 Over the past five years doing this series, one thing I hope that I've made abundantly transparent is my utter disdain for socialism and central planning. I've tried to be clear and detailed across my many criticisms of the ideology, but at the core of everything, the problem is simply that collective ownership over the means of production just doesn't work. The whole concept misunderstands and outright rejects reality to such a fundamental degree that it consistently creates poverty, misery and pain for people wherever it's implemented. We've seen this play out all over the world. Cuba, Venezuela, China, the USSR, East Germany, Cambodia, North Korea, even places that we often don't even think about anymore, like Somalia and Zimbabwe, were decimated by socialist policies. Those countries would have been better off with no government at all than they were with a government that controls natural resources, dictates what people are allowed to produce, sell or buy, and sets prices for goods and services across their economies. The evidence of socialist failures is overwhelming and it's really not that difficult to understand the causal relationship, and yet somehow millions of people around the world still think it's a good idea. Why? Well, perhaps one reason is because they just aren't particularly connected to the victims. After all, they're on the other side of the world. They mostly don't speak English. They're probably dirty capitalists anyway, besides a lot of the worst abuses happened a long time ago. But what if I told you that there are large areas of the United States right now, today, which feature all the hallmarks of socialism? The people who live in these areas are subject to complete top-down control over education, healthcare, resource management, business licensing, utilities, food distribution, all of it directly managed by U.S. government agencies. Immigration in and out of these areas is also restricted, and it's even difficult for outsiders to do business in these parts of the country. Predictably, sadly, the result of socialism in these pockets of the United States is the same as it has been literally everywhere else in the world. Poverty, suffering, despair, death. If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm talking about Indian reservations. Realistic portrayals of American Indian life in popular culture are sometimes few and far between, but we're starting to see more and more content that depicts the realities of living on a reservation. But what most of these portrayals still don't tell you is how and why those realities came to be, and almost none even hint at effective solutions. So stick around and join me for something I've wanted to talk about for a very long time on this episode of Out of Frame. Let me say a few things up front. Yes, for the most part, I'm going to be using the term American Indian, or just Indian, and not Native American. If you have questions about why, CGP Grey did a pretty good video about it that I'll link in the description. The short version is, that's the term used for legally recognized tribes in the United States. Another thing you should know before we really get into this is that while I will be challenging some common misconceptions, it is absolutely true that what the United States government has done and continues to do to American Indian people is horrific and unjustifiable. It's true that Native populations were most likely declining before Europeans arrived, but the introduction of new diseases and increased conflict led to a massive decrease in their numbers between the 1600s and the early 20th century. The full history is bloody, cruel, and too long to be properly accounted for, but the highlights include enslavement, slaughter, reeducation, forcible relocation, occasional forced sterilization, and denial of any semblance of autonomy, some of which continues to this day in spite of what you might have been taught in school. Of course, the contentious history between Native tribes and the federal government goes back further, but for our purposes today we'll start with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. This is the legislation that granted the president authority to set aside lands west of the Mississippi River for Indian resettlement in exchange for their traditional tribal lands within existing state borders. It's the start of what we now think of as reservations. The remainder of the 19th century was marked by the western expansion of the United States, more forced relocation of American Indians, and escalating violence on all sides. Eventually, some of the land reserved for relocated Indians was even taken back by the federal government and made available to American settlers instead. Indian religions were banned, Indian children were taken from their tribes to be civilized at government-run boarding schools, the same way Aboriginal people in Australia were treated until the 1970s. If those children returned, and we've been discovering that that's a big if, they no longer spoke their native tribal languages, knew their people's history, or believed in their tribes' religions. In the words of the Great Libertarian Activist and Ogallala Lakota tribesmen Russell Means, in the government schools, which are referred to as public schools, Indian policy has been instituted there, and it's a policy where they discourage critical thinking and the creation of ideas. And yet, in spite of all this re-education, American Indians weren't even granted full US citizenship until 1924. Tribal landholdings were in decline as well, from 130 million acres in 1884 down to just 40 million in 1934. Now, you'd think that as a lot of those atrocities became more widely known and as more Americans started to actually