The Long and Winding Trail

Because cigarettes have such a deservedly
unsympathetic role in modern society, it's no
wonder there is little support for any cigarette
retailers. Questions of fairness and free
enterprise fly out the window due to the simple
fact that cigarettes kill people. Even still,
Chief Harry Wallace is incredulous at the attack on the
Native American smoke trade for reasons
beyond the economic peril it places them in.
“They're the ones that turned a Native
American sacrament into a carcinogen,” he
says in disgust.
When America declared itself free,
indigenous people were herded like animals
onto isolated areas of the burgeoning nation.
Stretches of remote desert lands and parcels
nestled in the secluded woodland areas
became homesteads for Native Americans.
Their numbers were decimated and the
survivors were humiliated. Yet, in the
beginning, there was still food to eat and some
freedom to move about. But the influx just
kept coming.
Says Robert Odawi Porter: “Personally I don‟t think it
sunk in with our people that the usage of our
land was so severely restricted. We weren't
used to lines being drawn on a map.”
Over time, a sea of white faces pushed
deeper and deeper into the country—slowly at
first, then like a dam bursting, they rushed
through the forests and across the plains.
Pretty soon they were everywhere. They
brought machines and ushered in the Industrial
Revolution. Gradually, the skies turned
gray, the waters turned brown and the earth
lay fallow.
This part of the story took 400 years. The
next part took much less time.
Native Americans became like prison
inmates adapting to life on the “inside.” By
the mid-20th century the Native American
population living on reservation land was
among the poorest on Earth. The game was
long gone and the earth and seas were
poisoned. Fast food, low-wage jobs and
hustling were part of the daily routine. If you
stayed, you hustled. And you probably drank.
If you were a woman, there was a one-in-three
chance of being raped in your lifetime.
JC Seneca
This was life on “the res” and for many
tribes, it still is.
For the most part, reservations are rural ghettos,
forgotten wastelands with few opportunities
to get ahead. This concept of “getting
ahead” in America usually starts very simply.
Find a job. Buy a home. Take out a home equity
loan to start your business. As the business
grows, you have the option of paying off
that loan and securing business financing. But
this is precisely where the Indian economic
dream ends.
Because reservation land cannot be owned
by anyone, the land and any structure on it
cannot be leveraged. Put simply, if it cannot
be repossessed, you can't take out a loan on it.
Therefore, even the most industrious Indian
entrepreneur has been unable to tap into the
source of financing that is behind nearly every
great American story of growth and industry.
by Jed Morey, published in mavimag.com