By David Sugar
A proposal for alternate models of social-economic development in the surviving indigenous nations of North America
Information in the computer age is the last genuine free market left on earth except those free markets where indigenous people are still surviving (Russell Means)
Some of the surviving nations in North America have tried Casinos and call centers. Others have tried meat packing for freedom. Yet, unemployment remains high, over 80% for some communities, such as on the Lakotah reservations. Similarly, per capita income often remains below the poverty line. On the Lakotah reservations, per capita income is less than $4,000 annually. The exact story is of course different for each nation, but the overall results of these efforts have usually been rather bleak.
Worse still, each of these efforts require nations to participate in a culturally foreign social-economic model. Each time doing so, a small part of the culture dies in the process. That is because this model requires people to compete against each other, often by any means necessary, and to do so while using the labor of others for personal gain in a market that is often closed and where goods and services often become artificially scarce and demand is artificially generated to further extract wealth rather than meeting real needs.
Certainly, for the American Indian working at a meat packing factory or a call center a job is a means of survival for a family. But it leads to no real economic development or further growth, whether for the worker or for the nation. It is a relationship that exists because the cost of bargained labor is so very cheap on the reservation. If the standard of living and income expectations did actually rise, those so eager to place some temporary facility or industry on the reservation will often simply pull up and leave to someplace cheaper. In fact, this relationship specifically discourages investment in the kind of economic development that would produce long term growth, infrastructure, and economic facilities, because doing so both will create higher future labor costs and make it far more difficult to later leave.
Even in the case of Casinos, there are issues. Where a nation is fortunate enough to be the direct beneficial owner of a casino rather than simply licensing the rights and profits to an outside entity, this casts the nation itself in the role of extracting wealth through deliberate deception of others. It may be ironic, given that this is essentially a reversal of roles, since often indigenous lands were acquired through such tactics, but this too means people must forget who they are and what their lifeways mean and take up the very same behaviors of the invader that they found to be so very offensive. In this way, also, the nations and culture can surely also slowly die.