care, things would have gotten better. But the main thing that happened was that the way our society viewed Indigenous people started to diverge. Some folks held on to the traditional racist image of Indians as genetically inferior savages who needed to be civilized. But the progressive intelligentsia of the early 20th century started to develop a new and different perspective, which added a veneer of science to that same racist idea, reimagining American Indians as noble savages, tragic casualties of history to be mythologized and saved by self-appointed do-gooders. And throughout the 1900s, the prevailing political attitude toward American Indians was that the government had the duty and obligation to take care of the tribes and their members. You see, according to the progressives, American Indians had been irrevocably broken by the oppression they faced throughout the centuries. And as per usual, they thought that bigger, more intrusive government was the answer. Now, to be clear, while the progressive viewpoint might seem to be kinder on the surface than that of the more obvious racist who believed that Indians were somehow innately inferior, their conclusions were fundamentally the same. Native people simply couldn't handle freedom. If they were smarter, more psychologically resilient, harder workers, less prone to crime, less susceptible to alcoholism, or whatever other racist trope you want to trot out, they would be fine. But whether it was due to genetics or history and socialization, both the arrogant progressives and the old school bigots believed that American Indians were just not cut out to make decisions for themselves. And of course, the only solution either group has ever been able to come up with is to have the government get more involved, policing crime, managing their economies, and re-educating Indian children. But that's always been true. The federal government, specifically the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has been handling education, infrastructure, healthcare, food distribution, licensing, regulation, and even law enforcement on Indian reservations for as long as they've existed. The result? A poverty rate of 25.4% hours long drives to the grocery store, assuming you're not getting commodity foods from a food distribution program. Either way, this usually means being stuck with processed, shelf-stable foods that won't spoil on the way home, which isn't particularly healthy. Unfortunately, unhealthy food generally leads to poor health outcomes, so it's no wonder that obesity, heart disease, and diabetes rates are much higher on reservations than in the rest of the country. This means a shorter life expectancy on the reservations than anywhere else. But it also frequently takes hours for EMS to get to a medical emergency, so a lot of people die simply waiting for healthcare. Indian health service clinics are overburdened, poorly run, and difficult to get to. Many homes on reservations don't have adequate access to necessary infrastructure. And I'm not talking about multi-gig, high-speed internet, although of course internet access is a problem too. I'm talking about the basics, paved roads, electricity, running water. The, you guessed it, Indian Housing Authority, a division of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, recently determined that more than half a million American Indians have severe housing needs. But the IHA's waitlist for better housing is incredibly long, and the government's restrictions on development make it all but impossible for private alternatives to emerge. Law enforcement is another problem area for reservations. Tribal police are empowered to deal with crime that is entirely contained within their tribes, that is crimes committed against a tribal member by another tribal member. Once a crime begins to involve non-members, such as casino guests visiting a reservation, the FBI or state police have to be involved, even if the crime occurs on reservation land. Given that the circumstances for American Indians on reservations are so bleak, it's no real surprise that there's a higher incidence of the side effects of despair, like alcoholism and drug abuse. As far as I'm concerned, virtually all of this can be traced back to the federal government's authoritarian control over Indian reservations. And I bet you thought they were sovereign territory, right? That's certainly what I was taught in school, and I believed it for a long time, even though it's actually nonsense. This is a weirdly personal issue for me, not because I'm particularly connected to tribal people, but because of where I grew up in Nebraska, and because of my dad, who has been an amateur collector of Native American art, and a voracious student of their history and culture since I was a small child. Most of us learn a little bit about different societies in school, but strangely, very few Americans have any knowledge of our country's own indigenous tribal cultures whatsoever. I mean, I was taught about Greek and Roman mythology. I learned U.S. and European history. We studied little bits about Mesoamerican culture, Japanese culture, Chinese culture, Russian culture. I grew up around a lot of German and Czechoslovakian immigrants, so I got a taste of their cultures growing up too. But in spite of living right in the middle of Lakota territory, almost everything I knew about the tribal people of Nebraska prior to college came from my dad, and also from reading books about important figures like Black Elk, Sitting Bull, and Red Cloud. Nebraska has several large reservations. The Pawnee, Odo, Nyebrera, Omaha, Ogallala, Sack and Fox, and Winnebago people all have a home in that state. I was fortunate enough as a kid to be able to experience some