4

Drivers and Interventions of Intergenerational Poverty Among Native Americans

The third and final session of the workshop featured presentations and discussion on the drivers of intergenerational poverty among Native Americans and on interventions that could improve economic mobility. The session was designed to inform the committee on

• correlates and drivers of the perpetuation of poverty from childhood into adulthood among Native Americans in the United States, including structural factors contributing to intergenerational poverty;
• promising policies and programs, and their supporting evidence, to reduce the chances that Native American children will be poor as adults; and
• high-priority gaps in the research, concerning drivers of and interventions in intergenerational poverty among Native Americans, that need to be filled to help develop effective strategies to reduce intergenerational poverty in this population.

ROLE OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Matt Gregg (senior economist, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis) began with an overview of what is known about AIAN intergenerational mobility. He noted that only recently have researchers gained access to the administrative data that are necessary to directly measure mobility among this small population. One notable study (Akee et al., 2019) measured intragenerational mobility across multiple races by linking IRS income

records with self-identified data in Census Bureau records. This study found that AIAN incomes are 50 to 80 percent of White incomes across income quintiles, and that AIAN individuals exhibited less upward mobility and more downward mobility than Whites and Asians. A study that used similar data sources to examine intergenerational mobility (Chetty et al., 2018) found that AIAN children have low rates of upward mobility and high rates of downward mobility. Further, said Gregg, AIAN income distribution is close to a steady state, with incomes permanently lower than those of Whites. This means that temporary policy solutions—such as short-term cash transfers—will not shrink racial disparities in the long run. A key policy question that needs to be answered, he said, is why AIAN children have lower incomes, conditional on parental incomes, than White children. Unfortunately, he said, this is difficult to answer for several reasons: tribal enrollment data are not available in Census data, small sample sizes can obscure heterogeneity in intergenerational mobility (e.g., by gender), research results vary widely based on the racial definition used for AIAN, and administrative datasets do not include all individuals in a population (e.g., some Native Americans may not file taxes and thus are not represented in IRS data).

Drivers

There is a wide spectrum of socioeconomic outcomes across tribal communities, said Gregg. However, there are also a few high-level drivers of intergenerational poverty that are shared across most tribal communities. Gregg discussed three of these drivers. First, tribal members are “effectively shut out of access to housing wealth.” While tribal members on trust land can own homes, there are many hurdles to building wealth, including a long mortgage process that involves several government agencies, higher cost for mortgages for mobile homes, and a lack of banking services on reservations. The second driver of intergenerational poverty, said Gregg, is the historical undermining of tribal self-determination. For hundreds of years, the best lands and resources were taken away from tribal hands and tribal governments were suppressed. Since the 1970s, tribes have been able to exert sovereignty, but “they’re still getting their feet back under themselves” in some areas, for example in litigating contracts. The third high-level driver is a historic lack of public and private investment in reservation lands. For example, there is a significant lack of internet access on tribal lands; Gregg said that this digital divide impacts both private investment and the ability to retain tribal members.

Interventions

Stable and robust economies, Gregg said, have three legs: education, health care, and stable rule of law. Interventions in these areas have the potential to break the cycle of poverty; he noted that in Indian country, interventions need to be merged with traditional cultures. One key intervention would be to create a more stable rule of law on reservations to promote private investment and to retain tribal members. Creating economic development on reservations is critical, he said, and there is a large body of research showing that the creation of culturally specific tribal institutions can spur local development (e.g., Navajo Peacemaking Courts). Additionally, there is a need for tribes to have clear jurisdiction on criminal and civil matters; Gregg said that certainty in this area will help improve economic development. The other two legs of stable and robust economies—education and health care—are both treaty rights. In return for giving up land, tribes were guaranteed certain rights. The question, he said, is what should these rights look like in the 21st century? Some universities provide free tuition for members of federally recognized tribes in their own state; these universities include the University of Minnesota Morris, and the Montana and California university systems. The University of Maine also provides free room and board and waives fees for tribal members. “Is that enough?” asked Gregg, or should more be done? In the area of health care, many tribes have claimed greater sovereignty by signing 638 contracts¹ that allow them to provide health care themselves to better meet local needs. Gregg noted that this seems to be another form of self-determination that may lead to better economic outcomes for AIAN individuals and communities.

