Yes, if you have ever attended a pow-wow you can witness first hand what goes on at the reservation. There is a lot of addiction. A few Indians are brain damaged beyond repair and continue to sniff glue and paint. At no less a pow-wow or celebration of self, they celebrate by slowly killing themselves. Socialism at work.
Very sad.
just apersonal observation; It seems to me that what they are missing is a sense of hope. For aman to make a living, he must leave the village. For most, this means fighting forest fires or construction, both seasonal. They return to the villages and try to improve their lot. They can only look forward to more of the same as there are no jobs locally. They get depressed, so they drink to feel better, which ultimately leads leads to deeper depression, which leads to more drinking until, finally they take the ultimate escape, suicide.
The native corporations offer no help. While their people live in squalor, an elitist few rake in salaries off 40,000 to 200,000 dollars per year.
A young man in one village told me this story. He and a friend walked to an old gold mine 15 miles from the village. They spent a day panning gold and made a couple hundred dollars each. There is a limited amount of water available, so this will never be a major mining operation, but a few men could make a living there and go home at night. The mine sits on corporation land. They tried to get the corp to lease them the land. The people whom they talked to told them the CORP does not do that. They MIGHT open the mine at some future date and offer them jobs, but until then they were to stay away from the mine. That was 1994. It is still idle today. The men still have to leave to find jobs. No hope.