Native Reservations Research Articles

The Social Determinants of Health

Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care 23(3):p 181-183, May 2012. | DOI: 10.1016/j.jana.2012.03.001

Income Inequality across Micro and Meso Geographic Scales in the Midwestern United States, 1979–20091

AbstractThis article examines the spatial distribution of income inequality and the socioeconomic factors affecting it using spatial analysis techniques across 16,285 block groups, 5,050 tracts, and 618 counties in the western part of the North Central Region of the United States. Different geographic aggregations result in different inequality outcomes, suggesting spatial scale needs to be carefully considered in inequality research. Inequality is spatially clustered in suburban areas of larger metro areas and around Native American reservations in the Dakotas. Higher inequality is associated with better socioeconomic conditions, counter to the social inequality literature but consistent with the inequality growth literature. However, growing inequality is associated with worse socioeconomic outcomes. Results partially support the polarization thesis that declines in industrial sectors and growth in services has caused incomes to diverge. Higher and growing inequality is associated with both low‐skill and high‐skill services jobs. However, employment in agricultural and industrial sectors experiencing large losses over the past three decades is also linked to higher and growing inequality. This suggests a dual process where many former agricultural and industrial workers are now employed in other sectors at lower wages, while the remaining workers in these sectors earn higher and growing wages.

Expanding Access To Rural Healthcare Services And Benefits Through Secure, Interactive Video Links: A Case Study Of Video Claims Taking Implementation In The Great Plains

Context: Between 2003 and 2008, the University of North Dakota Center for Rural Service Delivery (RSD) increased access to a number of vital government services for citizens in rural communities and Native American reservations through the Video Claims Taking (VCT) program, which allowed claimants in rural healthcare settings to apply for benefits over secure interactive video networks to distant government offices. VCT helped increase healthcare reimbursement, social and related public service benefits to 31 underserved communities in six states and leveraged a significant increase in applications for government services and monetary benefits to these communities. Methods: A case-study examines the implementation, use and impact of the VCT technology over the RSD’s five year operation. Findings: The authors offer five principal findings which center on the relationships between government agencies and rural claimants, some cultural considerations posed by this electronic form of service delivery, the program’s potential to realize certain efficiencies, the technical challenges faced during implementation and overcoming a number of organizational and communications barriers. Conclusions: The foregoing analysis of the RSDs initiative and its VCT program contributes to a better understanding of how to leverage an interactive video platform to provide government healthcare reimbursement services to underrepresented groups in rural contexts for public agencies and private healthcare providers that are interested in adopting a similar model of service delivery to their stakeholders

Utah Domestic Violence Council Economic Justice and Empowerment Project Final Report

Policy report on domestic violence and economic justice for the state of Utah, including an assessment of programs throughout the state. Provides a focus on Native American Reservations and colonialism, race and predatory lending, gender and rural poverty.

Tensions in Italian Whiteness and Racial Violence in Italy, the United States and Native American Reservations: Sandro Onofri and the Italian Left

This article has two aims: to explore the tensions and ambiguities in the response of the Italian Left to the challenges of immigration in the 1990s through the prism of Sandro Onofri's writing, published between 1991 and his premature death in 1999, and in doing so to offer an introduction to this lesser-known writer whose works offer a unique perspective on this very specific period. During the 1990s racial violence grew in Italy as mass immigration challenged perceptions of 'Italian-ness'. Onofri's writings seek to subsume racial attacks carried out in marginalized Italian communities into wider discourses of economic and social marginalization, denying the role of racism in Italy. This is expanded in his American writing, in which he uses the Native American reservations as a 'contact zone' in which to align Italian-ness in America and Italy with a past history of powerlessness.

Association of Alcohol Dehydrogenase Genes with Alcohol-Related Phenotypes in a Native American Community Sample

Previous linkage studies, including a study of the Native American population described in the present report, have provided evidence for linkage of alcohol dependence and related traits to chromosome 4q near a cluster of alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) genes, which encode enzymes of alcohol metabolism. The present study tested for associations between alcohol dependence and related traits and 22 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) spanning the 7 ADH genes. Participants included 586 adult men and women recruited from 8 contiguous Native American reservations. A structured interview was used to assess DSM-III-R alcohol dependence criteria as well as a set of severe alcohol misuse symptoms and alcohol withdrawal symptoms. No evidence for association with the alcohol dependence diagnosis was observed, but an SNP in exon 9 of ADH1B (rs2066702; ADH1B*3) and an SNP at the 5' end of ADH4 (rs3762894) showed significant evidence of association with the presence of withdrawal symptoms (p = 0.0018 and 0.0012, respectively). Further, a haplotype analysis of these 2 SNPs suggested that the haplotypes containing either of the minor alleles were protective against alcohol withdrawal relative to the ancestral haplotype (p = 0.000006). These results suggest that variants in the ADH1B and ADH4 genes may be protective against the development of some symptoms associated with alcohol dependence.

