10 year system, so we had a good time debating that entire set of questions. Im confident i won but i have to contest that it worked very well. The most recent book deals with the topic most of us dont know much about and that is the utterly shameful condition of americas indian reservations and the utterly shameful treatment that native americans receive from the federal government. Naomi has very properly entitled the book the new trail of tears how washington is destroying American Indians and when she tells the story you will see why this is such a fitting title and why the story she has to tell is so important. [applause] thank you for coming out today. It appears been won the argument when he was still teaching here. I usually offer a warning before i give a talk about this subject, not the kind you may be used to but a warning you might want to get something stiffer to drink because it is a depressing topic and i dont have good news for you today. I will begin. 3000 people live in south dakota. It is in the middle of the Pine Ridge Reservation which makes up most of the second poorest county in the United States. In 2013 the five Police Officers assigned to patrol the area received 16,500 calls for Emergency Assistance. I want to take a moment for all of you to do the math. 3000 people, 16,500 calls, five Police Officers. As of 2009 there were 35 games on the Pineridge Reservation including 5000 young men. The average Life Expectancy is 48. Pineridge is one of the worst reservations but the nationwide statistics are not much better. American indians have the highest poverty rate of any racial group in the nation. High School Graduation is around 50 and fallen in recent years. Suicide is the leading cause of death for native american males age 10 to 14. Alcohol use disorders are more likely than those belonging to any other racial group. Involvement in gang activities more prevalent among native americans than latinos and africanamericans. Native american women report being raped at two times the National Average. The rate of child abuse among native americans is twice as high as the National Average. Estimated one of every four girls and one of every six boys is molested before the age of 18. If you want to understand what is behind these statistics you have to visit indian territory. A couple years ago that is what i did. I spent time visiting the Elementary School called wounded knee and it has received 600,000 turnaround from the federal government. It is clean, freshly painted and mostly quiet hall. They install the computer room to award kids for Good Behavior and laundry machines so local parents have an incentive to meet with teachers. Academically it is pretty appalling that as i stood there, the principal offered to help a secondgrade student with two math problems, gave the boy incorrect answers to both of them. Recently fired the entire staff of the school and rehired teachers who had not come from teach for america. Despite some had math degrees from the best colleges in the country, they were not the right fist. Other tribal leaders were more explicit. They me the tfa folks were too white but it must be said schools for his job is to keep children safe and occasionally called the police when students got violent but mostly their problems are not serious enough to merit an officers response so the school learned to handle matters on its own. One weekend a month we have walk in. I wondered what the students had done to deserve such a punishment. It is not punishment, she assured me. It is when children stay at school all weekend for their safety. The weekend is billed as a Cultural Enrichment event for the children, they sing songs and play Traditional Games in the school gym. It is timed to coincide with when the government checks go out. These are the times when parents are most likely to drink and become abusive. The rhythm of life at wounded knee on pineridge and over 1 million American Indians living on reservations is surprisingly dependent on the federal government. To know just how much the economy on the reservation depend on public funds, only look at the effect the federal Government Shutdown has in the fall of 2013 on the reservation. Take the crow try. Some 364 crow members, more than a third of the tribes workforce were furloughed. The only way some crows are able to travel across their 2. 3 million acre reservation was shuttered. A Home Healthcare aid for six tribal members was suspended. The tribe in northern carolina rely solely on federal financing to operate. Its reservation has an Unemployment Rate of 80 . When i wrote recently on our bed editor wrote me back saying you must mean the employment rate is 80 and i assured her i meant the Unemployment Rate. As a result of the shutdown, 60 of 310 employees close to the Child Care Center and halted Emergency Assistance to low income and older members. Financing for a program that ensures clean Drinking Water on the reservation ran low as tribes are so dependent on the federal government that without money from the bureau of Indian Affairs their Economic Activity comes to a complete halt and their members dont have access to clean Drinking Water. This is a third world country that exists in the middle of the wealthiest nation on earth. The question is how did we get here . Reservations, most people