For the last few weeks of the year, the Reckon Report will be taking a look at some overlooked and underserved communities in the United States. Native Americans are the second smallest racial group in the United States, the irony of which is extremely apparent to anyone who spends more than a few seconds thinking about it. In a country of over 333 million people as of July 2022, the population of Native Americans is smaller than the city of New York. The largest concentrations of Native Americans in the lower 48 are on reservations in the Midwest and Southwest. Reservations overall aren’t densely populated and owing to numerous broken or unenforced treaties with the federal government, tribal nations like the Oglala Sioux in South Dakota are left with few resources to provide for public health and safety matters. In fact, the tribe recently sued the U.S. government for the latter after it failed to uphold a requirement to support law enforcement on the reservation. Although the courts were partially on the side of the Oglala Sioux, relief has been slow to arrive, leading the tribe to declare a state of emergency due to a spiraling drug and crime crisis on the reservation. Despite being 2% of the population of South Dakota, citizens of the Oglala Sioux’s Pine Ridge Reservation account for 10% of missing persons cases in the state, according to ICT News. |
