Communally Owned; Communally Let Go To Pot
John Koppisch blogs at Forbes about the sorry state of Indian reservations and the reason behind it:
To explain the poverty of the reservations, people usually point to alcoholism, corruption or school-dropout rates, not to mention the dusty undeveloped land that doesn't seem good for growing much and the long distances to jobs. But those are just symptoms. Prosperity is built on property rights, and reservations often have neither. They're a demonstration of what happens when property rights are weak or non-existent.The vast majority of land on reservations is held communally. That means residents can't get clear title to the land where their home sits, one reason for the abundance of mobile homes on reservations. This makes it hard for Native Americans to establish credit and borrow money to improve their homes because they can't use the land as collateral-and investing in something you don't own makes little sense, anyway.
This leads to what economists call the tragedy of the commons: If everyone owns the land, no one does. So the result is substandard housing and the barren, rundown look that comes from a lack of investment, overuse and environmental degradation. It's a look that's common worldwide, wherever secure property rights are lacking--much of Africa and South America, inner city housing projects and rent-controlled apartment buildings in the U.S., Indian reservations.
More than a third of the Crow reservation's 2.3 million acres is individually owned, and the contrast with the communal land--often just on the other side of a fence--is stark, as Google satellite maps show. Terry Anderson, executive director of the Property & Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, co-authored a study showing that private land is 30-90% more productive agriculturally than the adjacent trust land. And this isn't because the land is better: A study of 13 reservations in the West put 49% of the land in the top four quality classes, while only 38% of the land in the surrounding counties was rated that highly. For the Crow reservation, 48% of the land made the top four classes; only 33% of the adjacent land did. "The raw quality of the land is not that much different, it's the amount of investment in that land that's different," he says.
via @walterolson
thank you so very much for your wonderful advice. our communal style of property has been what was keeping us down for lo these many years.
we never would have guessed it without your insight.
to think, that after years of single focused genocide, the destruction of whole peoples and cultures, the lost languages and centuries of broken treaties and all the rest, if we had just known that we could solve it all by becoming property owners what misery would have been avoided.
i grew up on the white mountain apache rez. right there amid the crushing poverty, isolation, and all the rest of the common reservation problems.
if only my parents could have gotten a clear title to the land our small, cheaply built home was on, then i wouldn't have minded so much being hungry so often.
you have managed to solve centuries of problems with a few consise paragraphs.
to bad they didn't send you first instead of gen. nelson miles.
minstrel boy at December 22, 2011 9:47 AM
Truth. Having grown up around Indian reservations, my observation is that the only successful Indians are those who got out - who turned their back on the reservations.
What's even more irritating are all the wannabees who claim 1/64-millionth Indian ancestry, romanticize the whole Indian experience, and want you to acknowledge what special people they are.
a_random_guy at December 22, 2011 10:05 AM
Amy Alkon
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2011/12/22/communally_owne.html#comment-2869306">comment from minstrel boyI think you need to read up on the Tragedy of the Commons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
My origins are Jewish. Jews have been persecuted out of just about every country they've lived in until the 20th Century, when a number of countries became safe havens. Jewish people didn't have a country at all for much of human history and have generally been the kickball of humanity, but somehow, Jews have won a vastly greater number of Nobel prizes than is their percentage of the population and generally succeeded. There's Jewish whining, but generally it's about stuff like "It's too COLLLD!" or other such weenieness. (And I can whine with the best of 'em about the temperature and such, but when life throws me lemons, I do my best to make lemontinis.)
In short, whining (as in your pitiful screed above) isn't the answer, and, pssst!, government handouts breed dependence and not self-sufficiency.
Also, I have to add, you, like all Americans, had access to free schooling. You don't seem to have taken advantage of the portion of it where they tell you to capitalize the first letter of the sentence. Suggest you go to a library -- free to all of us! -- and pick yourself up a copy of Strunk and White.
Amy Alkon
at December 22, 2011 10:09 AM
Stalin proved this on a large scale, creating mass starvation out of once prosperous farms.
Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize suppressing the story for the New York Times.
MarkD at December 22, 2011 10:23 AM
To minstrel boy,
So, you like the communal property rights, and see no bad effects from them? I infer that you see the property rights issue as irrelevant to American Indian poverty.
