Stuff You Should Know - Native American Reservations

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

Today we dive into the history and current state of Native American reservations. This serves as a nice follow-up to the Trail of Tears double-ep from 2017. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and that makes this stuff you should know a tutelier, doodly-do. That's great. Thanks. You're welcome. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about. I don't believe, but there was a word saying, I think. Do you know what does?

What? The season three of reservation dogs. Yeah, that's why I figured you were probably, you suggested this topic. It's not why, actually, because I suggested this a long time ago I've been sitting on this one and kind of forgot but then reservation dogs season three the finale season started And I know talked about this show a lot but big recommendation Okay, a show shot and Crude up and written in directed and acted entirely by Native Americans.

I believe it's shot inside the Muscogee Nation. Nice. Reservation. And it's great. It's one of the best shows ever. Wow. That's full-throated endorsement, man. I'll have to check it out.

It's awesome. It's funny and heartwarming and sweet and meaningful and it's just really, really good. I would also direct people to the movie Smoke Signals that was made not too long ago. Oh, yeah. It's a reservation life in a fairly lighthearted manner, but pretty accurately too. Yeah, and we also want to caveat this by saying this is a very broad overview of Native American or American Indian reservations. There's a lot to it and certainly could have been like five or six episodes long, but

as we do, we try to give a good broad overview. That's how we do. That's right. And if this episode is banned in schools in Florida. Listen to it outside of school. Just go travel to Valdosta and download it and go back to Florida. Exactly. That was an odd thing to say.

What's sad is I have no idea what you're talking about, but I can totally believe what you just said is real. Well, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, is on a push to keep children from being indoctrinated by true history of our country. And so he has, I believe it was in the gubbed editorial debate, the last one, he was saying that his opponent said it was okay to teach that some of the land in America was stolen from the native indigenous people.

And he said, that's not appropriate for our schools and it's not true. Yeah, that's not true at all. No, it's not. And I'm not sure how you get away with just saying completely untrue things on a debate stage. But that's where we are these days. For sure. So, the very fact that reservations exist prove that that's true, because the entire reservation system that we still have today that dates back to the 19th century and actually

earlier was, and is, entirely, a way of removing Native Americans from their traditional lands, putting them somewhere they probably had never been and didn't know anybody, and then taking that land away and increasingly shrink the land that they have so that European colonists and then eventually American settlers,ists could take that land for themselves and the reservation system is Just proof that that is this it was this ongoing century plus long process that still has Just very fresh wounds today like it's not like, that happened in the past and things are good now. That is not the case in a lot of places. It's that happened in the past and the effects of it

are still being felt generations later. Yeah, for sure. And before we get emails from people that say, you know, much of much of that land was negotiated for and there were treaties over it in deals made, that is certainly true. But much of it was also outright seized. And that's just a fact of what happened here, you know? We don't need to debate somebody who's trying to tell us that the margin didn't steal land from the native mayor. They don't even deserve our attention, let alone our breath. I agree. These days, just to start off with a stat for you and big thanks to Olivia for helping out with this one. In the 2020 census, 9.7 million people in these United States identified as either a Alaska native or American Indian.

And although we'll talk a little bit about the fact that the census isn't always accurate when it comes to native populations. But 1.2 million, 13% of those people live on reservations today as of a few years ago. Right. So we have a big population of Native Americans. I think there's something like 534 tribes recognized by the federal government as their own tribe But yeah, the vast majority do not live on reservations the reason that some people live on reservations because they were born there Their parents were born there. That's just where they were raised

But another reason that a lot of Native Americans live on reservations is because that is the place where they can still do whatever they can to keep their culture alive and whatever ways that they can. And they have a certain amount of self-determination there because in the United States, reservations are considered sovereign nations. They're ruled by the tribe that whose reservation that is. So that's why there's casinos

and that's why you can buy cigarettes for super cheap on a reservation. And all sorts of other stuff why the state can't prosecute somebody for a crime that happened on the reservation if they're a member of the tribe. It's because it's like little pockets of independent nations that exist in the United States.

