they have a certain amount of self determination there because in the United States, reservations are considered sovereign nations. They're ruled by the tribe that whose reservation that is. So that's why there's casinos, and that's why you can buy cigarettes for super cheap on a reservation and all sorts of other stuff. Why the state can't prosecute somebody for a crime that happened on the reservation if they're a member of the tribe, it's because it's like little pockets of independent nations that exist in the United States.
Yeah, it's a little convoluted, but generally it's there under federal law. And purview, but not under state law. So like you were saying, that's why you can have casinos in states where you otherwise could not.
Yeah, and I saw that even the federal law is usually kind of just the big stuff. Sure, yeah, but states have almost no jurisdiction. And Oklahoma was really really pushing recently to I guess, gain more jurisdiction over members of tribes there, because Oklahoma is about half reservation these days. But there was a Supreme Court ruling in McGirt versus Oklahoma in twenty twenty that said, no, states, including Oklahoma, have no jurisdiction to prosecute tribal members of crimes that happened on tribal land, and they're having to dismiss tons of cases just outright because Oklahoma, I guess kind of went buck wilde and started arresting people on tribal land, knowing full well that this has been recognized for nearly a century if not longer, that the tribe whose reservation that is is essentially a sovereign nation.
Yeah. So I say we kind of start with.
After maybe the quickest overview of how this happened to begin with, start with the with how the system evolved to begin with. We don't need to go over everything before that because we have covered a lot of it before in our are really, if I may say so, really great two part episode on the Trail of Tears from twenty twenty seventeen I think twenty seventeen, and that was the one where Hulk himself, Mark Ruffalo tweeted out about that one.
Remember that's right, Yeah, yeah for sure.
And we were like, holy cow, doctor Banner listens to our show.
Right, the Hulk doesn't, Doctor Banner does?
Yeah, of course Hulk Smash when.
He turns into the Hulk, he's like, what is this crap? When you know when it's still playing, So.
Hulk Smash podcast.
I would also I would also direct people to the Louisiana Purchase one too, that had a lot to do with this as well.
Sure that was a good one, but I will just say in like a sentence that Native Americans were generally forced west and further west, and then as we decided, well we actually want to live west now, they were squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces because you know, we renigged on deals on like hey, this is your land.
We kind of actually want that now, And.
They were squeezed into smaller and smaller territories in what was known as Indian Territory, much of which ended up in Oklahoma, right.
And there was from the outset basically too pronged effort to move Native Americans further and further west. And that was through violence and through treaties essentially. And like you said, those treaties would be negotiated, but they would also be broken. But some of them are still intact. There's actually reservations that are state recognized because of a treaty that the tribe had with the state that goes back sometimes to colonial days. But a lot of them were broken, for sure. But it was a patchwork of different localities and different colonies and different states that were negotiating with the tribes they needed to negotiate with to get their land. It wasn't until eighteen fifty one that the federal government said, forget this patchwork stuff. We're going to create like a federal system of recognizing and moving Native Americans on to land, settling them onto reservations. It was the Indian Appropriations Act of eighteen fifty one.
Yeah, and that was basically, here's some funding. We're going to move you where we say you should go, and you should become more like us. Basically, you should live your life a little more like us. You should farm like us.
Shop at the Gap, Yeah, the gap.
Where podcaster Chuck worked for a couple of months. Sure, how many times did I talk about that yesterday at our book events?
A lot?
I came up, like four times. Yeah, be a little bit more like us.
Eat the stuff that we eat, even though it's not the stuff that you usually eat. And you know what, maybe we'll even send you some food sometimes and supplies when we feel like it. And so what if some of that food shows up spoiled, and so what if it's not very good for you. And also this tribe that may have been your long long term rival, maybe that's your neighbor now. And good luck working all that out.
Yeah, so that's a big deal though, that they said they would supply them with food. The reason why they said they would supply them with food is that they said, you can't you can't hunt any longer. You can't do what you used to do as a Native American tribe to support yourself, to sustain yourselves, You're going to have to rely on us, the federal government, and by the way, we're going to take shabby care of you in return for you agreeing to that.
