Native Americans Left Behind in the Economic Recovery
Native American performers listen as President Barack Obama speaks in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. The unemployment rate among Native Americans was nearly double the national rate in the last quarter. JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
FINALLY THE U.S. IS beginning to see steady improvement in employment and economic activity years after the worst crisis since the Great Depression. But one group is still plagued with endemic unemployment and widespread poverty.
Native Americans continue to grapple with unemployment levels nearly double that of the overall population, have higher poverty rates and lag behind in education attainment. Making up about 1 percent of the labor force, the native population of 5.2 million is relatively small but diverse. About 49 percent identify as American Indian and Alaska Native only, and 51 percent are combined with one or more other races, according census data. In all, they comprised 2 percent of the population in 2013.
Although many groups have progressed economically in recent years, the native population, oft-overlooked, has a long way to go.
Malia Villegas, director of the policy research center at the National Congress of American Indians, describes American Indian and Alaska native populations as “asterisk nations” that in national studies are too small to be included when race and ethnicities are broken down.
“There's a lot of invisibility of the challenges facing our people in the national schema,” says Villegas, herself an Alaska native from the village of Afognak, where she’s on the tribal council. “A lot of the time we're not included in these national policy discussions and dialogues and so it's difficult to begin to get the attention that's needed on our community issues.”
But the national data that’s available paints a gloomy picture. More than 1 in 4 native people live in poverty and their labor force participation rate – which measures the share of adults either working or looking for a job – is 61.6 percent, the lowest for all race and ethnicity groups. At 11 percent, the native unemployment rate in the third quarter of 2014 was almost double the national rate of 6.2 percent, according to the Labor Department.
The only time the national unemployment rate hit double digits over the past 30 years was in October 2009, four months after the official end of the Great Recession. The unemployment rate has been sluggish to improve for Native Americans since the financial crisis.
For some individual tribes, the rate is even higher. For example, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Nation -- which Barack Obama visited this summer during his first trip to Indian country as president -- has an unemployment rate of over 60 percent, according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“American Indians suffer from a variety of problems somewhat similar to African Americans,” says Algernon Austin, author of a 2013 Economic Policy Institute report on Native American unemployment. “You have lower levels of education [and] continued racial discrimination in the labor market. Some of my work for EPI showed that … improving education attainment of American Indians would likely produce a significant increase in their employment rates.”
According to the EPI report, American Indians and white Americans attain high school diplomas at roughly the same rate. But almost twice as many native people have less than a high school education compared with whites, and their rates of completing bachelor’s and advanced degrees are also about half that of whites.
And even when American Indians are similar to whites in terms of factors like age, sex, education level, marital status and state of residence, Austin wrote, their odds of being employed are 31 percent lower than those of whites.
The federal government provided native communities with almost $19 billion in federal funds in 2013 to cover food assistance, education and health services, according to the White House, and Obama’s 2015 budget includes an additional $3 billion.
“The nation, after a really lousy start, evil even, has tried to do a lot to help tribes,” says Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former White House adviser on welfare issues. “It’s extremely difficult. If people aren’t integrated into American society then it’s very difficult to reach them and create the basis for economic opportunity and affluence.”
Infrastructure challenges could be one major factor standing in the way of more robust job growth for native populations.
“A lot of the jobs … are not available in people's home communities, you have to actually leave the reservation to get access to jobs,” Villegas says. “So there was real hesitance to that for a variety of reasons. Costs, related to when you have to leave work for two weeks at a time. Transportation can be a challenge. Some of the weather-related factors related to where the jobs happen to be.”
According to the Interior Department, there were 325 federally recognized native reservations in 2012 and 566 federally recognized American Indian tribes. Of those who identify as American Indian or Alaska native only, about 1 in 3 live on a reservation or tribal lands, according to the Pew Research Center. For the native population as a whole, it’s about 1 in 5.
Further, when resources aren’t available on reservations or tribal communities, it forces people to spend money elsewhere.
“That dollar that someone could earn in order to get services like getting a haircut, purchasing gas, groceries, when those services aren't available on reservations or in village communities that economy becomes less sustainable and can't create its own jobs at that level,” she says.
The White House has said tribal leaders “must have a seat at the table” when it comes to working with the administration on economic development. On the community level, many are already doing that. Chairman Dave Archambault of the Standing Rock Sioux, for example, led a marketing effort to create a series of videos encouraging young men to pursue job training through a partnership with an all native male comedy troupe in North Dakota.
“While we do struggle with some of the serious infrastructure needs … that can create and sustain job growth, we have amazing tribal leaders who, out of a deep love for our people and native youth, are developing innovative approaches to strengthening our workforce, using cultural values like humor and kinship,” Villegas wrote in an email to U.S. News.
Obama’s June visit to the Standing Rock tribe in Cannonball, North Dakota, was the first presidential visit to Indian country since Bill Clinton in 1999, and was only the third presidential visit to Indian country in U.S. history.