know, were formed as a way to get indians out of the way to push natives onto infertile or undesirable land so that americans could pursue westward expansion. Today a surprising number of people see a way of using reservations to protect native americans and ensure nobody can take anything away from them. Reservation land is held, quote, in trust for indians by the federal government. The only other people who legally hold things in trust for my children or the mentally incompetent. The goal of this policy originally was to keep indians contained but now it has shifted to preserving these lands for Indigenous People but the effect is the same. Indians cant own reservation land. No one on the reservation can get a mortgage because the property on the reservation is held in trust by the federal government. Most of it is also, quote, owned communally by the tribe. Banks could never foreclose on the property because this bank cannot own reservation land. And theres a severe housing shortage. More families crowd into small trailer homes, a Tribal College on one of these reservations and talking about possibility of expansion and they said we have to build up. I looked out the window at acres upon acres of empty space and they could never get a loan to build on that because that is land they dont already have in their, quote, possession. They are thinking about building the way they do it in new york city as opposed to montana. This is only part of the problem. More than a quarter of Small Business owners use home equity loans to start a business or finance an existing one but American Indians do not have access to the capital which and those use their homes as equity, indians have long suffered from what is called dead capital. They may possess a certain amount of land on paper but cant put it to use by selling it, buying more to take care of economies of scale or borrowing again. Indian reservations may have been thought to be useless land once but that is no longer the case. In fact they contain almost 30 of the nations coal reserves the west of the mississippi, 50 of uranium reserves in 20 of known oil and gas reserves. These resources are worth nearly 1. 5 trillion or 290,000 per tribal member. Tragically, 86 of indian lands with energy or mineral remain undeveloped because of the federal control on the reservation. In order to tap those reserves indians must follow a 49 step process as a prolegislator explained to me. These steps involve the bureau of land management, debarment of the interior, the permit of justice and the commerce department. It can take months if not years for each step to be approved. Just to dig a hole requires a 6500 upfront payment for application for permit to drill. Compared to the process just off the reservation which requires 125. 05. The bureaucracy that oversees reservations is mindboggling. The bureau of Indian Affairs has a total of 9000 employees, that is one employee for every 111 indians on a reservation. As with all bureaucrats they need to find something. One in man i spoke to was trying to purchase land from his neighbor, another indian on which to grade, two men agreed on a price but a representative of the bureau of Indian Affairs told them the deal could not go through because the price they agreed on was not, quote, fair market value. In the real world fair market value is what someone would actually pay you for the land but not in the world of the bureau of Indian Affairs was the agency, it turned out, recently commissioned an appraisal of the land on a reservation and apparently told the appraiser to overvalue the land so as, quote, not to screw the indians, which is exactly what happened. No wonder indians say it stands for bossing indians around what about the casino. I am regularly asked cant indians make enough money from gambling to claw their way out of poverty you most indian casinos, those in the northeast dont see, our in isolated communities and their customers are other indians but successful casinos dont bring the kind of prosperity you might expect seneca place in upstate new york have made 1 billion in gaming operation. Those are distributed in the form of annuities. According to lucille brooks who runs the Seneca Economic Development company, quote, the annuities created an entitlement attitude and that is the downfall. The annuities have enabled people not to work. Now that more and more states are opening gambling to nonindians, tribes are facing increased competition. The seneca nation increased low or no interest to anyone who wants to start some other business but there are almost no takers. Michael don, the manager of the Small BusinessIncubator Program said his group conducted a survey to find out which businesses residents should open, tells people there are too many pizza places around and recommend outdoor recreation, maintenance, landscaping and professional massage. You dont have to go to beijing to see Central Planning at work. The Economic Outlook on the reservation is bleak. Indians have no Real Property, no access to capital for building businesses, little ability to develop their own Natural Resources and no incentive to work. We give them regulatory and Tax Advantages and things like gaming, alcohol, tobacco and marijuana coming Industries None of us would want in our backyard but those dont help them because the industries are all collectively owned by the tribe and the profits are distributed like lottery winning and welfare checks depending on your perspective. More money is not the answer. Washington since 20 billion a year to reservations. The Indian Health service has a budget in 2015 of 4 . 