And that was over a roughly thirty year period from eighteen fifties through the late almost into the eighteen eighties, and you know, involved all the planes tribes Apache, Comanche, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Cheyenne, among many others.
Did we do did we do a whole Apache or Geronimo? Was it a Durnimo episode because that's when he was fighting.
I don't remember what? Does it sound familiar?
But you know me, don't you remember he like personally lobbied Teddy Roosevelt, and Roosevelt just basically patted him on the head.
And I think that's sound familiar.
It was a Geronimo or an Apache or was it it was the Apache Wars, I think is what it was.
Okay, Well, they eventually settled again in the eighteen eighties in Oklahoma. They were squeezed down to a smaller and smaller area. There were twenty seven tribes by that point in this you know, relatively small part of land. And in the ensuing decades there was a lot of changes. There were a bunch of different policy shifts. There was the DAWs Act of eighteen eighty seven. This is just a for instance. Basically, there were all kinds of changes. Yeah, but the DAWs Act was when they said, all right, let's not do reservations, let's break them all up. Let's give families plots of land, because we want you to be more like us. Like here, like we're Americans. We like to own our own little small pieces of land, and we find that that's pretty awesome. So this is how you should do it too. So here's little pieces of land for each of your families. And a lot of it wasn't great land. A lot of it couldn't be farmed or they're not from there, so they didn't know how to farm that land. They were further displaced. And then finally, in nineteen thirty four, there was the Indian Reorganization Act as part of the Indian New Deal. They reversed that policy and said, all right, here's some funds you can repurchase some of your original tribal lands. But this started the termination era of the nineteen fifties and sixties, when they said, but you should really move to cities, Like why don't you just assimilate with everyone and be a lot easier if you moved into urban areas.
Yeah, and the termination policies referred to termination of tribes, like the federal government stopped recognizing tribes, broke up reservations, and it was a concerted effort to just get rid of Native American tribes in the United States and make everybody assimilate into cities, like you said, And that's one reason why the Native American movement, the American Indian Movement AIM alongside the Civil Rights era or Civil rights movement as a response to that and saying like, no, you're not going to terminate our tribe. And they were largely successful, and finally, in nineteen seventy five, thanks in large part to AIM and other activists in the Native American community, the Indian Self Determination and Education Act said, Okay, we're not doing termination anymore. We're officially going to keep recognizing tribes, We're going to support reservations, and like that is that?
That's right? I think that's a robust intro.
I think so too. You want to take a break, then yeah.
Let's take a break that kind of brings us up to the modern system and we'll get back into that right after this.
Okay.
I find it interesting that every time we study this stuff, it seems like there were just periods from the beginning where every so often someone else would come into you know, a new president or a new administration, someone would come into power, and it was always like, oh Jesus, like, what do we do with a what do we do with the Indians? And out right, and they would just change policies and you know, let's not do that, let's do this. So not only had they been displaced to begin with, but then it was just a series of like shuffling around and moving and consolidation and now we want to do this with you and that with you, and the whole time we were just like, man, we we were here.
First, Yeah, for sure, and all that that whiplash going on, you know, back and forth between totally termination and reservations that took place over like the course of less than a century. Yeah, I can't imagine that. That means that there are people who lived almost entirely through that, you know, that's that's just crazy. You can't treat people that way.
No, And it's it's just it's amazing to think about the fact that like if someone tried to, uh, not calling out any particular politicians, but if they thought about their family all of a sudden being told, well, you have to leave, and we're going to tell you where to go, and we're gonna make it hard for you to get by in a place that you're not familiar with, maybe next to your enemy that you've always had. It just is hard for someone to imagine that happening. And that's exactly what happened.
But that's precisely why the United States has tucked Native Americans away on reservations and forgotten them, because they don't we don't want to imagine that happening to We can't imagine that happening to our families. And so the brain goes, well, it didn't happen to your family, so you can stop thinking about that now.
Yeah, and not and let's not even teach that in schools just because let's just not do that. Let's just say just a lie.