Dirofilaria immitis Infection in Dogs from Underserved, Native American Reservations in the United States

Blood samples from 1,822 dogs residing on Native American reservations in 10 states were collected between February 2004 and August 2007. Samples were examined using a commercial enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) antigen capture test. All ELISA-positive samples were subsequently examined for microfilaremia. All dogs were asymptomatic for Dirofilaria immitis infection, resided outside (except for winter in the Northern latitudes), not on prophylaxis for D. immitis, and had not traveled off of the reservation. Reservations were characterized by degrees of north latitude, true prevalence of D. immitis, and a reproductive index calculated by multiplying the number of months of the year in which infective stage larvae (L(3)) could develop in 30 days or less for each reservation by the 30 yr mean annual rainfall in centimeters recorded for that community. The prevalence of heartworm was directly related to the reproductive index on each reservation.

Alianza y conflicto interracial en los Llanos de Casanare (Virreinato del Nuevo Reino de Granada). El caso del adelantado Juan Francisco Parales, 1795-1806

This paper analyzes the interethnic violent events occurred in Los Llanos (Arauca, Casanare and Meta) between 1795 and 1806 when Juan Francisco Parales, the Adelantado, an African-descendant from Barinas, Venezuela, tried two native guahibochiricoa reservations in the places known as Las Cachamas and El Zumi which at the beginning were supported by landowners and common people from the area but then this reservations were attacked by the same ones who had supported them before; permanent violent acts emerged. As a result, hate and resentment appeared against the guahibochiricoa people and also a hateful cultural practice known as “la guahibiada” began. Since then, “la guahibiada” has been present in the region.

Mortgage lending on Native American reservations: Does a guarantee matter?

The Section 184 Indian Home Loan Guarantee Program provides lenders with a 100 percent guarantee for mortgage loans to Native Americans residing on reservations belonging to tribes that have chosen to participate in the program. We find that Native Americans residing on trust land whose tribes have adopted Section 184 have a marginally statistically significantly higher loan approval rate than Native Americans residing on trust land whose tribes have not adopted Section 184. However, the statistical significance disappears once tribe fixed effects are included in the analysis, suggesting that underlying tribe characteristics correlated with the adoption of Section 184 are more important determinants of access to credit than is Section 184 per se.

Economic impact of a private sector micro-financing scheme in South Dakota

While poverty rates on Native American Indian reservations are triple the US average. Small business incubation programs, available elsewhere in the US, scarcely exist on the Native American Indian Reservations (NAIRs). Our unique study tests the effects of the Lakota Fund (LF), a private sector small business development initiative on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, on the economic development of the NAIRs. Our objective is to determine whether the SBA-like programs (loans, training, and consulting) can improve economic conditions. The 1980–2006 annual county-level (Shannon Co. is ‘treatment,’and Todd Co. is ‘control’) data are a natural experiment. Results indicate that the LF inception and duration significantly raised real per capita income (RPCI)—suggesting not only the success of the LF, but support for the broader notion that privately funded small business initiatives can be used to support economic development of isolated impoverished groups within the US economy.

Rod Edmond, Leprosy and empire: a medical and cultural history, Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. x, 255, illus., £50.00 (hardback 978-0-521-86584-5).