Yeah, it's a little convoluted, but generally, it's their under federal law and purview, but not under state law. So like you were saying, that's why you can have casinos and states where you otherwise could not. Yeah, and I saw that even the federal law is usually kind of just the big stuff. Sure. Yeah, but states have almost no jurisdiction. And Oklahoma was really, really pushing recently to, I guess, gain more jurisdiction over

members of tribes there. Because Oklahoma is about half reservation these days. But there was a Supreme Court ruling in McGert versus Oklahoma in 2020 that said, no, states including Oklahoma have no jurisdiction to prosecute tribal members of crimes that happened on tribal land. And they're having to dismiss tons of cases just outright because Oklahoma, I guess, kind of went buck wild and started arresting people on tribal land, knowing full well that this has been recognized for nearly a century, if not longer,

that tribe whose reservation that is essentially a sovereign nation. Yeah. So I say we kind of start with, after maybe the quickest overview of how this happened to begin with, start with the, with how the system happened to begin with, start with the, with how the system evolved to begin with, we don't need to go over everything before that because we have covered a lot of it before in our, really, if I may say so, really great two-part episode on the trail of tears from 2017, I think, 2017. And that was the one where Holt himself, Mark Reffelow tweeted out about that one.

That's right, yeah, yeah. And we were like, holy cow, Dr. Banner listens to our show. Right, the Holt doesn't, Dr. Banner does. Yeah, of course, Holt smash. We need turns into the Holt, he's like, what is this crap when it's still playing? So Hulk smash podcast. I would also, I would also direct people to the Louisiana purchase one too that that had a lot to do with this as well. Sure. That was a good one. But I will just say in like a sentence that Native Americans were generally

forced west and further west. And then as then as we decided well we actually want to live west now they were squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces because you know we re-nigged on deals on like hey this is jolana we kind of actually want that to now yeah and they were squeezed into smaller and smaller territories and what was known as Indian Territory, much of which ended up in Oklahoma. Right. And there was from the outset, basically, a true pro- too pronged effort to move Native Americans further and further west. And that was through violence and through, like, treaties,

essentially. And like you said, those treaties would be negotiated, but they would also be broken. But some of them are still intact. There's actually reservations that are state recognized because of a treaty that the tribe have with the state that goes back sometimes to colonial days. But a lot of them were broken for sure. But it was a patchwork of different localities and different colonies and different states that were negotiating with the tribes

they needed to negotiate with to get their land. It wasn't until 1851 that the federal government said, forget this patchwork stuff, we're gonna create like a federal system of recognizing and moving Native Americans onto land, settling them on two reservations. It was the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851. Yeah, and that was basically, here's some funding.

We're going to move you where we say you should go, and you should become more like us, basically. You should live your life a little more like us. You should farm like us. Shop at the gap. Yeah, shop at the gap where pod or truck work for a couple of months. Sure. How many times did I talk about that yesterday

at our book event? A lot. I got the gap on it. It came up like four times. Yeah, be a little bit more like us. Eat the stuff that we eat, even though it's not the stuff that you usually eat. And you know what, maybe we'll even send you some food

sometimes, and some plies when we feel like it. even though it's not the stuff that you usually eat. And you know what, maybe we'll even send you some food sometimes and some plies when we feel like it. And so what if some of that food shows up spoiled and so what if it's not very good for you? And also this tribe that may have been your long-term rival, maybe that's your neighbor now and good luck working all that out. Yeah, so that's a big deal though, that they said they would supply that's a big deal though that they said they would supply them with food

the reason why they said they would supply them with food is that they said you can't you can't hunt any longer you can't do what you used to do as a native american tribe to support yourself to sustain yourselves you're gonna have to rely on us the federal government and by the way we're gonna take shabby care of you in return for you agreeing to that. And that was over roughly 30 year period from 1850s through the late, almost into the 1880s and involved all the plane stripes, Apache, Comanche, Kikapu, Kiyowa, a Cheyenne among many others.

Didn't we do a whole Apache or Jeronimo? Was it a Jeronimo episode? Cause that's when he was fighting. I don't remember. It doesn't sound familiar, but you know me. Don't you remember he like personally lobbied Teddy Roosevelt and Roosevelt just basically patted him on the head? And I think it was.

I think it was a Jeronimo or an Apache. Was it? It was the Apache Wars, I think is what it was a Geronimo or an Apache or was it it was the Apache Wars. I think is what it was Okay, well they eventually settled again in the 1880s In Oklahoma they were squeezed down to a smaller and smaller area There were 27 tribes by that point in this you know relatively small part of land And in the ensuing decades, there was a lot of changes

or a bunch of different policy shifts. There was the DAWs Act of 1887. This is just a, for instance, basically, there were all kinds of changes. But the DAWs Act was when they said, all right, let's not do reservations. Let's break them all up. Let's give families plots of land because we want you to

