American Indian Culture and Research Journal

"Finding the solution to Indian economic problems is a desperate task." Unemployment estimates on the Navajo reservation, the largest and most populous Indian reservation, range between 35 percent and 70 percent; the most conservative estimate indicates that more Navajos are unemployed and seeking work than are currently employed in the wage and salary sector of the reservation economy. President Reagan, acting through executive order in 1983, established a Commission on Indian Reservation Economies, "charged to identify obstacles to economic growth in the public and private sector at all level." The Commission's report largely confirmed the conventional wisdom, characterizing reservation labor as unskilled and unreliable, with inferior educational endowments, and therefore an obstacle to development. Contrary to this expectation, a study undertaken in the summer of 1985 revealed a sizable pool of unemployed men and women with extremely credible educational qualifications, many with relevant employment experience. This pool is so large and so well qualified as to argue that the quality of labor is not a significant barrier or obstacle to industrial development on the largest and one of the poorest Indian reservations. Why did this assessment go unobserved by the Presidential Commission? If the quality of labor at this level is not a significant obstacle to development, where do the actual obstacles lie? These are the questions this assessment will address. The approach is essentially a policy analysis, based on institutional economics, that seeks to understand the interpretations of reservation economies held in centers of power in the United States. It is a challenge to these interpretations and offers an alternative strategy.

Statistics indicate that American Indians form one of the most disadvantaged minority groups in the United States. Poor health, low-paying jobs, and low levels of education, along with high levels of unemployment, all contribute to the American Indian's seemingly endless state of poverty. Their cultural persistence, some argue, exacerbates the problem. Studies do indeed indicate that Indians generally maintain their cultural distinctiveness, even after their introduction and adjustment to an urban, industrial style of life. The fact that many reservations are pursuing industrial development as a strategy for attaining economic an cultural self-determination increases the ramifications of Indians' adjustment to the industrial way of life. Federal policies and sociological analyses concerning American Indians in the past have failed to take into account long-term and world-wide system changes that not only impinge on the United States but which also have consequences for the United States government's relationship with American Indians and reservation development. Therefore, the major aim of this essay is to examine the intertwined "problems" of the persistence of Indian poverty and culture using the metropolis-satellite and world-system explanations. Focusing on the political and economic underpinnings of ethnic relations, these approaches allow not only the location of Indian-United States relations among more general, world-wide politico-economic processes but also a specification of these processes' impact upon the reservation economy and Indian ethnicity. A second aim is to illustrate United States-world system relations as a possible basis for alternative United States-Indian policy considerations, and for addressing the cultural dilemma that Indians face in their efforts to industrialize.

North American Indian Photographs/Images Side Trips: The Photography of Simmer W. Matteson, 1898-1908. By Louis B. Casagrande and Phillips Bourns. Seattle: University of Washington Press, distributors for Milwaukee Public Museum and The Science Museum of Minnesota, 1984. 256 pp. $24.95 Paper. Coast of Many Faces. By Ulli Steltzer and Catherine Kerr. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. 224 pp. $25.95 Cloth. Inuit: The North in Transition. By Ulli Steltzer. Seattle: University-of Washington Press, 1983. 224 pp. $29.95 Cloth. A Haida Potlatch. By Ulli Steltzer, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1985. 96 pp. $14.95 Cloth. The Enduring Navaho. By Laura Gilpin. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1980 [1968]. 264 pp. $37.50 Cloth. Hopi Photographers, Hopi Images. Compiled by Victor Masayesva, Jr. and Erin Younger. Tucson: Sun Tracks and the University of Arizona Press, 1983. Ill pp. $25.00, Cloth. $14.95 Paper. The Blackfeet Reservation, 1885-1945: A Photographic History of Cultural Survival. By William E. Farr. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1984. 232 pp. $19.95 Cloth. Window on the Past: The Photographic Ethnohistory of the Northern and Kaigani Haida. By Margaret B. Blackman. Ottawa: National Museum of Man Mercury Series, Canadian Ethnology Service Paper No. 74, 1981. 236 pp. N.p. Paper. Side Trips constitutes further evidence of the marked rise over the last two decades of serious consideration of the history and meaning of photography. Insofar as this increasing awareness has affected our understanding of the photography of American Indians, one aspect of the progress may be charted in the discovery or rediscovery of photographers, such as Sumner Matteson, whose images might otherwise have been consigned to oblivion. I am thinking-to give just two examples-of the anonymous British Royal Engineers who in 1860 or 1861 made the earliest known photographs of interior Pacific Northwest peoples and of Edward H. Davis, who worked in Mesa Grande.l Initially Matteson might seem less important than such others as these in that he counted no photographic coups, as it were, and only part of his output, if a significant part, was devoted to Native American subject matter. But, on reflection, this means that his Indian work, represented by approximately half of the images in this book, each as meticulously documented as possible, must be seen in context.