What’s forcing the issue is an acute housing crisis on the reserves. He expects that the bill will be introduced in Parliament early in 2012 and is confident of approval by the end of the year. Reserves would become new entities that would have some of the powers of municipalities, provinces and the federal government to provide schools, hospitals and other services, and to enact zoning laws. Manny Jules, a former chief of the Kamloops Indian band in British Columbia, is lining up support for the First Nations Property Ownership Act, which would allow bands to opt out of the government ownership of their land and put it under tribal and private ownership. “The raw quality of the land is not that much different, it’s the amount of investment in that land that’s different,” he says.Ĭanada faces the same issues with its 630 bands-as tribes there are called-but thanks to the effort of a dogged reformer, there’s a push to allow reservation land to be privatized. For the Crow reservation, 48% of the land made the top four classes only 33% of the adjacent land did. And this isn’t because the land is better: A study of 13 reservations in the West put 49% of the land in the top four quality classes, while only 38% of the land in the surrounding counties was rated that highly. Terry Anderson, executive director of the Property & Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, co-authored a study showing that private land is 30-90% more productive agriculturally than the adjacent trust land. More than a third of the Crow reservation’s 2.3 million acres is individually owned, and the contrast with the communal land-often just on the other side of a fence-is stark, as Google satellite maps show. It’s a look that’s common worldwide, wherever secure property rights are lacking-much of Africa and South America, inner city housing projects and rent-controlled apartment buildings in the U.S., Indian reservations. So the result is substandard housing and the barren, rundown look that comes from a lack of investment, overuse and environmental degradation. This leads to what economists call the tragedy of the commons: If everyone owns the land, no one does. They’re a demonstration of what happens when property rights are weak or non-existent. Prosperity is built on property rights, and reservations often have neither. To explain the poverty of the reservations, people usually point to alcoholism, corruption or school-dropout rates, not to mention the long distances to jobs and the dusty undeveloped land that doesn’t seem good for growing much. “If I knew contracts would be enforced, then I could do a lot more business there.”Īt a time when there's a spotlight on America's richest 1%, a look at the country's 310 Indian reservations-where many of America's poorest 1% live-can be more enlightening. “We take on such a huge extra risk with someone from the reservation,” says Square One’s Nancy Vermeulen.
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And the chances of finding the customer and the car on the sprawling rural reservation, or winning in the unpredictable Crow courts, are slim. The reservation is a separate nation-judgments in American courts can’t be enforced. Instead, Square One enters the murky realm of international affairs. Going to state court to repossess the car or garnish wages is not an option.
When customers who live and work on the nearby Crow Indian reservation don’t make their car payments, there’s not much Square One Finance of Billings, Montana can do.