Professor Cheyfitz talked about the myriad of issues facing Native Americans today. One of them was the high rates of unemployment faced by Native Americans on reservations. I don’t know the economic situation of any specific reservation. I will discuss the cycle of poverty, that Cheyfitz mentioned, that exists on many of these reservations.

The main question at hand is how to bring a downtrodden community out of poverty. It is apparent from the multitude of economic situations that exist in the United States today that the government has no sure fire way to relieve poverty in a specific city. That’s because it is an incredibly difficult task. Certain ways to bring a community out of poverty is to increase lines of credit into the community or create economic incentives for companies to move to those communities. These approaches most likely won’t work, and in some sense aren’t exactly possible. Lets instead look to the individual level as the institution of the Federal government has failed  and betrayed Native Americans countless times.

In economics, individuals have to go to economic opportunities, not the other way around. A majority of these opportunities exist in urban centers. Individuals or family units living in poverty on a reservation are unlikely to see their situation improve without leaving the reservation to go live in a strong economic center.

Cheyfitz discussed that many Native Americans do work off the reservation. This brings up the issue that the Native American population will become dispersed. Many other groups of people are able to preserve their culture whilst living in America mixed in with other ethnic groups, but a big part of Native American culture is the community aspect. I can’t offer a solution for that issue.

To sum up, for Native Americans to get access to better economic opportunities they need to move to urban centers where these opportunities exist.  The US government doesn’t have the ability to turn reservations into booming economic towns.