I know, oh boy, all right, I need to bring my blood temperature down. So I'm doing a little mental stretch right now.
Drink some mice water.
I've got some right.
Here under today's system, and we're going to go through a lot of sort of staty things right now as we tell this sort of early story, But there are three hundred and twenty five tracts of land that the US government now holds in trusts. Some are called reservations, some are called villages, some are missions, some are pueblos. Yeah, rancheria is in California, which sounds kind of nice, but sounds like a top menut.
It totally does.
The largest is the today is the Navajo Nation. It's about twenty seven thousand square miles. I think the smallest is one of those ranch areas. It's called the Likely Rancheria in California. It's in the upper upper tippy top northeast corner of California, and it is one point three to two acres. And there are also some state some land held by state trust. There are also reservations, but generally this is a federal government thing.
That trust thing is a big that's a big point, these reservations. The land that the Native American tribes live on, that belongs to them, that's their sovereign land. That land is held in trust by the US federal government for them, and that seems pretty precarious if you think about it. But the reason that that is held in trust is because if it weren't held in trust by the US government and was just owned by the Native American tribes that lived there, then it would be subject to the laws and the taxes of the state that the reservation is in. So by removing that land from ownership and putting it with the federal government for the benefit of those sovereign tribes, it cuts that out entirely.
Yeah, yeah, very very thought out, singly.
Yeah, and I deally on paper, it's not supposed to be a paternalistic arrangement. It's supposed to be a fiduciarial arrangement, where like the US government has a very important responsibility to take care of that land and meet its obligations and taking care of the people on the reservation. They just don't do it typically, that's right.
Not every tribe has their own reservation. Sometimes they share a reservation. Some of the larger tribes may have more than one if they're a little more spread out.
This is something I.
Actually didn't know until yesterday, is that non native people can live on reservations, and some of them are majority non native, And I never knew that I just I knew that you could pass through and do your thing. And a lot of them are you know, have businesses and like you said, casinos and much more as we'll see in the state of Florida. But I did not know that you could just live there. And there's in fact one in upstate New York where I believe this, the Oneida Indian Nation, and they have about five hundred American Indians living there in about sixty thousand total residents, so very few Native Americans and mostly not.
Yeah, and the Ononeida tribe is one of the largest, if not the largest employer of Upstate New York thanks to their Turning Stone Resort and casino and veronas York. All right, and they're actually one of the success stories of a Native American tribe becoming self sufficient and actually wealthy in a lot of cases.
Yeah.
We mentioned Oklahoma a lot, and that's because about half of the land in Oklahoma, legally speaking, is reservation land. And California we mentioned those rancherias that you can get on special at Taco Bell.
That's right.
These are usually I mean, that's why they call them rancherias. They're usually really small, like the one we talked about, the likely rancheria. They were created because you know, California did the California thing and created these in the twentieth century when after those genocidal campaigns worked out to the ones that were left over, and they're like, listen, we got to give you some land.
I guess, right. And if you're starting to notice there's a pattern that this is all kind of patternless, you're correct. Like there's not one reservation system that the federal government administers. They kind of have developed on their own, ideally to meet local needs or kind of jibe with the tribe's culture. An example of that is in Alaska.
Yeah, very unique.
There's two hundred and seventy nine federally recognized tribes. By my account, more than half of the federally recognized tribes in the United States all live in Alaska. But there's only one reservation that they all share. And so rather than living in a kind of a paternalistic relationship with the United States on a reservation, instead all of those Alaskan Natives get I guess dividends.
Well, if you enroll, which most of them have right.
From the mineral rights in Alaska and other resource rights. So when you extract something in Alaska, when you cut down a tree, when you remove a fish, I believe you are contributing to that fund that benefits those two hundred and seventy nine tribes.
Yeah, and Hawaii I think has a similar system, right, I.
Guess, but they don't have any reservations at all.
Right.
Yeah, So you mentioned that they are recognized as sovereign nations. That was in the Constitution from the beginning, and that basically says, you know, we can engage with you like a foreign country if we want to. Chief Justice John Marshall in eighteen thirty one, in a pretty landmark case for everything that followed, wrote that tribes possess a nationhood status and retain inherent powers of self government, but they are domestic dependent nations that are award to his guardian, which is it's all a little confusing if.