be more like us. Like here, like we're Americans, we like to own our own little small pieces of land, and we find that that's pretty awesome. So this is how you should do it too. So here's little pieces of land for each of your families. And a lot of it wasn't great land. A lot of it couldn't be farmed or they're not from there. So they didn't know how to farm that land. They were further displaced. And then finally in 1934, there was the Indian Reorganization Act as part of the Indian New Deal. They reversed that policy and said,

all right, here's some funds. You can repurchase some of your original tribal lands, but this started the termination era of the 1950s and 60s when they said, but you should really move to cities. Why don't you just assimilate with everyone and be a lot easier if you moved into urban areas? The termination policies referred to termination of tribes. The federal government stopped recognizing tribes, up reservations and it was a concerted effort to just get rid of Native American tribes in the United States and

make everybody assimilate into cities like you said. And that's one reason why the Native American movement, the American Indian movement, AIM developed alongside the civil rights movement. As a response to that and saying, like, no, you're not going to terminate our tribe. developed alongside the civil rights movement. As a response to that and saying, look, no, you're not gonna terminate our tribe and they were largely successful. And finally, in 1975, thanks in large part to AIM and other activists in the Native American community,

the Indian Self Determination and Education Act said, okay, we're not doing termination anymore. We're officially going to keep recognizing tribes. We're going to support reservations. And like, that is that. That's right. I think that's a robust intro. I think so too. You want to take a break then?

Yeah, let's take a break. That kind of brings this up to the modern system and we'll get back into that right up to this. Okay. the modern system and we'll get back into that right up to this. I find it interesting that every time we study this stuff, it seems like there were just periods from the beginning where every so often someone else would come into a new president or a new administration, someone would come into power, and it was always like, oh, Jesus, like what do we do with the Indians now? Right. And they would just change policies.

And let's not do that, let's do this. So not only had they been displaced to begin with, but then it was just a series of like shuffling around and moving and consolidation. And now we wanna do this with you and that with you. And the whole time, just like, man, we were here first. Yeah, for sure. And all that whiplash going on, you know, back and forth between.

Totally. Termination and reservations. That took place over like the course of less than a century. Yeah. You can't imagine that. That means that there are people who lived almost entirely through that. You know, that's crazy. You can't treat people that way.

No, and it's just, it's amazing to think about the fact that like if someone tried to, not calling out any particular politicians, but if they thought about their family, all of a sudden being told, well, you have to leave and we're going to tell you where to go and we're going to make it the hard for you to get by and a place that you're not familiar with, maybe next year, enemy that you've always had. It's hard for someone to imagine that happening, and that's exactly what happened.

But that's precisely why the United States has tucked Native Americans away on reservations and forgotten them because they don't, we don't wanna imagine that happening to our families. We can imagine that happening to our families. We can't imagine that happening to our families. And so the brain goes, well, it didn't happen to your family, so you can stop thinking about that now. Yeah, and let's not even teach that in school,

so let's just not do that. Let's just say it's a lie. I know. Oh, boy. All right. I need to bring my blood temperature down, so I'm doing a little mental stretch right now. Drink some ice water.

That works. I've got some right here under today's system And we're gonna go through a lot of sort of static things right now As we tell this sort of early story But there are 325 tracks of land that the US government now holds in trusts Some are called reservations some are called villages some remissions some are Pueblos. Rancherias? Yeah, Rancherias in California, which sounds kind of nice, but it sounds like a top-of-belt menu item. The totally nice.

The largest is the today is the Navajo Nation. It's about 27,000 square miles. I think the smallest is one of those rancherias. It's called the likely rancheria in California. It's in the upper, upper tippy top, northeast corner of California. And it is 1.32 acres. And there are also some state, some land held by state trust.

There are also reservations, but generally this is a federal government thing. That trust thing is a big point. These reservations, the land that the Native American tribes live on that belongs to them, that's their sovereign land. That land is held in trust by the US federal government for them. That seems pretty precarious if you think about it. But the reason that that is held in trust is because if it weren't held in trust

by the US government and was just owned by the Native American tribes that lived there, then it would be subject to the laws and the taxes of the state that that reservation is in. So by removing that land from ownership and putting it with the federal government for the benefit of those sovereign tribes, it cuts that out entirely.

Yeah, very thought out unsurprisingly. Yeah, and ideally on paper, it's not supposed to be a paternalistic arrangement. It's supposed to be a fiduciary arrangement where like the US government has a very important responsibility to take care of that land and meet its obligations and taking care of the people on the reservation. They just don't do it typically. That's right.