In an ambitious work that seeks to bridge the disciplinary divide between cultural studies and medical history, Rod Edmond illuminates the connections between leprosy's enduring metaphorical power and medical efforts to contain and cure the disease in the modern age of empire. Edmond seeks to avoid both the over-generalities in studies of disease produced by cultural theorists and the overly narrow focus of site-specific medical histories that fail to recognize continuities among various colonial settings. Providing an innovative integration of both medical and literary texts, Edmond demonstrates that neither physicians nor writers in the nineteenth century consistently defined leprosy and those who suffered from the disease as infectious agents. Such disagreements about the nature of leprosy failed to produce a single isolationist model of treatment as previous scholars have claimed. When the germ theory gained predominance by the early twentieth century, however, so did more coercive policies of segregation, a result that reflected broader anxieties about the imperial project and the impulse to establish fixed boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized. The recognition that such a boundary proved permeable only heightened European fears of contamination and helped shape calls for compulsory segregation that emerged in various colonial settings throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Edmond's comparison of regulations in a distinctive array of geographic settings is a welcome effort to illustrate that no common colonial policy toward leprosy emerged in these years. Differences in racial populations, national identity, and attitudes toward the intermingling of European and indigenous colonials shaped distinctive chronologies and regulations regarding the containment of those with leprosy. Yet these comparisons remain cursory, in part because they lack any in-depth exploration of the archival sources specific to each institution. Despite his stated intention to challenge the “top-down nature” (p. 177) of previous theoretical models, this archival absence means the voices of those with leprosy or family members intervening on their behalf are largely absent from Edmond's account. More impressive is Edmond's effort to draw clear connections between domestic and imperial policies toward leprosy, addressing the call from such scholars as Ann Stoler to examine the ways in which metropole and colony are mutually constitutive. He effectively uses Paul Gilroy's conception of the “camp” to examine the wide variety of institutions constructed by Europeans to isolate those viewed as contaminants. In Edmond's conceptualization, such colonial sites as concentration camps and native reservations, and such domestic facilities as lock hospitals and tuberculosis asylums shared a common imperative to “enclose and isolate the primitive, the diseased, and the backward” (p. 216). His comparison provides a historical context for leprosy that demonstrates how segregationist impulses emerged within domestic settings and were not simply tools of empire. Yet mapping the intersections among these various encampments, while valuable, ultimately does little to explain the particular power of leprosy to inspire a degree of revulsion disproportionate to its infectiousness, or to account for its hold on the literary imagination. In his concluding chapter, Edmond briefly examines a series of authors to illustrate how leprosy settlements served as a source of both fascination and fear from the 1860s to the 1960s. He attempts to link this literary study to the preceding chapters by demonstrating how each author transgressed and challenged established imperial boundaries; however, the connections between this cultural analysis and his medical context remain elusive. While one wishes that this work could draw more specific conclusions to bring together the composite parts of his interdisciplinary study, this book will prove rewarding to scholars interested in literary and medical accounts of disease and their complicated imperial genealogies.

Plenary Rhetoric in Indian Country: TheLone Wolf v. HitchcockCase and the Codification of a Weakened Native Character

AbstractThe U.S. Congress passed the General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887 as a part of its assimilationist plan to remake American Indians in the image of the U.S. nation. The act helped constitute a changed Native identity as it contracted reservation lines and forced an agricultural economy onto Native reservations. The Supreme Court case Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) resulted from American Indian protests of the Dawes Act, including the argument that the assimilationist plan had been implemented against Natives' will. The resulting decision granted Congress the ultimate “plenary” power to abrogate treaties without any limits because American Indians were wards. Through an analysis of the case and Indian Commissioner reports addressing plenary power, I argue that the Lone Wolf holding served as an imperial discourse that maligned American Indian identities through a parent-child relationship. This denigration manifested through Lone Wolf's construction of American Indians as cultural wards, its reduction of Native property to commodity through a westernized economic plan, and its assimilation of Native communities into dominant U.S. culture. In addition, I contend that the Lone Wolf case solidified a wider U.S. nationalism by emboldening federal power over indigenous communities through a familial rhetorical strategy.

Small Business Economics of the Lakota Fund on the Native American Indian Reservation

Poverty rates on Native American Indian reservations are triple the US average. Small business incubation programs, available elsewhere in the US, are sparse on the reservations. Small businesses are potent drivers of US economic growth. Some 25.5 million entrepreneurs generate more than 50% of the GDP, are 26% of the exporters, and create 80% of the total net new job formation. The Small Business Administration (SBA), an independent agency of the federal government created in 1953, maintains and strengthens the nation's economy by aiding, counseling, assisting, and protecting the interests of small businesses and by assisting families and businesses to recover from national disasters. SBA services hardly exist on the Native American Indian Reservations (NAIRs), however. Studies have linked micro entrepreneurial activities to economic growth and poverty reduction. Our study tests the effects of the Lakota Fund (LF), a small business development initiative, on the NAIRs to determine whether SBA-like programs (loans, training, and consulting) can improve economic conditions on the NAIRs. The LF, a private micro loan and business training initiative on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, is tested for its effectiveness in generating income. The 1980-2006 annual county-level data (Shannon Co. is 'treatment', Todd Co. is 'control') are a natural experiment; the counties are similar otherwise. Using the real per capita income (RPCI) dependent variable, and controlling for other factors, our regression results indicate that the LF initiative and its duration (intensity) raised RPCI significantly - suggesting the success of a privately funded small business incubation initiative targeted at isolated impoverished groups within the highly developed US economy. Suggestions for future research and program replication ideas are explored.

Public Policy Implications of Tobacco Industry Smuggling through Native American Reservations into Canada

From 1980 to 1994, the Canadian government enacted major tax increases on tobacco products. These actions initiated significant tobacco smuggling from the United States into Canada through a few U.S. Native American reservations to undercut the price of Canadian tobacco products. The tobacco industry blamed rampant smuggling on excessive taxation; however, research shows that the tobacco industry had actually promoted smuggling schemes to both increase profits and provide an argument for tobacco taxation reduction. Although the smuggling has resulted in numerous U.S. and Canadian criminal convictions of tobacco industry officials and partners, significant smuggling continues throughout the world. For the few Native Americans involved, the smuggling was lucrative and they were able to avoid criminal prosecution through tribal sovereignty. Industry-supported tobacco smuggling has had a profoundly negative effect on Canadian public health that must be brought to light to prevent future similar occurrences.