You just sort of read the words.
That's a big butt.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're a sovereign nation, but you're also dependent on us essentially.
Right.
Yeah. That just opens up the gate for all sorts of weird interpretations and misinterpretations and all sorts of stuff. And as a result, that's kind of what goes on.
Yeah, I think it's sort of like a patchwork of because it works different. You can't summarize, like all reservations are like blank and it's kind of like a patchwork because in Reservoir Dogs, the one of my favorite character Reservation Dogs.
What I say, you said, reservoir Dogs. It's understandable.
No one cuts any ears off in reservation.
That is what it is, you know, named for obviously, and in the I think in the pilot they sort of mimic that great opening shot of Reservoir Dogs, the sort of slow my walk.
But on Reservation Dogs, one.
Of my favorite characters, although it's hard to say because I love them all, but is the sheriff that the actor is on McLaren and he's just great and hysterical and he's the local sheriff and in at the res as they call it, he's very just sort of low key and doesn't want to arrest anyone, and it's usually like I'd rather just take someone home who's disturbing the peace and tuck them into bed than you know, cause any real trouble. But that kind of got me thinking about the modern system and it's really kind of patchwork, But it all depends some tribes have their own courts. If they don't, then there are five Regional Courts of Indian Defenses that kind of gather up what tribes don't have their own courts and serve them, right.
Yeah, And they also very frequently operate their own law enforcement agency, although they also may have a Bureau of Indian Affairs police agencies patrolling as well. Sometimes it can be a combination of the two. In Alaska, they have the Village Public Safety Officer program, so there is they have their own court system, they have their own law enforcement. They also have their own school districts there as well. Again, they can be administered by the Bureau of Indian Education or they can be run themselves like a charter school would be or a private school would be. But these are often public schools in the reservation. And they also have boarding schools.
Still, yeah, that needs to be a whole episode. I think that would kind of be a nice way to finish this trio.
Definitely. So, I mean the boarding schools that kids go to today are sometimes the same boarding schools that treated the younger Native Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like just like they were disposable and often killed them and did everything they could, yeah to beat the Native American out of them and just remove them from their tribe. Sometimes they never saw their family again. But those still exist. They're not doing stuff like that anymore, and in fact, they're trying to figure out how to kind of make amends. And in one way that they're making amends, as we'll see, is there's a big revitalization of Native American culture, specific tribal cultures around the United States right now, and it's being taught on the reservations and schools. It's also being taught in the boarding schools. It's the exact opposite of what the United States has been trying to do since the nineteenth century, reinstilling Native American culture into the tribes that had been had had that culture stripped and beaten and killed out of them for a cent Now it's like, hey, let's teach you about your culture that you would have already known about had we not made you go to this compulsory boarding school and teach you to forget just break that lineage of cultural transmission. Now it's like, let's give that back to you. Let's make sure you know what you're talking about, and then they'll bring in elders of the tribe to teach it. Because there are some people who didn't go to the boarding schools. Typically they might have been hidden and they escaped, and those people are fonts, incredibly valuable reservoirs of the cultural information that when those people die, if they haven't passed down what they know, that information dies with them and the culture dies in that way, slowly but surely. So there's a big push among Native American schools to prevent that from happening.
Yeah, especially I mean the culture as a whole, for sure, but especially with efforts for saving and preserving the languages these native tongues. One good example is the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. Two thousand or fewer fluent speakers left, and most of them are older. They're losing about one hundred and fifty Native speakers a year. And what they're trying to do. They have what's called the Durban Feeling Language Center, named after the skuy durban Feeling, who wrote the Cherokee English Dictionary. Among other things, he put symbols of the Cherokee language into Unicode. So they could be used on smartphones, and he was kind of he might be worth a shorty at the very least doing one on durban feeling. He really led the charge and was sort of probably the leading person in history as far as preserving at least the Cherokee language. But they have a fifty two thousand square foot building at the language center there where they're you know, they're doing everything they can. Their goal is to basically, within the decade to gain more speakers than the elders that know the language are dying off.
