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“Estimating the economic well-being of American Indians is a complex task. In general, American Indians tend to have higher poverty rates, higher unemployment rates, and lower educational achievements that other Americans. However, the picture is complicated by the fact that some Indians live on reservations and some don’t. The poverty rates on reservations are significantly higher than in the urban areas.
There are currently about 310 reservations in the United States. These reservations are lands which the Indians reserve for themselves: they were “gifts” from the United States government to the Indians. All Indian reservations, however, are not equal: some are very large, covering thousands of square miles while others are small, containing only a few acres; some have populations numbering in the many thousands, while other have only a few hundred (sometimes fewer) residents. Some reservations are pockets of extreme poverty, the kind of poverty geographers describe in the lesser developed countries of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Listed below are the ten largest Indian reservations in the United States along with estimates of the percentage of families living in poverty and the percentage in extreme poverty (defined as less than half of the poverty threshold). Because economic well-being is associated with educational attainment, also shown is the percentage of adults who have at least a high school education. In the United States as a whole, 80% of all adults have at least a high school education; among all Indians this is 76%. The large reservations listed below have education levels far below this.”
– Daily KOS, Indians 101: Reservation Poverty.
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Download the 18″x24″ poster (.pdf), Indian Country 52 #37 – Poverty.
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
