19 Indian Tribes in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota: A View from 30,000 Feet

Abstract

The Guardians Project is a task force that was established in 2012 to identify and expose official corruption on the 7 Indian reservations in Montana. By all accounts it has been very successful. To date the project has obtained over 100 felony convictions or guilty pleas and their efforts are ongoing. My initial reaction to this program was: why Montana. Certainly fraud on reservations is not unique to Montana. The Assistant U.S. Attorney for the district of Montana said it was the result of receiving complaints from reservation residents that stimulus money was not reaching the people it was intended to help. Again, that is a broad complaint heard throughout Indian Country.As a result I decided to investigate if there was anything unique about Montana reservations. I chose to look at reservations in North and South Dakota also. The reason for this is that all the reservations are similar in many respects. All are quite remote and in states that are sparsely populated. All these reservations have consistently ranked among the poorest and most crime ridden. All have little in the way of economic opportunities and have historically been agricultural based until recent times when a few have been able to take advantage of mineral resources. All 19 tribes in these 3 states are gaming tribes but because of location and sparse population none have had significant impact on reservation economies.I utilized audits of federal grants to these 19 tribes over the past 14 years as the primary source for the investigation. The results showed that all 19 tribes had similar audit histories but it was not these similarities that were striking. It was the disparities between these 19 reservations, Indian Country in general and the U.S. overall that were striking and should be a real cause for concern. This paper compares the results of these audits using various filtering techniques that are summarized in 9 tables. My conclusions are that there is abundant room for additional study but this study alone should provide sufficient evidence that a real problem exists on Indian reservations and residents of Indian Country are being directly affected and they should be the ones to stand up and demand that something be done.