Reservation Trash

By Ray Harvey

There are 3 million Native Americans in the United States today, approximately 1 million ofwhom live on these reservations. The leading cause of death for Native American boys is suicide. Native Americans have the highest rate of poverty of any racial group in the country -- more than twice the national average. They also have some of the highest crime rates and gang-membership rates. Native American women are raped two times more often than the national average, and the rate of child abuse among Native American children is double the national average. This is the subject nobody wants to deal with -- and so on this subject, in elementary schools, high schools, and universities, you'll hear over and over and over the same non-solution: centuries of oppression and victimization at the hand of the white man has made the situation insoluble. Until we somehow teleport Natives back to their "pre-contact" place-in- nature, they won't be helped or succored. This non-solution has dire ramifications: The first of those dire ramifications is the mentality that Native Americans should be given as much federal money as humanly possible and reparations for racism, wars, and westward expansion should know no bounds. The second is that we must somehow perform the impossible task of erasing all indignities that Native Americans have suffered.The BIE gets $850 million for providing for its 42,000 students, which is roughly $20,000 per student. The national average is $12,500.There are also a number of other federal agencies that subsidize Native Americans: The Department of Health and Human Services houses the so-called Indian Health Service. It's budget is $4 billion.The Department of Housing and Urban Development runs the Native American Housing Block Grant Program, which has a budget of $750 million.The Department of Education spends $300 million each year on BIE schools -- which, in spite of all this, are an embarrassment:The education Native children receive is an arrant travesty -- I know because I lived it. And the BIE, even with all that money, cannot keep the schools from crumbling down: collapsing roofs, gas leaks, wiring everywhere exposed, circuit-breakers popping, no heat in sub-zero weather. And so on. It's not, I assure you, a problem of money. It's a problem of money mismanagement. Which is a problem of government bureaucracy.Which is a problem of spending other people's money. Or money that you print.The cultural perception of Native Americans is just as destructive. What I want to tell you is that the misbegotten paternalism of the past century-and- a-half has brought great misery to a great many.The reservation system, which really began in 1824, is not just pathetically antiquated and broken. The reservation system is trash. Reservation Trash is the story of a young man who challenged this -- and sought to change it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1980858373
• ISBN13: 9781980858379
• Release Date: April 2018
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.0"