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Regular and current information on Native American income is hard to come by. According to a U.S. Census Bureau 1995 report, the per capita income for the 25 largest Native American tribes was $8,284 [1]. These figures are based on 1989 figures and are compared to a national average of $14,420. Native American incomes were almost half the average U.S. income. Given the general U.S. trend of increasing income inequality, it is likely that the gap, not only holds true, but is more exaggerated today. It is also important to note that the overall Native American average does not in any way reflect the diversity of native communities. For example, according to governmental data compiled by the University of California, the per capita income among Natives in certain counties was as low as $6,369 in 1999. This figure is compared to average county incomes of $21,729.

The low income among Native Americans translates into high poverty rates. Although the national poverty rate in 1989 was 13%, as many as 31% of Native Americans were living below the poverty line. Today this national average is estimated to be around 25%, however, this rate again fails to reflect the diversity of native communities. Some reservations, for example, have poverty rates as high as 100%.

Education indicators in Native America, much like income levels, are quite poor. According to the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development’s report Native America at the New Millenium, Native children have the lowest educational attainment of all minority groups. “Indians have the highest dropout rates of all minorities,” the study reports pointing out that, “over one-third of Native American children will leave the education system prior to obtaining a high school diploma.” This rate is one and a half times that of other minorities. Tex Hall, President of the National Congress of American Indians, reported in the 2004 State of Indian Nations address that only 50% of Native students finish high school. This completion rate is grotesquely below the 87% high school completion rate average.

Another education indicator is the money put into Native American education systems. According to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, individuals working in Indian education are typically underpaid in comparison to colleagues teaching non-indigenous children. “In the 1996–1997 school year…tribal college full-time faculty averaged $23,964 on nine- or 10-month contracts,” the Commission reports. On the contrary, “full-time faculty at non-tribal two-year institutions averaged $43,730 for the same period of work, with faculty at all public institutions in the United States averaging $49,855.” The rates are the same for government expenditure per child. Bureau of Indian Affairs schools are allotted less than half of what public schools spend on average per student.

Life expectancy for Native Americans is relatively low. According to several official sources, the life expectancy for Native Americans is six years less than for any other racial/ethnic group. In 1998 the Surgeon General of the United States reported that a high proportion of Native deaths at relatively young ages, has resulted in the mean age of the Native American population to be 23, much lower than the general population’s mean age of 32. Premature deaths among this population are 60% higher than among the U.S. general population.

Native Americans have disproportionately high infant mortality rates. According to David Satcher, the U.S. Surgeon General, Native Americans experience the second highest infant mortality rate of any ethnic group in the United States (averaging 120% of the national rate) and the highest rate of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. He ties this to the fact that Native Americans have the lowest rate of prenatal care, beginning in the first trimester, of all members of the U.S. population.

Housing in Native America is extremely inadequate. According to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in a 2003 report, approximately 40 percent of on-reservation housing is considered inadequate, compared with 6 percent nationwide. “One in five reservation homes lack complete plumbing,” reports the Commission, “and 16 percent lack telephone service.”

In five out of the six socioeconomic indicators this study explored, Native Americans rated the absolute worst out of all racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. Only in the area of infant mortality Native Americans did not have the worst rating (although they rated second worst). According to these findings, Indigenous peoples are the absolute most marginalized population in the U.S. It is also probable that they are among the poorest in the world. Although more research would have to be conducted on the matter, it seems that many of the indicators are comparable to poverty in the developing world. Director of the International Development Program at American University David Hirschman compared the poverty to his homeland. “I felt like I was in Africa,” Hirschman recalled of his visit to an Indigenous reservation in Kansas, “the poverty is the absolute same.”

Conversation between Keli Lovejoy and David Hirschman, American University, December 3, 2004.

Roaring Creek and Cedarville Rancherias (equivalent of reservations) in California have this unenviable poverty rate according to a study from the US Census Bureau, “American Indian Reservations and Trust Lands,” available online at http://www.census.gov/geo/www/ezstate/airpov.pdf.

Eric Hensen, Jonathan B. Taylor, et al., Native America at the New Millennium ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Project on American Indian Economic Development, November 2002) (hereafter cited as Hensen and Taylor, Native America at the New Millennium ) p. 70.

Hensen and Taylor, Native America at the New Millennium , p. 73. This information is also backed up a study from the National Center for Education Statistics, Public High School Dropouts and Completers 1997http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/dropout91_97/index..asp#2.

See U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, A Quiet Crisis, p. 110; Hensen and Taylor, Native America at the New Millennium , p. 6; David Satcher, “Statement of David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D., Surgeon General of the United States and Assistant Secretary for Health, before the Committee on Indian Affairs, US Senate,” http://indian.senate.gov/1998hrgs/0521_ds.htm, May 12, 1998.

David Satcher, “Statement of David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D., Surgeon General of the United States and Assistant Secretary for Health, before the Committee on Indian Affairs, US Senate,” http://indian.senate.gov/1998hrgs/0521_ds.htm, May 12, 1998.