ROLE OF EDUCATION

“Increased educational attainment … without a deep transformation of education models perpetuates a problem and will continue to create the problems” associated with intergenerational poverty, said Megan Bang (professor, Northwestern University, and senior vice president, Spencer Foundation). Schooling has been a key tool in the assimilation of Native communities, and the source of many harms, she said, noting that in the United States there were 408 boarding schools that were aimed at “eradicating Indigenous intellectual, cultural, and linguistic forms of life.” These schools were funded by the wealth that was derived from territorial acquisition and land theft from Native people (Newland, 2022), and one goal of

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¹ For more information see https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/dup/assets/bia/ots/ots/pdf/Public_Law93-638.pdf

the schools was to further dispossess Native Americans of their land and to drive wealth away from them.

While many in the United States believe that these policies are in the distant past, said Bang, they are ever-present in Native communities today. Bang shared a picture of her son, who recently graduated from high school. He is the descendent of seven people who attended boarding schools, four of whom are still living, and he was the first male in the family to graduate from high school. He was not allowed to walk in his graduation ceremony unless he removed all cultural indicators, she said. The boarding school policies that stripped Native children of their culture, language, and clothing are still “very much alive.” When we talk about the history of education in Native communities, said Bang, the stories and experiences are still relevant and still impact people’s everyday lives.

Status of Native Students

Bang gave an overview of where and how Native students are educated today, focusing on the K–12 system. The Native American population is young, she said; 29 percent of Native people are under 18 years old. Bang noted that this statistic can vary, depending on how Native American people are counted. The huge majority of Native students—90 percent—attend public schools, and the majority do not go to tribally controlled schools or schools on the reservation. Bang presented data from the National Indian Education Study (Rampey et al., 2021), which looked at AIAN students in three different school types: low-density public schools (few AIAN students), high-density public schools (at least 25% of students are AIAN), and schools run by tribes or in partnership with the Bureau of Indian Education (Figure 4-1). Among all school types, the reading and math scores of AIAN students are consistently lower than the scores of White students, and look similar to the scores of Black and Hispanic students. Over the past 15 years, scores of AIAN students in public schools have remained relatively flat or decreased, whereas during the same period the scores of those attending schools operated by tribes have increased in both reading and math. Bang said that “where education self-determination and tribal sovereignty is most likely to be exercised, we do see educational improvement.”

Educational Principles

Bang introduced workshop participants to several high-level principles from the science of learning and development (National Academies, 2018) and discussed how they apply to Native American students. First, she said, it is clear that cultural practices and identity are intertwined with disciplinary learning. Having a strong racial and cultural identity is

associated with higher academic performance, and many students experience conflicts between their ethnic and academic identities. Second, engaging prior knowledge is critically important in building new knowledge, and also impacts knowledge organization and memory. Third, the learning, identity, and well-being of learners improves when culturally responsive

instruction and instructional materials are utilized. Finally, teachers’ and schools’ stances on equity impact instruction.

These four principles have a great deal of relevance for Native students, said Bang, and unfortunately schools today are the “main drivers of Indigenous absence in peoples’ knowledge,” which enables systemic racism and presents challenges for Native people. An analysis of educational standards in the United States (Shear et al., 2015) found that only 50 percent of states require teaching about Indigenous peoples, and 87 percent of those standards dictate the teaching of Indigenous peoples in the context of pre1900 U.S. history. A survey of teachers (Rampey et al., 2021) found that 52 percent of 4th grade language arts teachers have never or only once per year mentioned Native people; for 8th grade language arts teachers, this rises to 73 percent. The numbers are even worse for mathematics teachers, said Bang.