Not every tribe has their own reservation. Sometimes they share a reservation. Some of the larger tribes may have more than one. If they're a little more spread out. This is something I actually didn't know until yesterday is that non-native people can live on reservations. And some of them are majority non-native. And I never knew that. I knew

that you could pass through and do your thing and a lot of them are, you know, have businesses and like you said, casinos and much more as we'll see in the state of Florida. But I did not know that you could just live there and there is in fact one in upstate New York where I believe this is the O'Nighta Indian nation and they have about 500 American Indians living there and about 60,000 total residents. So very few Native Americans and mostly not. Yeah, and the O'Nighta tribe is one of the largest, if not the largest employer of upstate New York, thanks to their turning stone resort and casino and

Verona in New York. And they're actually one of the success stories of a Native American tribe becoming self-sufficient and actually wealthy in a lot of cases. Yeah. We mentioned Oklahoma a lot and that's because about half of the land in Oklahoma, legally speaking, is reservation land. And California, we mentioned those rancherias that you can get on special at Taco Bell.

Sure. What's in the mouth of the surprise? Simbur. That's right. These are usually, I mean, that's why they call them rancherias. They're usually really small, like the one we talked about, the likely rancheria.

They were created because California did the California thing and created these in the 20th century when after those genocidal campaigns worked out to the ones that were left over and they're like, listen, we gotta give you some land, I guess. Right. And if you're starting to notice there's a pattern that this is all kind of patternless,

you're correct. There's not one reservation system that the federal government administers that kind of have developed on their own, ideally to meet local needs or kind of jive with the tribe's culture. An example of that is in Alaska. Yeah, very unique. There's 279 federally recognized tribes. By my count, more than half of the federally recognized tribes in the United States

All live in Alaska, but there's only one reservation that they all share and so rather than living in a kind of a paternalistic relationship with the United States on a reservation Instead all of those Alaska natives get, I guess dividends. Well, if you enroll, which most of them have. Right. From the mineral rights in Alaska and other resource rights.

So when you extract something in Alaska and you cut down a tree, when you remove a fish, I believe, you are contributing to that fund that benefits those 279 tribes. Yeah. And Hawaii, I think, has a similar system, right? I guess, but they don't have any reservations at all. Right.

Yeah. So, you mentioned that they are recognized as sovereign nations. That was in the constitution from the beginning. And that basically says, you know, we can engage with you like a foreign country if we want to. Chief Justice John Marshall in 1831, and a pretty landmark case for everything that followed, wrote that tribes possess a nationhood status and retain inherent powers of self-government, but they are domestic dependent nations that are award to his guardian,

which is, it's all a little confusing if you just sort of read the words. That's a big butt. Yeah. Yeah, you're a sovereign nation, but you're also dependent on us essentially. Right. Yeah, that just opens up the gate for all sorts of weird interpretations and misinterpretations and all sorts of stuff. And as a result, that's kind of what goes on.

Yeah, I think it's sort of like a patchwork of, because it works different. You can't summarize like all reservations are blank. It's kind of like a patchwork, because in reservoir dogs, one of my favorite characters is... Reservation dogs. What do I say? He said reservoir dogs. It's understandable.

No one cuts any ears off in reservation dogs. That is what it is named for, obviously. And I think in the pilot, they sort of mimic that great opening shot of Reservoir Dogs, the sort of slow-mo walk. But on Reservation Dogs, one of my favorite characters, although it's hard to say because I love them all, but is the sheriff, the actor is on McLaren, and he's just great in hysterical. And he's the local sheriff, and at the rest rest is they call it he's very just sort of Loki and doesn't want to arrest anyone and is usually like I'd rather just take someone home

Who's disturbing the peace and and tuck them into bed then you know calls any real trouble But that kind of got me thinking about the modern system and It's really kind of patchwork, but It all depends some tribes have their own courts. If they don't, then there are five regional courts of Indian offenses that kind of gather up what tribes don't have their own courts and serve them, right? Yeah. And they also very frequently operate their own law enforcement agencies, although they also

may have Bureau of Indian Affairs, police agencies, patrolling as well. Sometimes it can be a combination of the two. In Alaska, they have the Village Public Safety Officer Program. So there is, like they have their own court system, they have their own law enforcement, they also have their own school districts there as well. Again, they can be administered by the Bureau of Indian Education or they can be run themselves like a charter school, would be or a private school, would be, but these are often public schools in the reservation. And they also have boarding schools still. Yeah, that needs to be a whole episode. I think that would kind of be a nice way to finish this trio.