Yeah, and again, the reason why they're so gung ho about doing this is because the as the language dies, the culture dies. Because there are a lot of Native American languages that weren't written. They were all oral. So not only do they have to make sure that that oral tradition gets passed down, they then have to figure out how to turn it into something tech space as well. So it's a huge challenge. And finally the United States government has started to kind of show some signs of trying to help out. I mean, it's not very much if you think about it, but in twenty twenty two, the US government donated seven million dollars in grants to forty five different tribes to support their preservation of their language. So there's there's a movement for that for sure, and it has this sense that like they're racing against the clock, which they pretty much are the biological clock.
Yeah, and if I may hear for a minute now, we try not to get super overtly political, but there's really been a tale of two really three administrations over the last fifteen ish years, with the Obama administrations, then the Trump administration, and now the Biden administration. Of course, in twenty twenty two, like you said, the seven million that's under the Biden administration, they also delivered twenty one million dollars for road safety on tribal lands because a lot of these roads they don't have like street lines and rumble strips and the little reflective signs and reflective markers on the roads, just sort of basic infrastructure things that keep driving safer.
Right, and that's the main roads don't even get on the side streets.
Yeah.
Absolutely, also one hundred and thirty five million dollars to help relocate tribes affected by climate change, and also deb halland the first Native American to ever serve as Secretary of Interior as the current Secretary of Interior. Donald Trump, on the other hand, he delivered well. He likes to say he delivered three million dollars in twenty twenty for a language and one point two million for broadband grants, but those were an actuality pushed through by Senate and House Democrats. But Trump failed to re establish Obama's Council on Native American Affairs, which ran for the eight years Obama's in office until his final year in office, because people kept saying, like, why aren't you doing this over and over.
He never held a White House Tribal Leaders.
Conference at the White House, which you had for eight years under Obama. And just after COVID, a couple of things happened. He pushed to exclude reservations from the Cares Act in the wake of COVID, and he de established the Wannapogue Reservation outright, which is the first time that's happened since the Termination era.
Wow.
And like not only that, he removed.
Just kind of plowed through sacred burial sites to build that wall and on when people were protesting that wall and the sacred burial lands, they used sent you know, people in there with rubber bullets to fire on them on Indigenous People's Day of all.
Days, No way.
Yeah, wow.
So they're not big fans. You can look up for yourself. If you think I'm being too political. You can just look up Donald Trump's administration and Native American peoples and they are not big fans of what happened during those four years.
Oh it does.
Yeah, But also I've seen they're not necessarily fans of any political party because neither one is paying enough attention to their obligations to help people on the reservation make better lives for themselves.
Yeah.
Absolutely, So I say we take a break, okay, and then the people who are still with us can come back and we'll talk some more about reservation life today. So, Chuck, we're we should talk about a few different examples of reservations in the United States today, because just between the Navajo Nation, the Oglala Sioux Nation, and the Seminole, you got just a really distinct contrast between those three big spectrum. You said that the Navajo was the largest of all of the reservations, right, yeah, I think did you say it's larger than Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island. Put together.
No, but you just did, my friend. So the Navajo there, it's quite a stack.
Yeah, they're also the DNA. Their land, their reservation spans Utah, Arizona, and in New Mexico.
Yeah.
If you look at the at their reservation on a map, it is I mean, I know you said all the states combined, but just check out a map. Sometimes it's it's quite quite large.
Yes, and there's been an ongoing like dispute with them and the Hopie over whose land is who's And I think that they have it relatively settled geographically, but culturally it's still not very settled.
Yeah.
But the Navajo, they're also the largest tribe in the United States. They have four hundred thousand enrolled members, one hundred and seventy thousand of which live on the reservation. And what makes them really unusual is that they were removed along with just about every other tribe in the United States as America was expanding, and within four years they managed to negotiate a treaty to get that land back and move back to their ancestral lands. That's really rare among Native American tribes. Their reservations very frequently are not their ancestral lands. They're just land that they were given one hundred years ago by the US government in an entirely different part of the country.