This means, said Bang, that we live in a society that knows very little about Native people, and what is known is largely a historicized image. This has implications for Native students; Indigenous youth face mental health challenges at a significantly higher rate than other youth, and one of the key issues is related to being able to imagine a present and future self (Elliot-Groves & Fryberg, 2018). The erasure of Native people from educational curricula is often seen as an issue only for Native Americans, said Bang, but there are broader consequences as well. It is imperative that all Americans know about Native people, because this history is the “very foundation of the legitimacy of the United States.” In discussions of equity, Native Americans tend to be “lumped in” with other racialized minorities, said Bang, but it is critical to recognize their distinct political and legal status. She said that education that does not distinguish between Native Americans and other groups can exacerbate discrimination and ignorance. Bang said that she is encouraged by the White House’s recent commitment to elevate Indigenous knowledge in federal policy decisions; this move is a recognition that Indigenous people have knowledge systems and ways of knowing that are important for all people to learn about and understand.

In closing, Bang urged the committee to consider four areas in which action is needed to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. First, there is a need to transform the understanding of educational paradigms and relationships to U.S. wealth and economic development with respect to Native peoples. Second, schooling experiences need to be grounded in and contribute to the revitalization of Indigenous peoples and their knowledge, culture, and language. Bang noted that investments in curricular materials and teacher education will be needed to accomplish that goal. Third, there is a need for policies that take seriously the historical trauma that has been systematically inflicted and that support the cultivation of well-being for these communities and individuals. Finally, she said,

there is a need to transform the relationships between schools, families, and communities.

ROLE OF DATA

Many speakers at the workshop have talked about the challenges involved in studying mobility among Native Americans, said Beth Redbird (assistant professor, Northwestern University). These challenges include small sample size and the omission of Native people from national survey instruments. However, said Redbird, the solution is not to fix these issues and create more data on this population. Rather, the answer is data sovereignty.

Before elaborating on data sovereignty, Redbird discussed some of the data challenges. One of the biggest challenges, she said, is defining “Native.” There is a difference between tribal enrollment, racial identification, and living in the service area of tribal programs, and the results of a study could vary significantly depending on which definitions are used. Redbird said that the current federal definition undercounts Indians who have stronger tribal attachments, which also happens to be the group least well served by federal policies. In addition, there is no sampling frame for Indian country; that is, there is no framework for creating nationally representative data on Native people. As a result of these issues, said Redbird, Indians are systematically undercounted by as much as 10 to 15 percent. Undercounting is not just a problem of bad data, but also leads to chronic underfunding and chronic under-allocation of resources.

Another challenge, said Redbird, is that the ways things are measured are often irrelevant to the economic mobility of Native American populations, due to complicated economic and legal structures and extra layers of government. For example, surveys on inequality do not generally capture information about communal property ownership or per-capita payments, both of which can be important sources of economic well-being in tribal communities. Similarly, home ownership is well understood as a factor that is important to economic mobility, but home ownership can be difficult to measure due to historical programs such as allotment, which created home plots that are now owned by thousands of people. Program uptake in Native communities can also be difficult to measure, because programs are often implemented differently than in non-Native communities. For example, non-Native communities have food stamps and school lunches as programs to address hunger, whereas Native communities may have food programs that take a very different form or are combined with traditional cultural practices. Redbird noted that “we don’t actually know what’s out there, so we don’t even know what to ask” when trying to evaluate programs.

However, the most important consideration related to data collection, said Redbird, is that “Natives are already the most surveilled population in the United States.” Further, this surveillance is nearly always detrimental for the population. Redbird compared collecting data in Indian country to “waltzing into a prison” to collect data, but noted that prisoners have constitutional rights, while Indians do not. She explained that the citizenship of Native Americans is statutory and subject to the good will of the federal government. Collecting data on the Native American population comes with the potential for significant harm; Redbird said that tribes must be the ones to mitigate the harm by being involved in the ethical collection of data. In Indian country, tribes are the best source of information about what works and what does not work. There are 500 separate governments that are engaged in innovative programs and practices, and they need access to better data to engage in more planning. Before considering ways to improve data on Native American populations, said Redbird, it is imperative to ensure that efforts are conducted in collaboration and partnership with tribes, and that data sovereignty guides all aspects of data collection.

ROLE OF HEALTH AND WELL-BEING

A healthy population translates into a productive, stable, and secure tribal nation, said Karina Walters (professor, University of Washington). The productive growth of tribal economies is tied to the overall physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional health of the people; however, this reciprocity between health and economic development has not generally been thoughtfully dealt with in Indian country.

