End-of-century demographic information reveals that a surprisingly large number of Indian people—almost half of the approximately two million who identified themselves as Native American in the last census—now live away from reservation and trust lands. Except for the fact that the American Indian population is significantly younger and growing more rapidly than that of the nation as a whole—a fact which has been true for decades but is confounding to presumptions of doom and vanishing—a descriptive profile reveals information that mostly confirms what Indian people already know: Our population is significantly poorer and at greater risk than the nation’s at large. The proportion of American Indian families living below the official poverty level is, in fact, almost three times that of all families taken together, and the per capita income of Indians is less than half that of Whites. Indians also have higher death rates attributable to accidents, suicides, and homicides; and the second leading cause of death for Native young adults is directly linked to the effects of alcoholism.
Frequently motivated by poverty at home and the promise of greater economic opportunity elsewhere, Indian people, especially since World War II, have congregated in growing numbers in urban areas, where the particularities of their lived experience are either largely unexamined by non-Native American society or understood only within the broad categories of stereotype.