Yeah, they said, you know, you can build your railroad through here. If you're settling and your wagon train is coming through here, you can pass through.
We'll let you pass through.
We will accept the schooling, which I think probably at the time sounded like a good deal, even though it ended up being that boarding school, that shameful boarding school situation. And I know, by the way, we've gotten a lot of I know, we'll hear from some Canadians. Canada has their own shameful background with the same kind of thing, and we've gotten a lot of emails from them over the years to cover that. So maybe when we do that, when we can tackle them both.
Yeah. So the Navajo, I've lived back on that land since eighteen sixty eight. And what they formed essentially is as a large government. There's twenty four districts in this huge, huge reservation and they have delegates at this legislative council. There's an executive a president that runs the executive branch. They have their own court system with eleven districts, and their largest city, Tuba City, is home to nine thousand people, which is pretty enormous. The problem is where it starts to kind of get reservation y at least standard or average, is that thirty six percent of those households in the entire Navajo Nation are below federal poverty level and about the same amount have no running water none. And the reason why Donald Trump the Great Father made such a big deal about getting broadband access as part of the package he delivered to the Native Americans himself is he signed, is that internet access is really patchy at at absolute best on a lot of reservations, and if you don't have the internet today, you might as well not bother sending your kids to school to In a very hyperbolic sense.
Yeah, you know, Elon Musk should swoop in there and send much of those starlink dishes. Sure grantits just say, well, here you go, I'll do my party. Well, not a bad idea. He's lunching tho satellites all over the place.
Yeah, help in Ukraine.
Yeah for a service that isn't even that good. What else, Well, we're talking about the spectrum, So I guess we go from one end to the other end, and then we'll talk about the other farthest end at the end.
Is that confusing enough?
Yes, dude, And I even know you're talking about I.
Know the Pine Ridge Reservation is the largest Lakota reservation and that's who you're speaking of earlier when you were talking about the Oglala Sioux tribe who governs them. And it's about four thousand square miles in South Dakota. And again the census is probably really wrong. They listed as nineteen thousand people, but most people say it's probably more like, you know, mid thirties or so.
And it is.
Well, first of all, they were one of the people that were squeezed out of their original land. It's not their original land. They were nomadic people and they where they are now. It was originally your prisoner of war camp in eighteen eighty nine, and Wounded Knee took place, the Wounded Knee massacre in eighteen ninety.
A lot of things happened on Pine Ridge. It's actually been really culturally relevant for a long time, starting with Wounded Kna for sure, that was where one hundred and fifty I think largely old people, women and children were massacred by the US government for not living where they were told.
Yeah, it's a very symbolic place kind of for those reasons. That's where they protested in the early seventies with the sort of earliest American Indian movement, and that's where remember the twenty fifteen Dakota Access pipeline Standing Rock.
That's where they protested there.
But we talk about Pine Ridge being the other end of the spectrum, because if you want to talk about poor, that is sort of.
The place to focus on. It is very poor.
They have an infant mortality rate five times five times the national average infant mortality rate, which is just horrifying that that's allowed to happen in this country. The unemployment rate is eighty percent.
I saw eighty to ninety on Al Jazeera.
I mean, yeah, you're if you have ten to fifteen percent of your people working like that, that's just poverty stricken.
They live in trailers, they live in shacks.
Some have no like many of them have no running water or electricity, and it's not a hospitable place for either a growing thing or for an industry to come in and set something up and maybe share profits. They have a little casino that doesn't generate a lot of revenue, and it's just not a very great scene there.
