Ive spent some time in Indian Country doing rock work. It was highly enlightening and I recommend it to everyone. It varies by tribe of course, but those reservations are...sick...in a way that's hard to comprehend without seeing it up close. About a third of Navajo, for example, live without electricity and bubonic plague is a problem among them due to prairie dog infestations. Part of this is due to the...frankly ridiculous...tribal reservation system which basically bans investment. The tribal land system makes ordinary private investment extremely difficult or impractical on most reservation land (because it cannot be readily foreclosed on or alienated, banks and investors will not treat it as normal collateral blocking standard mortgages, construction loans, and business financing.) Same is true with fractionalized ownership, which raises transaction costs to absurd levels by preventing typical inheritance to force interests be passed to all heirs as undivided fractional shares. Progressives also use the immense amount of federal control over these areas to "protect" the individuals living there from anything approaching opportunities. These are real, but fixable, problems. But itd take a decade for reforms to pay off and theyd be resisted by the folks theyd most help But a major factor is cultural...and the deep seated desire among the American Indian population to blame literally anything on "broken treaties." I personally observed somebody their blaming his own alcoholism and the fact that many young people left on the treaty system, while becoming riotusly angry at the thought of losing "his" land by enabling sale. The socially approved plague of being able to blame any and all problems on "the white man" is a cultural disaster in these communities. Its the least productive possible attitude to hold...and its quite common.