There is a fair amount of research on the structural and social determinants of health in Indian country, said Walters, but it is not sufficient to focus only on this perspective. It is critical to also acknowledge and address issues such as White settler colonialism and historically traumatic events and how these issues impact the health and well-being of today’s Native Americans. As an example, Walters shared her experience working to reduce obesity in her tribe, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Obesity and comorbidities are a big issue, with one in three tribal youth projected to be living with type II diabetes by 2050, said Walters. One elder told Walters that it seemed as though grandparents would start outliving their grandchildren. The tribe has “thrown millions of dollars doing all of the right things” at the problem of obesity, she said. Infrastructure improvements have included better roads, walking paths, gyms, greenhouses, and better food. Initiatives addressed individual behavioral health, offering nutrition and diet information and programming. However, despite these efforts, obesity levels were reduced by only about three percent.

Walters said that when talking with elders and community members about why these efforts were not successful, there were two main messages. First, people highlighted the importance of building health promotion programs based on Indigenous world views and knowledge. Walters noted that hundreds of tribal communities are already doing this, sometimes without any federal support. Second, she said, “people talked about a grief that just stayed present.” Historically traumatic events and settler colonialism are still impacting the community, but these historical determinants are often left out of conversations about health or economic promotion. Walters explained that settler colonialism is a term for structures and policies that facilitate Native land dispossession and the erasure of Native people. These policies come in different forms, including genocidal policies (destruction of the people), ethnocidal policies (destruction of life, ways, and cultures), and epistemicidal policies (destruction of a way of thinking).

These policies have stretched throughout history, and continue to impact communities today, said Walters. For example, genocidal policies included colonial laws from the 1600s that encouraged the scalping, raping, and enslavement of Native people, and the Indian Adoption Project of the 1960s and 1970s. The Indian Adoption Project, said Walter, was administered by the Child Welfare League of America and funded by a federal contract with BIA and the U.S. Children’s Bureau; its goal was to stimulate the adoption of homeless American Indian children by Caucasian families. However, she said, “homeless” was very loosely defined and many children were removed from their families and communities. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 put protections in place to prevent Native children from being removed from Indian homes, and the Child Welfare League formally apologized for its role in 2001. The boarding schools that were instituted in the late-1800s and 1900s are a prime example of ethnocidal policies, as they sought to separate Indian children from their languages, cultures, and traditions. Late-1800s-era laws that outlawed Indian religions and languages were epistemicidal policies, that is, an attempt to systematically destroy ways of thought.

Walters said that she and her colleagues have found that historical trauma across multiple generations is associated with present-day elevated rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, greater alcohol-related problems, and greater likelihood of drug use. Land-based historically traumatic events across generations also account for variance in mental health outcomes, she said. These findings on the impact of intergenerational trauma are aligned with studies on epigenetics that have found a relationship between in utero conditions (e.g., famine) and later health outcomes. These relationships highlight the need to address historical determinants in current policies, said Walters, and to develop linkages between trauma, health, and the stability of tribal nations.

DISCUSSION

Following the presentations, Stephanie Fryberg, a member of the National Academies Committee on Policies and Programs to Reduce Intergenerational Poverty, moderated a question-and-answer session with the panelists, taking questions from committee members and the audience.

The workshop has presented two fundamentally different approaches to solving problems: the first, removing barriers and allowing tribes to be less constrained in their approach to development, and the second, leveraging outside resources to implement changes. What is the level of on-the-ground support for these different approaches?

The first approach is probably the one with the most support from tribes, said Redbird. Tribes know their people, their lands, and their hurdles best. In addition, the tribal population is diverse and complicated, so one-size-fits-all programs often fail in Indian country. This is the “great part about tribes,” said Redbird; there are over 500 tribal nations addressing issues in different ways. Identifying and understanding their solutions could help us address problems in the nation and the world. The allocation of resources and removal of barriers would be one of the best and most effective ways to address the issue, Redbird concluded.