Yeah, I saw that the casino, if it divvied up its profits, it's revenue. Among the members of the tribe living on the reservation, they'd each get something like fifteen cents a month. And poverty stricken just does not even begin to get it. Across saw there's a site called the Red Road Project. It's like Native American Voices kind of articles. It's really interesting. They said that on Pine Ridge the average number of people in a house is seventeen because homelessness is a really really big issue on reservations, so you kind of get in where you fit in, which leads to huge amounts of overcrowding, and that includes the kids who are going to school the next day. Because the employment is so low again eighty to ninety percent unemployment, people typically turn to diversions of despair, basically drugs, alcohol, crime. And there's a town that I read about in that Al Dazeer article called White Clay, Nebraskas, just across the line from the Pine Ridge Reservation, and they sell something on the average of twelve thousand cans of beer a day to the Lakota who come across from the dry reservation by the beer and take it back. And the big kicker is that White Clay is not an actual town. It's a town on paper only. There's one street and it's all shops basically, and those shops all sell beer to the Lakota Sioux. And I saw it described by one activist as liquid genocide. That's been going on really long time. And so when you add all this stuff together, the life expectancy on Pine Ridge, are you ready for this?
Now?
Forty eight years for men, fifty two for women. It's the second lowest not in the country in the Western hemisphere. The only country that has a lower life expectancy is Haiti. This is Pine Ridge in the United States.
Does that include the infant mortality rate?
Yeah, I'm sure it does. It's dragging it down big time for sure. Regardless. I mean, like forty eight and fifty two is just appalling. And again the reason you might be like, I don't care about welfare, welfare sucks. These people should be figuring out themselves, and a lot of them do. A lot of people make it off the reservation, go get it a college education. A lot of them come back and share that college education. A lot of people get killed. There's I think the rate of suicide is four or five times is the national rate. So the problem with that argument is that these are the descendants of the people who are stripped of their culture, stripped of their ability to support themselves, and their only choice is to go be white, go assimilate into white culture, or stay on this reservation and hold on to your culture, be one of the last bastions of your culture, and just pay every day for that with joblessness, with despair, and rely on the United States government to take care of you. But then don't expect things like running water, internet, good schools, law enforcement that's going to take care of drug problems, new job prospects, like that stuff. It's just not delivered. And so as a result, we have a group of people who have the life expectancy second only to Haiti here in the United States.
Yeah, so that's sort of the worst end of the spectrum. Now to a tribe that is actually thriving these days. The Seminole people who in the eighteen fifties, after a bunch of warring, were forced west of the Mississippi kind of like everyone else. But there I saw about three hundred hid away in Florida and the swamps of Florida and hit there for a while and eventually sort of, you know, showed their faces to society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the nineteen fifties, they adopted their own constitution and gained recognition as a Seminole tribe of Florida. And they are thriving in a big, big way in South Florida, largely because of business and largely because of the casino business, the Seminole Classic Casino and Hollywood, Florida. They opened the hard Rock casino down there in Hollywood. I saw the Rolling Stones there a few years ago.
Yeah, it's a big, big time. It's shaped like a guitar. It is.
Yeah, that stands up from the hotel like a guitar and just a little insider thing. If you ever want to see like what could be like a stadium act in a comparatively small venue, that's where you should go.
It was a really good experience.
And you couldn't I don't know how many people it is, but I feel like it's about the size of like the Fox Seat or in Atlanta, whereas you know, they were playing like stadiums and then all of a sudden it's maybe like five thousand people or so. So it's intimate by that standard. And I had a great time, and I keep that on my list now to check out because it was a fun trip down there. And the Seminole Tribe is making a lot of money. They have about two thousand, and this is one reason why is because they only started out as a few hundred. There are only a couple of thousand now and they're splitting up that dough in a big, big way.
Right.
Did you know this that the Seminole Tribe of Florida. We have to differentiate because there's a Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma that were the ones that moved out there, the ones that say the Seminole Tribe of Florida own hard rock everything. They owned the brand. They bought the brand in two thousand and six for nine hundred. I don't know about the whole brand. They're wearing a hard Rock Cafe shirt that's owned by the Seminole Tribe of Florida. They owned the hard rock franchise.
Do you know where the very first hard rock was? Trivia questions?
I'm going to say San Francisco or London.
No, And the only reason I know this is because of my family. It is in I believe it was in Jackson, Mississippi.
What Yeah. Wow, that is a great trivia question. You can even do multiple choice, and I don't think a lot of people would get that.