Andrew_M_Garland at December 22, 2011 10:35 AM
if we had only known. when the waves of spanish, mexican, texan, and other invaders had come to our rez we might have had ourselves some legal deeds to show and stop them.
if the cherokee had in their possession something like a supreme court decision granting them legal ownership and the status of a nation then andrew jackson would never have dared to disposses them and exile them to oklahoma. (no, bad example, they had just that and jackson ignored it)
it is a long, and old story you tell. "if you want to get along and get ahead, you need to quit being who you are."
you infer? i thought i was quite clear. silly me.
ya'll are full of it.
the problems on the reservations are much deeper and defy simplistic solutions.
individual property rights. bah, humbug.
minstrel boy at December 22, 2011 11:48 AM
The Lumbee Indians of North Carolina are a prosperous people. Laboring without a Reservation or full federal recognition, they have prospered by doing things the way most Americans do them. They own property and run businesses, and if I remember correctly, some of them are quite wealthy. This contrasts with the standard destitution on Indian reservations.
Unfortunately, the Lumbee are in the process of destroying themselves by applying for full federal recognition as a tribe.
mpetrie98 at December 22, 2011 2:14 PM
Sure communal property is a bleeding wound. But the abject stupidity evidence by minstril boy doesnt help.
Look at his first comment, in his orgasmic need to ridicule Amy for impunging the 'Nobel Spirit' of his people he coulndt be bothered to notice Amy didnt write it, She just gave a link and an excerpt
And minstrel boy - might makes right the history of native americans (north and south) wanst te homoerotic/denderphiliac paradise the opening scenes to Disney Pocohantas made it out to be.
Boo Hoo you got fucked over by a superior military force, so did the europeans ancestors.
Ever read history? Romans fucked up damn near everone they came in contact with, went on to get fucked up by the Huns.
It happened, get over it. Do something with your life, if you want to get on over on the white man create some god awful sugary desert and make a million or two as your enimes pay you to poision themselves
lujlp at December 22, 2011 2:20 PM
Well, they did give us tobacco.
carol at December 22, 2011 2:25 PM
And syphilis.
"if you want to get along and get ahead, you need to quit being who you are"
That's right. It's called progress. On their journey to modernity, white folks gave up a lot of things that were holding them back - slavery, segregation, the divine right of kings, etc. You can do the same.
Martin at December 22, 2011 4:56 PM
For further reading on this subject, see The Mystery of Capitalism by Hernando de Soto:
"'The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph', writes Hernando de Soto, 'is, in the eyes of four-fifths of humanity, its hour of crisis'. In The Mystery of Capital, the world-famous Peruvian economist takes up the question that, more than any other, is central to one of the most crucial problems the world faces today: Why do some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail?In strong opposition to the popular view that success is determined by cultural differences, de Soto finds that it actually has everything to do with the legal structure of property and property rights. Every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly informal, extralegal ownership to a formal, unified legal property system. In the West we've forgotten that creating this system is also what allowed people everywhere to leverage property into wealth. This persuasive book will revolutionize our understanding of capital and point the way to a major transformation of the world economy.
Lori at December 22, 2011 5:29 PM
The Mayans, Aztecs, Moche and the rest of the native populations of America was just as cruel to each other as the Europeans were to them. Unfortunately, for the native populations, they had limited or no access to gun powder, metallurgy, horses and many other items the Europeans had, since America was isolated from Europe, Asia and Africa by the oceans.
the problems on the reservations are much deeper and defy simplistic solutions.
No doubt. Where do you wanna start? Gotta start somewhere. Abolish the BIA and the rez system?
Stinky the Clown at December 22, 2011 5:39 PM
And syphilis.
Hotly debated in some quarters Martin. Although a lot of the people debating it have an axe to grind. I tend to believe the New World origin theory myself.
On the article, here's an interesting game - take the above excerpt and substitute "black" for Native American, and "housing projects" for "reservations". Same cause, same problem.
Ltw at December 22, 2011 8:31 PM
All my friends who are Lakota or Crow sneer at the Pequot or San Manuel, et al. Plains tribes might not be rich, but they know who they are and are very proud of not having sold out for casino cash.
KateC at December 22, 2011 8:39 PM
The Aztecs did a pretty good job of tyranny without guns and steel. Avi, one of Neal Stephenson's characters in Cryptonomicon says it best - something along the lines of "it says a lot that things actually got better when the Spaniards turned up and started raping the place".
As far as I know, despite constant and fairly brutal warfare, no North American tribe ever reached the Aztec level of depravity.
They also, very rarely for an indigenous people in the face of European invaders, put up one hell of a fight. That's a technical judgement, not an expression of sympathy for minstrel boy.
Ltw at December 22, 2011 8:46 PM
Now I dont think thed Aztec were any more or less depraved than any other neolithic/bronze age culture
lujlp at December 23, 2011 5:46 AM
Alsos given the journal entries from the conquistadors I would argue that aside from their lack of contemporary militgary technology and their practice of human sacrifice, that they had a better culture than the spanish
lujlp at December 23, 2011 6:08 AM
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