From the education perspective, said Bang, removing barriers would require building a self-determining educational system across Indian country. Currently, the K–12 system is not under tribal control. To remove barriers so that communities can build their own wealth, an educational infrastructure across all tribal communities is needed. This would have massive implications around trust responsibilities and treaty rights, she said. Gregg added that revisiting the trust relationship between the tribes and the federal government is a critical piece of facilitating tribally controlled economic development.

What are the different approaches to property ownership for Native Americans? What are the challenges to home ownership, and are there specific barriers for urban Native Americans versus those who live on reservations?

Surveys of tribal members in South Dakota and North Dakota have found that there is a great demand for private, western-style home ownership, said Gregg. One of the key barriers is the difficulty getting mortgages due to the way trust land is treated by banks. The federal government has created some programs to address the issue of home ownership, but they have not really penetrated Indian country, he said. For example, there is

a Department of Housing and Urban Development section 184 program that is focused on tribal members, but many of the loans go to American Indians who are living on non-trust land because it is less complicated to issue a mortgage. Recently, said Gregg, there have been pilot programs in which Native community development financial institutions issue mortgages through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Home Loans program (also known as Section 502). There have only been a small number of loans issued, but this program is an opportunity to use a more tribal-specific model to understand the risks that are associated with lending to tribal home owners.

Walters added that safe and adequate housing is essential for good health. Unfortunately, many Native American communities have substandard housing, live in overcrowded conditions, and lack access to clean water. The consequences of these housing conditions were seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the virus spread quickly in some Native American communities. There are current and future opportunities to address overcrowded and unsafe housing conditions, said Walters, including through rental assistance for Native veterans, the Native American Housing Assistance and Self Determination Act, and the Urban Indian Health Parity Act.

Is the Indian Health Service (IHS) working? In which areas could IHS be changed or modified to bring about better health outcomes?

IHS is “woefully underfunded,” said Walters. While it is doing the best it can with limited funds, it is so underfunded that it has “an impossible task to meet its trust obligations to ensure the health and wellbeing of Indian people in the United States.” From the beginning, Congress did not appropriate sufficient money for Native health care, she said, and the program has been a “quasi-symbolic gesture.” Currently, less than 3 percent of funding goes to urban areas, where 65 percent of the Native community lives. This means that people wait until they get very sick and then either have to drive hours to get the services that they are entitled to by law, or are transported by air to other hospitals at great expense. This is a “ripple effect” of a number of structural issues, due to structures that are not in place, said Walters. Fryberg added that it can be difficult to get quality doctors and dentists out to remote areas, and that some Native Americans avoid IHS services because of past experiences with poor care. Walters said that IHS facilities are sometimes staffed by doctors “fresh out of medical school” who don’t have the experience to address the issues and concerns in Indian country. There is a critical need to invest in the infrastructure of the community in order to provide the care where and when it is needed, said Walters.

The current administration has made attempts to address these issues, including through increased funding to IHS and a proposal to elevate the director of IHS to an assistant secretary position, said Walters. The 638 compacts that have allowed tribes to use IHS funding to develop their own programming have had mixed results. While this arrangement has allowed tribes to exercise their sovereignty in some ways, the health processes and practices are still tied to federal policies and funds. It would be helpful, said Walters, to do a systematic review of IHS and its current functioning, and to look at how the 638 compacts are working. Redbird added that there are a number of models in Indian country that could inform practice in other areas; for example, tribes have purchased rural hospitals that went out of business. Native Americans have viewed health care as a human right for centuries, she said, and as such, have innovative and creative ideas for how to best serve their populations.

CLOSING

In closing, Bang noted that many of the issues discussed—lack of good data, underfunded health care systems, inadequate housing, poor educational outcomes, and barriers to mobility—are in part a manifestation of the mis-education of the American population. The historical efforts to eradicate Native Americans and the current lack of education about and attention to Native Americans make it possible for these inequities to persist. Redbird added that with a large proportion of Native Americans being under 18, immediate and meaningful action on these issues has the potential to transform many lives. She warned, however, that “failing to act today has the potential to be detrimental in ways and on a scale” that hasn’t been seen in recent history.

Fryberg thanked workshop speakers, moderators, and participants, and adjourned the workshop.