6 billion. It is the last place you would want to see a doctor. The bureau of Indian Education spends 20,000 per pupil compared to National Average of 12,400. Not only do the schools educate students but even their roofs are caving in. The pie has gone through 33 directors in 36 years. More cultural sensitivity is unlikely to do the trick either. After the media launched a National Campaign to get the owner of the Washington Redskins to change its name the Washington Post did a survey and found 9 of 10 indians couldnt care less about the name of the team which is not surprising. If your community is facing an epidemic of adolescent suicide, what nfl nafta be at the top of your list of concerns . The tragedy of American Indian policies demand immediate examination, not only because they make the lives of millions of american citizens harder and more dangerous but because they are a microcosm of anything that has gone wrong with modern liberalism. A result of decades of politicians and bureaucrats showering victimized people with money and sensitivity instead of what they truly need, the autonomy, education and Legal Protection to improve their own situation was American Indians like all americans must be able to avail themselves of the economic and legal freedom this country guarantees. Until then it will remain mired in poverty, social policy and the kind of anger that comes from knowing your fate is controlled by an ineffective and illinformed bureaucracy. The solutions are not easy but they could start with education. The states that have the largest indian populations are the only ones that have no charter law. These children have no alternative to places like wounded knee because no one is allowed to offer one. We could start to scale back the regulation in washington allowing indians to develop Natural Resources without having to tap everything through the bia and some legislators are working to curb the power of that agency but ultimately it will be hard to undo this Economic Disaster without Real Property rights. A number of tribes in canada are pushing legislation, the first nation Property Ownership act which would create the Legal Framework for individual numbers of first nation to Access Capital through Care Property rights, they see reserve land which is treated similar to reservations here as becoming more like city even if the land were sold, it would remain part of the city, no one can sell a part of new york city to newark. Individuals of any race buy and sell among themselves without the oversight of tribal or federal officials, this would allow a true freemarket. First nation members who want to lease their land to Natural Resources to do so without seeking permission from the Natural National government and those who want to select the highest bidder, and put it to use for themselves and their families. Finally those who want to keep their land would be able to borrow against it or start a business. As one indian from North Carolina told me, quote, the only solution i see is divide everything up and give it to the native American Families and let them disperse it, keep it, whatever. I dont need a government taking care of me. This kind of freedom is why the pilgrims left here. Thank you very much. Take questions . Okay. Be change i assume you interviewed bia officials, what do they say . I did not interview a lot of them because most of the research was on the ground that the reservation. The bia, 75 of native americans. A lot of people misunderstand it as some sort of white paternalist bureaucracy imposing its will. They see their job has essentially the way a lot of people see reservations which is the last best hope for protecting the rights of American Indians, just as i think many bureaucrats in washington see regulation as a way of protecting people at the heart of them so it is not much different with the bia but when you talk to people on the ground about the way these regulations are interfering with their daytoday lives and even small form of commerce they engage in the results are much different. I am a little curious to know what the advantages are to native americans living on the reservation versus integrating with other urban societies and also what are the differences between American Indians what would be the advantage . One question i get a lot is why dont they leave . That is at the heart of this question. There are several reasons behind that and the first is we naturally grow up in a place and it is home. We know it is home. That may be more the case on some of these reservations because there is such an extreme sense of isolation. Fly in rapid city south dakota and drive 100 miles. Theres nothing around, gps doesnt work, cell phone might not work and unlike, this is one of the things i was noticing because i have done a lot of research on families who live in inner cities, one of the differences between rural and urban poverty is in an urban setting in the south bronx chances are if you are a child you see people in the middle class who get on the subway to