Standing on Principle: The Global Push for Environmental Justice

Climate change, acid rain, depletion of the ozone layer, species extinction—all of these issues point to one thing: environmental health is a global issue that concerns all nations of the world. Now add environmental justice to the list. From South Bronx to Soweto, from Penang to El Paso, communities all over the world are finding commonality in their experiences and goals in seeking environmental justice. Environmental justice was defined by Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, in his seminal 1990 work Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality as “the principle that all people and communities are entitled to equal protection of environmental and public health laws and regulations.” In countries around the world, the concept of environmental justice can apply to communities where those at a perceived disadvantage—whether due to their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, immigration status, lack of land ownership, geographic isolation, formal education, occupational characteristics, political power, gender, or other characteristics—puts them at disproportionate risk for being exposed to environmental hazards. At a global scale, environmental justice can also be applied to scenarios such as industrialized countries exporting their wastes to developing nations. In either case, “environmental and human rights have no boundaries, because pollution has no boundaries,” says Heeten Kalan, senior program officer of the Global Environmental Health and Justice Fund of the New World Foundation in New York City. “Environmental justice organizations are starting to understand that they are working in a global context.”

The Funding Dilemma for Rural Water Infrastructure on Tribal Nations

Safe drinking water is the most capital intensive of all utility services. Paying for water infrastructure improvements is a particular problem for small, rural communities, such as those on Native American reservations. These communities often rely on federal grant programs for capital improvements; however, granting agencies face difficulties deciding who to fund. By evaluating water infrastructure projects for 10 Native American communities, the authors show advantages and limitations of three methods for awarding grants—traditional benefit—cost analysis, social benefit—cost analysis, and funding criteria used for the Tribal Set-Aside grants program. Results suggest that the choice of prioritization method leads to very different results. As an example, fire protection benefits can change the viability of a water system project, but the Environmental Protection Agency does not directly consider these benefits for statutory reasons. From a life cycle perspective, mission agencies may want to reevaluate their decision-making methods to more holistically consider risk when allocating infrastructure funding.

In this issue

In this issue

Ethnomethodological architectures: Information systems driven by cultural and community visions

AbstractAs networked digital systems are rapidly created and deployed, social, cultural, and community‐focused issues are often neglected. Indeed much research has focused on the “effects” these systems hold rather than viewing systems as tools to be designed given an understanding of sociocultural context. Acknowledging the cultural practices and belief systems of a set of users may allow systems to be more effectively created and deployed into particular contexts. Emerging research in community information systems and archives has highlighted possible interactions between system design and ethnographic research. These bridges include understanding how communities can begin (1) to create content for their own information systems, (2) to design the database architectures, and (3) to integrate systems within community infrastructures. In this article, I allude to several cultural criticisms that accompany the global proliferation of information technologies. These criticisms can be answered by research that focuses on developing systems based on ethnographic insights. Specifically, I present the research example of Tribal Peace, a cultural information system designed for and by community members of the 19 Native American reservations of San Diego County (California, United States). This case has demonstrated the potential for a community to create an information system that satisfies its own priorities. This precedent points to the need for further research that investigates this convergence.

Identifying Rural Health Care Needs Using Community Conversations

Community input can lead to better-defined goals in an organization. With this in mind, the Center for Rural Health at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences embarked on a series of 13 meetings with representatives of organizations serving rural communities, including 5 Native American reservations. To give a detailed description of the steps involved in planning, and the outcomes and lessons learned from the meetings. Organizations will be able to use this information when incorporating community involvement as part of their planning process. Each meeting included a presentation of the Center for Rural Health efforts throughout the state and a discussion in which residents were asked about health care barriers they have encountered and how the Center for Rural Health could align its efforts to assist communities. The conversations from these meetings have provided a wealth of information about barriers to providing quality health care facing rural and Native American residents. The Center for Rural Health has incorporated this information into its strategic planning process and has formed several work groups to address issues raised. Community conversations allow organizations to better determine priorities that will be valid and realistic to the communities they serve.

Michigan Gambling

Michigan is the most prominent gambling destination between Atlantic City and Nevada. Since the mid-1990s, there has been competition between casinos in Ontario, Detroit, and those on Native American reservations. The Ontario, Detroit, and Chippewa casinos in Mount Pleasant and Sault Saint Marie are full-scale, land-based, Las Vegas-style gaming venues. Other smaller Native American casinos that rely largely on machine gaming revenues are scattered throughout the state (in a manner similar to other midwestern and Northern Plains states).