Definitely. So, so, I mean, the boarding schools that kids go to today are sometimes the same boarding schools that treated the younger Native Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, like just, like, they were disposable and often killed them. And did- A lot of abuse. Yeah, did everything they could to beat the Native American out of them and just remove them from their tribe and sometimes they never saw their family again. Yeah. Those still exist.

They're not doing stuff like that anymore. And in fact, they're trying to figure out how to kind of make amends. And in one way that they're making amends, as we'll see, is there's a big revitalization of Native American culture, specific tribal cultures around the United States right now. And it's being taught on the reservations in schools. It's also being taught in the boarding schools. It's the exact opposite of what the United States has been trying to do since the 19th century. Reinstilling Native American culture into the tribes that had had that culture stripped and beaten and killed out of them

for a century. Now it's like, hey, let's teach you about your culture that you would have already known about. Had we not made you go to this compulsory boarding school and teach you to forget, it just break that lineage of cultural transmission, now it's like, let's give that back to you. Let's make sure you know what you're talking about. And then they'll bring in elders of the tribe to teach it because there are some people who didn't go to

the boring schools typically they might have been hidden. And those people are fonds, incredibly valuable reservoirs of the cultural information. When those people die, if they haven't passed down what they know, that information dies with them. And the culture dies in that way, slowly but surely. So there's a big push among Native American schools to prevent that from happening. Yeah. Especially, I mean, the culture as a whole whole for sure, but especially with efforts for saving

and preserving the languages, these native tongues. One good example is the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, 2000 or fewer fluent speakers left, and most of them are older. They're losing about 150 native speakers a year. And what they're trying to do, they have what's called the Durban Feeling Language Center, named after the sky, Durban Feeling, who wrote the Cherokee English dictionary among other things. He put symbols of the Cherokee language into unicode so they could be used on smartphones.

And he was kind of the, he might be worth a shorty, the very least, doing one on Durban feeling. He really led the charge and was sort of, sort of probably the leading person in history as far as preserving at least the Cherokee language. But they have a 52,000 square foot building at the language center there, where they're, you know, they're doing everything they can.

Their goal is to basically within the decade to gain more speakers than the elders that know the language are dying off and again the reason why they're so gung ho about doing this is because it that as the language dies the culture dies because uh... there are a lot of native american languages that weren't written they were all oral. So not only do they have to make sure that that oral tradition gets passed down, they

then have to figure out how to turn it into something text-based as well. So it's a huge challenge. And finally, the United States government has started to kind of show some signs of trying to help out. I mean, it's not very much if you think about it, but in 2022, the US government donated $7 million in grants to 45 different tribes to support their preservation of their language. So there's a movement for that for sure. And it has this sense that they're racing against the clock, which they pretty much are, the biological clock.

Yeah. And if I may hear for a minute, we try not to get super overtly political, but there's really been a tale of two really three administrations over the last 15-ish years with the Obama administrations, then the Trump administration and now the Biden administration. Of course, in 2022, like you said, the $7 million that's under the Biden administration. They also delivered $21 million for road safety on tribal lands because a lot of these roads, they don't have like street lines and rumble strips and the little reflective signs and reflective markers on the roads, just sort of basic infrastructure things that keep driving safer. Right. And that's the main roads. Don't even get started on the, like, side streets.

Yeah, absolutely. Also $135 million to help relocate tribes affected by climate change. And also, Deb Hallen, the first Native American to ever serve as Secretary of Interior is the current Secretary of Interior. Donald Trump, on the other hand, he delivered, well, he likes to say he delivered $3 million in 2020 for a language in 1.2 million for broadband grants, but those were an actuality pushed through by Senate and House Democrats.

But Trump failed to reestablish Obama's Council on Native American Affairs, which ran for the eight years Obama's in office until his final year in office because people kept saying like, why aren't you doing this over and over? He never held a White House tribal leaders conference at the White House, which you had for eight years under Obama. And just after COVID, a couple of things happened. He pushed to exclude reservations from the CARES Act in the wake of COVID. And he de-established the WANAPOG reservation outright, which is the first time that's happened

since the termination era. And like not only that, he removed, just kind of plowed through sacred burial sites to build that wall. And when people were protesting that wall in the sacred burial lands, they used, you know, people in there with rubber bullets to fire on them on indigenous peoples day of all days no way now so they're not big fans you can look up

for yourself if you think i'm being too political you can just look up donald trump's administration native american peoples and they are not big fans of what happened during this four year ago it does yeah but also i've seen they're not necessarily fans of any political party because neither one is paying enough attention to their obligations to help people on the reservation make better lives for themselves. Yeah, absolutely. So I say we take a break.

