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Do any of you spend any time with or around Native Americans? What are they up to these days?
I've been reading the 1970s novels of James Welch, which describe the modern lives of Native Americans living in Montana and other places; and that's the most up to date information I have. I guess I wonder if they've been absorbed into atomized individualism, if they still have a big alcohol problem, if there are any interesting cultural developments in general.
(In Welch's novels, I would say they've already been partially consumed by the main stream of American life, suffering from a wistfulness and purposelessness that may only partly stem from the loss of tribal structure and power over the land, and which may just as much originate in the inherent pointlessness of American working-class life as some then saw it.)
This depends dramatically on which tribe you're talking about. Tribeless natives are just integrated into the general population, though some remain within tribal orbits. Very generally speaking, the tribes with casino money and relatively small populations are doing extremely well, functioning as basically very large, very wealthy families (thinking here of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux in Minnesota, or even the Seminole in Florida). Those with sizeable reservation land are also in pretty good shape (most obviously, the Navajo tribe in the Four Corners area), though larger population and land area also means larger disparities between members. There are still a fair few Navajo grandmothers out there raising their grandchildren in derelict homes where they have to haul in potable water and get electricity from a generator. Smaller and more isolated tribes face similarly impoverished circumstances.
I have some experience living near different reservations around the country and I think maybe the best way to put it is that class differences are exaggerated for enrolled members; wealthy Native Americans are some of the wealthiest Americans, poor Native Americans are some of the poorest Americans, and those in the middle may as well be invisible. The wealthy and educated families are basically aristocrats, and they spend a lot of time and effort to keep it that way, often training in law and business to keep up their "most favored nation" status and ethnically inherited superprivilege. But the poor and drug- or alcohol-addicted are some of America's neediest people, living in squalor in homes they didn't buy, spending money they didn't earn. This leads to an interesting sort of "noblesse oblige" where the well-off tribal members sometimes dedicate significant time and resources (their own, as well as the federal government's) to "uplift" programs, building schools and homes for their downtrodden brethren, enacting jobs programs, and otherwise practicing a geographically and ethnically constrained form of communism. But no small number of this quasi-nobility also walk away from the reservation entirely, washing their hands of the fruitless frustration and thankless toil to seek their own personal fortune. These return to the reservation, if at all, only for a comfortable retirement.
I am if nothing else impressed with the shrewd leadership and entrepreneurial initiative that the quasi-nobility has shown, particularly in those tribes where the genetic remnant is so vanishingly small that they really are more plausibly white (or sometimes black) than "Native American." The Supreme Court some time ago asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment did not alter the constitutional status of Native Americans because tribes are political entities, not ethnic or racial ones. This fig leaf has been a boon for most Native Americans in America's post-colonial phase, to the extent that the tribes are land rich, government subsidized, and exempt from numerous regulations of general applicability.
But the boon is unevenly distributed, in ways that suggest mere resource redistribution might not address the core of the problem, and might even be a part of the problem. Very probably, I think, Native Americans would be much better off overall if we abolished tribes and reservations entirely, awarded the land to its residents in fee, and worked to integrate and mainstream them into American society. But this would undermine their tribal identity and heritage, as well as their aristocracy. And so the unflattering stereotype of the poor, drunk, welfare-dependent "Indian" persists as the reality of a permanent Native American underclass--not, as is sometimes suggested, as the byproduct of white colonial oppression, but as the "cost of doing business" for their own wealthy, educated tribal leadership maintaining the hierarchical status quo.
I appreciate the detailed answer. I live in Ohio, where there haven't really been any since the time of Anthony Wayne. I have a sense that, as with things like the Celtic Revival, Chinoiserie, etc., there was a period in the 20th century where there was, for a time, a broader cultural interest in "Indian" things; but this has waned, and now they don't seem to have any particular presence in the wider cultural arena. I don't think I can name any living Native Americans. Perhaps the absolute number simply isn't high enough. So I just find myself curious about - what are their politics? What are their unique subcultural practices in 2025? How did the Internet change their lives? In America you see things like Chinese laundries, Hispanic roofing crews, Vietnamese nail salons; apart from casinos, do the Native Americans have some thing like that? Perhaps I'd just have to go and see.
But as you note, the experiences of Native Americans in Florida vs. Oklahoma vs. Alaska are so different that it may not even be worthwhile to think of them as a single bloc.
There seems to be a lot of native Americans doing skyscraper construction.
Not sure where you're at, but historically I think this was specific to the Mohawk for some reason? Not sure if they're still at it, but they are famous for working on a lot of the original skyscrapers in NYC among other places.
Lots of lower class Cherokees doing it in DFW.
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