Why do native american reservations exist

While most Americans take running water, telephones, and electricity for granted, many reservation families live without these amenities. On a seriously stretched budget, utilities are viewed as luxuries compared to food and transportation. Overcrowding, substandard dwellings, and lack of utilities all increase the potential for health risk, especially in rural and remote areas where there is a lack of accessible healthcare.

Due to underfunding, Indian Health Service facilities are crisis-driven and leave a wide gap in adequate and preventative health care for many Native Americans on the reservations. Pharmacies and doctor's offices outside of hospitals are completely non-existent in some communities. The pressures to shift from a traditional way of life toward a Western lifestyle has dramatically impacted the health and welfare of the Native peoples and created a terrible epidemic of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, tuberculosis, and cancer.

The statistics are alarming. Cancer rates and disparities related to cancer treatment are higher than for other Americans , Native People for Cancer Control. The facts presented are important realities about the living conditions faced by many Native Americans in this country — facts that every non-Native American needs to know.

How can I help? We resist it. But Yellowtail believes that the situation is improving. He says there are more entrepreneurs than 20 years ago as networks of Native American business people have sprung up in Montana and elsewhere.

Then we have to make it okay to leave the reservation because the most successful are going to want to branch out. Entrepreneurs are going to have to stick their neck out, be a role model.

We Indians are going to have to do it. This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here. More From Forbes.

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However, there are still hundreds of tribes undergoing the lengthy and tedious process of applying for federal recognition. Tribal sovereignty describes the right of federally recognized tribes to govern themselves, their lands, and their people. It also includes the existence of a government-to-government relationship with the United States.

A tribe is not a ward of the government, but an independent nation with the right to form its own government, adjudicate legal cases within its borders, levy taxes within its borders, establish its membership, and decide its own future fate. The federal government has a trust responsibility to protect tribal lands, assets, resources and treaty rights.

In the US, there are only two kinds of reserved lands that are well-known—military and Indian. An Indian reservation is a land base that a tribe reserved for itself when it relinquished its other land areas to the US through treaties.

More recently, Congressional acts, executive orders, and administrative acts have created reservations. Today, some reservations include non-Indian residents and land owners. Not until were all Native Americans granted citizenship. Presently all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States are by law citizens.