OK. And then the people who are still with us can come back and we'll talk some more about reservation life today. And then the people who are still with us can come back and we'll talk about a few different examples of reservations in the United States today because just between the Navajo Nation, the Ogla-la-Su Nation and the Seminole, you got just a really distinct contrast between those three. Big spectrum.

You said that the Navajo was the largest of all of the reservations, right? Yeah, I think, did you say it's larger than Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island put together? No, but you just did, my friend. So the Navajo, they're all... That's quite a step.

Yeah. They're also the Dene. They're land, their reservation spans Utah, Arizona, and into Mexico. Yeah. If you look at their reservation on a map, it is... I mean, I know you said all the states combine, but just check out a map sometime. It's quite, quite large. Yes.

And there's been an ongoing dispute with them in the hope he uh... over whose land is who's and i think that that they have it relatively settled geographically but culturally it's still not very settled uh... but the the navajo there also the largest um... tribe in the united states they have 400,000 enrolled members, 170,000 of which live on the reservation. And what makes them really unusual is that they were removed

along with just about every other tribe in the United States as America was expanding. And within four years, they managed to negotiate a treaty to get that land back and move back to their ancestral lands. That's really rare among Native American tribes. Their reservations very frequently are not their ancestral lands. They're just land that they were given 100 years ago by the US government in an entirely different part of the country. Yeah, they said, you know, you can build your railroad through here. If you're settling and your wagon train is coming through here, you can pass through. We'll let you pass through. We will accept the schooling, which I think probably at the time sounded like a good

deal, even though it ended up being that boarding school, that shameful boarding school situation. and they'll end up being that boarding school, that shameful boarding school situation. And I know, by the way, we've gotten a lot of, I know what you're from some Canadians. Canada has their own shameful background with the same kind of thing and we've gotten a lot of emails from them over the years to cover that.

So maybe when we do that, when we can tackle them both. Yeah. So the Navajo have lived back on that land since 1868. And what they formed essentially is a large government. There's 24 districts in this huge, huge reservation. And they have delegates at this legislative council. There's an executive, a president that runs the executive branch.

They have their own court system with 11 districts. And their largest city, tuba city, is home to 9,000 people, which is pretty enormous. The problem is where it starts to kind of get reservation-y, at least standard or average is that 36% of those households in the entire Navajo nation are below federal poverty level and about the same amount have no running water. None. And the reason why Donald Trump, the great father, made such a big deal about getting broadband access as part of the package he delivered to the Native Americans himself is he signed. Yeah. Is that internet access is really patchy at absolute best on a lot of reservations. And if you don't have the internet today, you might as well not bother sending your kids to school to in a very hyperbolic sense. Yeah. You know Elon Musk should swoop in there and send a bunch of those starlink dishes.

For sure. Uh, gratis, just say, well, here you go. I'll do my part. Yeah. Not a bad idea. He's launching those satellites all over the place. Yeah. Hoping you crane.

Yeah. For a service that isn't even that good. What else? Well, we're talking about the spectrum. So I guess we go from one end to the other end, and then we'll talk about the other farthest end at the end. Is that confusing enough? Yes, dude. And I even know you're talking about. I know. The Pine Ridge Reservation is the largest Lakota reservation and that's who you're speaking of earlier when you were talking about the Oglala Sutraib who governs them.

And it's about 4,000 square miles in South Dakota. And again, the census is probably really wrong. They listed as 19,000 people, but most people say it's probably more like mid-30s or so. And it is, well, first of all, they were one of the people that were squeezed out of their original land. It's not their original land. They were nomadic people. And they, where they are now, it was originally your prison of war camp in 1889. And where Wounded Knee took place, the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. Yeah, a lot of things happened on Pine Ridge. It's actually

been really culturally relevant for a long time starting with wounded knee for sure. That was where 150, I think largely old people, women and children were massacred by the US government for not living where they were told. Yeah, it's a very symbolic place kind of for those reasons. That's where they protested in the early 70s with the sort of earliest American Indian movement. And that's where, remember the 2015 Dakota Access Pipeline, standing rock, that's where they protested there. But we talk about Pine Ridge being the other end of the spectrum,

because if you want to talk about poor that is sort of the uh... the place to to focus on it is uh... very poor they have an infant mortality rate five times five times the national average infant mortality rate which is just horrifying that that's allowed to happen in this country uh... the unemployment rate is eighty percent that's not eighty to in this country. The unemployment rate is 80%. That's not 80 to 90 on Al Jazeera.