Yeah, that's right, because I was like, I'm gonna get in big trouble here if this is wrong. But the first hard rock was at the old Hickory Mall in Jackson, Mississippi. And my uncle had something to do with it somehow. That's how I know about it.
Oh is his last name hard rock?
Uncle? Well, he sounds like a flintstone.
All he does.
Oh no, I'm sorry.
Jackson, Tennessee, which is even better because that's where my dad lives.
That's good.
You can put down.
For some reason, I thought it was Jackson, Mississippi.
You can put down your sharpened sticks Jackson, Tennessee. Chuck came through.
You're my people. My dad is a Union University graduate.
So with all that money that they're making among the two thousand tribe members, they divvy up enough that each person gets one hundred and twenty eight thousand dollars a year that includes babies. The baby's money is held in trust, so by the time they turn eighteen, they're they're worth a couple of the three million dollars already unbelievable. This is a Native American tribe. And one of the reasons why, a big, big reason why to Citrus Groves cigarette making and selling is the casino. They were the first ones to have a casino. They were the first ones to try it. The state tried to shut it down. They sued the state, they won, and from that point on, Native American casinos, starting in the seventies were a thing, and it made the Seminole rich, It made the Oneida rich, It made a bunch of different tribes rich. And I say, good.
Going, totally. Yeah.
I bumped into Mark Marin at that Rolling Stone show and he acted like he didn't know me, like he always does.
Really, oh yeah, it's funny every time it happens.
That's hilarious. So I say, that's reservations. What do you say?
Yeah, I got one more quick thing that we failed to mention as earlier when I was talking about different policies of different administrations. Native Americans that live on reservations can vote in federal elections, of course, but it bears pointing out because only sixty something percent of the eligible Native American population is registered to vote, and there's a push called the the Million Vote Opportunity where they are trying there's over a million eligible Native American voters who do not vote and who are not registered, and they're trying to get them registered, and it's a good cause to support.
You can go to.
Native Voter Impact or vote dot NARF dot org and check it out. Maybe throw a little dough their way and see if we can get them registered to vote so they can, you know, try and speak up for themselves and ensure they're right.
It's awesome. Nice work, Chuck, Nice work, Josh, and nice work to you guys for hearing us out. If you want to know more about Native American reservations in the United States, you can start reading about it. A good place to start wild be the Red Road Project, I say, And since I mentioned the Red Road Project again, I think that's time for a listener.
May I'm going to call this this.
Is from our Diary episode.
You have to start it with dear Diary.
Dear Diary.
Nice thank you.
Just listen to the Dear Diary podcast, and I love that you guys mentioned that women have a large part in the history of diary writing, so I want to put another female diarist on your radar. One of my favorite historians is named Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. She of well behaved women rarely make history, fame often misattributed to less well known women than her hahaha. The original context of that quote is related to Puritan settlers of New England and how women who live ordinary lives are often forgotten even though they quietly make the world go round. Or Rich's most famous book, A Midwife's Tale, is about one of these women, Martha Ballard, a midwife who lived in what is now Augusta, Maine. Martha Ballard wrote in a diary almost every single day from the time she moved to Augusta, Maine in seventeen eighty five until she died in eighteen twelve. Her diary chronicles the life of women and men in frontier America along with the inner thoughts of an ordinary and relatable person. Martha's ordinary life lifts me up, even though she was a very average person, because it shows her working and living like people have always done. That's what is so awesome about diaries. It humanizes the past and reminds us that people have always been and will always be just people. Thanks for highlighting diaries and for trying to bring different perspectives. Always do the podcast. The episode inspired me to be more consistent and chronicling my own ordinary life. All good things. It's another great site, tak.
Yeah, we've been getting a lot of those lately.
So good. I mean, I don't even say anything. I just type my dumb name.
I don't even do that. I'm like, figure it out yourself.
Yeah.
That is from Casey McClellan and that's a great, great email, Casey.
Way to go, Casey, thank you for pointing our way to something new that we had not heard about. We love that kind of stuff And if you want to hook us up like Casey did, you can send us an email to send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