I mean, yeah, if you have 10 to 15% of your people working, like that's just poverty stricken. They live in trailers, they live in Shacks. Many of them have no running water or electricity. And it's not a hospitable place for either a growing thing or for an industry to come in and set something up and maybe share profits. They have a little casino that doesn't generate a lot of revenue.

And it's just not a very great scene there. Yeah, I saw that the casino, if it divvied up, it's profits, it's revenue among the members of the tribe living on the reservation. They'd each get something like 15 cents a month. And poverty's tricking just does not even begin to get it across. Saw, there's a site called the Red Road Project. It's like Native American voices kind of articles.

It's really interesting. They said that on Pine Ridge, the average number of people in a house is 17 because homelessness is a really, really big issue on reservations. So you kind of get in where you fit in which leads to huge amounts of overcrowding. And that includes the kids who are going to school the next day. Because the employment is so low, Again, 80% to 90% unemployment. People typically turn to diversions of despair, basically. Drugs, alcohol, crime, and there's a town that I read about in that Al-Dezira article called White Clay Nebraska. It's just across the line from the Pine Ridge reservation. And they sell something on the average of 12,000 cans of beer a day to the

Lakota who come across from the dry reservation by the beer and take it back. And the big kicker is that White Clay is not an actual town. It's a town on paper only. There's one street and it's all shops basically, and those shops all sell beer to the Lakota Sioux. And I saw it described by one activist as liquid genocide that's been going on a really long time. And so when you add all the stuff together, the life expectancy on Pine Ridge. Are you ready for this? No. 48 years for men.

52 for women. It's the second lowest, not in the country, in the Western Hemisphere. The only country that has a lower life expectancy is Haiti. This is Pine Ridge in the United States. Is that does that include the infant mortality rate? Yeah, I'm sure it does. It's dragging it down big time for sure. Regardless, I mean, like 48 and 52 is just appalling. And again, the reason you might be like, I don't care about welfare, welfare sucks. These people should be figuring out themselves. And a lot of them do.

A lot of people make it off the reservation, go get it at college education. A lot of them come back and share that college education. A lot of people get killed. There's, I think, the rate of suicide is four or five times the national rate. So the problem with that argument is that these are the descendants of the people who are stripped of their culture, stripped of their ability to support themselves. And their only choice is to go be white, go assimilate into white culture, or stay on this reservation and hold onto your culture, be one of the last bastions of your culture and just pay every day for that

with joblessness, with despair, and rely on the United States government to take care of you, but then don't expect things like running water, internet, good schools, law enforcement that's gonna take care of drug problems, new job prospects, like that stuff, it's just not delivered. And so as a result, we have a group of people who have the life expectancy, second only

to Haiti, here in the United States. Yeah. So that's sort of the worst end of the spectrum. Now to a tribe that is actually thriving these days, the Seminole people who in the 1850s after a bunch of warring were forced west of the Mississippi, kind of like everyone else, but I saw about 300 hit away in Florida and the swamps of Florida and hit there for a while and eventually sort of

showed their faces to society in the late 19th and early of 20th century. In the 1950s, they adopted their own constitution and gained recognition as a seminal tribe of Florida. They are thriving in a big, big way in South Florida, largely because of business, and largely because of the casino business, the Seminole Classic Casino and Hollywood, Florida. They opened the hard rock casino down there in Hollywood. I saw the Rolling Stones there a few years ago.

Yeah, it's a big time. It's shaped like a guitar. It is. Yeah, that stands up from the hotel like a guitar and just a little insider thing. If you ever wanna see what could be a stadium act in a comparatively small venue, that's where you should go. It was a really good experience.

And I don't know how many people it is, but I feel like it's about the size of the Fox Theater and Atlanta, whereas they were playing stadiums and then all of a sudden it's maybe like 5,000 people or so. So it's intimate by that standard. And I had a great time and I always keep that on my list now to check out because it was a fun trip down there. And the seminal tribe is making a lot of money. They have about 2,000 and this is one reason why is because they only started out as a few hundred. There are only a couple of thousand now, and they are splitting

up that dough in a big, big way, right? Did you know that the Seminole tribe of Florida, we have to differentiate because there's a Seminole tribe of Oklahoma that were the ones that moved out there. The ones that stayed the Seminole Tribe of Florida, own hard rock, everything. They own the brand, they bought the brand in 2006 for 900 years. I know about the whole brand. The whole brand. I didn't know that.

Or wearing a hard rock cafe shirt that's owned by the Seminole Tribe of Florida. They own the hard rock franchise. You know where the very first hard rock was? Tribute question. I'm gonna say, San Francisco or London? No. And the only reason I know this is because of my family, it is and I believe it was in Jackson, Mississippi. What? Yeah. Wow. That is a great trivia question. You can even do multiple choice and I don't think a lot of people would get that

Yeah, that's right because I was like I'm gonna get in big trouble here if this is wrong But the first hard rock was at the old hickory mall In Jackson, Mississippi Did and my uncle had something to do with it somehow That's how I know about it. Oh, is this last name hard rock? No.

Uncle, well, I think he sounds like a Flintstone always. Oh no, I'm sorry, Jackson Tennessee, which is even better because that's where my dad lived. Oh, that's good. You can put down your... I thought it was Jackson, Mississippi. You can put down your sharpened sticks, Jackson, Tennessee. Chuck came through.

You're my people, my dad is a Jungian University graduate. So with all that money that they're making, among the 2000 tribe members, they divvy up enough that each person gets $128,000 a year. That includes babies. The babies money is held in trust. so by the time they turn eighteen there there were a couple the three million dollars already

unbelievable this is a native american tribe and one of the reasons why uh... uh... uh... big big reason why in addition to citrus groves cigarette making and selling uh... is the casino. They were the first ones to have a casino. They were the first ones to try it. The state tried to shut it down. They sued the state.

They won. And from that point on, Native American casinos starting in the 70s were a thing. And it made the seminal rich. It made the O'Nighter rich. It made a bunch of different tribes rich. And I say, good going. Totally. Yeah.

I have a bunch into Mark Marin at that Rolling Stone show and he acted like he didn't know me like he always does. Really? Oh yeah. It's funny every time it happens. That's hilarious. So I say that's reservations. What do you say?

Yeah. I got one more quick thing that we failed to mention as earlier when i was talking about different uh... policies of different administrations uh... native americans that live on reservations can vote in federal elections of course uh... but it bears pointing out uh... because only sixty something percent of the eligible native american population is registered to vote and there's a push call the The million vote opportunity where they are trying there's over a million eligible Native American voters who do not vote and who are

Not registered and they're trying to get them registered and It's a good call us to support you can go to Native voter impact or vote.narf.org and check it out. Maybe throw a little dough their way and see if we can get them registered to vote so they can try and speak up for themselves and ensure they're right.

That's awesome. Nice work, Chuck. Nice work, Josh. And nice work to you guys for hearing us out. If you want to know more about Native American reservations in the United States, you can start reading about it. A good place to start would be the Red Road Project, I say. And since I mentioned the Red Road Project again, I think that's time for a listener mail.

I'm going to call this. This is from our diary episode. You have to start it with Dear Diary. Dear Diary. Yes. Thank you. Just listen to the Dear Diary podcast, and I love that you guys mentioned that women have a large part in the history of diary writing.

So I want to put another female diarist on your radar. One of my favorite historians is named Laurel Thetcher Ulrich, she of well-behaved women rarely make history fame. Often misattributed to less well-known women than her. The original context of that quote is related to Puritan, settlers of New England, and how women who live ordinary lives are often forgotten, even though they quietly make the world go round. Orish's most famous book, A Midwife's Tale, is about one of these women, Martha Ballard, a midwife who lived in what is now a Guest of Maine. Martha Ballard wrote in a diary almost every single day from the time she moved to a Guest of Maine in 1785 until she died in 1812, and her diary chronicles the life of women

and men in front to America, along with the inner thoughts of an ordinary and relatable person. Martha's ordinary life lifts me up, even though she was a very average person, because it shows her working and living like people have always done. That's what is so awesome about Diaries. It humanizes the past and reminds us that people have always been and will always be just people. Thanks for highlighting Diaries and for trying to bring different perspectives. Always do the podcast, the episode inspired me to be more consistent and chronically my own ordinary life. All good things. That's another great sight you take. Wow, we've been getting a lot of those lately.

So good. I mean, I don't even say anything. I just type my dumb name. I don't even do that. I'm like, figure it out yourself. That is from Casey McClellan and that's a great, great email, Casey. Way to go, Casey. Thank you for pointing our way to something new that we had not heard about. We love that kind of stuff. And if you want to hook us up like Casey did, you can send us an email too. Send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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