powwows and other American Indian cultural events first hand. And again, thanks to my dad, I spent hours and hours listening to Native American mythology on audio tape. Admittedly, I had a pretty unique upbringing in that regard, but all that interaction with Native culture gave me a perspective that I think most people probably don't have. And you know what I learned? All the indigenous people who lived in the United States and every other part of the world before European colonists arrived were and are just people. They aren't all vicious warrior braves or magic shaman who have some kind of supernatural connection to nature. They weren't stupid, incapable of understanding commerce or incompetent to engage in property exchanges with Europeans. Those kinds of exchanges happened among their own tribes for centuries after all. And their history is just as filled with war and bloody conquest as anyone else's anywhere in the world. They were just groups of people trying to survive the harsh realities of nature, doing the best they could to develop technology, art, and industry. And many were pretty successful. But as has been true for every conquered group throughout history, they were just not as successful as the people who now inhabit their former territory. Sadly, until the 1990s and early 2000s, our school books and virtually all the movies and TV shows you could find about American Indians just reinforced all those old tropes. Fortunately, with the success of films like Dances with Wolves and Smoke Signals and shows like Northern Exposure, some of that started to change. And now, I think we're entering a much more interesting time with content that treats American Indians and other indigenous people as, you know, human beings. We're finally beginning to get better glimpses of life on reservations in pop culture. The 2017 movie Wind River and 2018's breakout TV hit Yellowstone, both from writer-director Taylor Sheridan, are pretty good examples. Fair warning, spoilers for both titles are coming. Wind River stars Jeremy Renner as a fish and wildlife service hunter named Corey Lambert and Elizabeth Olson as a relatively inexperienced FBI agent, Jane Banner. Corey is called out to his ex-in-law's farm on the Wind River Reservation to track down and kill a mountain lion that's been taking down local livestock. The actual Wind River Reservation is one of the largest in America, spanning 2.2 million acres and it's primarily home to members of the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes. But like most of Wyoming, it's mostly uninhabited, so it's pretty shocking when Renner's character, Corey, discovers the body of an 18-year-old woman dead in the snow. Since she's a tribe member and the obvious victim of sexual violence, the matter can't be left to tribal police. They have to call the FBI. And the nearest available agent is the rookie Jane Banner, who's only in the area for firearms training. Jane has very little idea what she's doing and is completely unfamiliar with the local geography, but she's all the federal government will provide. Knowing she's in over her head, Jane enlists Corey as a guide and assistant. As the case progresses, we learn that the victim, Natalie, was childhood best friends with Corey's daughter Emily, before Emily's own mysterious death two years earlier. The movie does a great job showing the meager resources available to the tribe to investigate serious crimes. We also see the damage that drugs, violence, and despair deal the families that remain on the reservation. The film is bleak and heartbreaking, and also a little heroic, but mostly it just feels real. Yellowstone is more cynical, although still fairly similar in tone, but it's centered around property rights instead of crime. Kevin Costner plays John Dutton, the patriarch of the largest continuous ranch in Montana, and his property abuts the fictional Broken Rock Indian Reservation, which I'm guessing is home to crow or salish people. There's a lot of tension between the ranch and the reservation. For one thing, John's youngest son, Case, is married to a member of the local tribe, Monica, with whom he has a son. But that's really just the personal family drama aspect of the series. The broader drama is an examination of both political power and property rights, who has it and who doesn't. Turns out it's not really anyone living on the reservation. But one of the standout characters in Yellowstone for me is the tribe's new chief, Thomas Rainwater, played by Gil Birmingham, who was also Martin in Wind River. He's savvy and sharp and seems to be a match for any of the other power brokers in the show. A lot of Taylor Sheridan's work is kind of depressing, but I really appreciate that it shows a part of America that most people never get to see, and it does it without resorting to simple stereotypes of either white Americans or American Indians. But okay, you get it. Life on reservations sucks. I can already hear the arguments that this isn't real socialism. Except that it kind of is. Socialism is not merely all the things you think are good, nor is it an imaginary state of Marxism that can never really exist. Sorry, tankies. It is any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods. And that's exactly what happens on Indian reservations. So yeah, it's a pretty good example of real world socialism. But no one can make decisions on behalf of other people better than those individuals can make for themselves. In the words of Ludwig von Mises, socialist central planning is the antithesis of free enterprise, private initiative, private ownership of the means of production, market economy and the price system. Planning and capitalism are utterly incompatible. Within a system of planning, production is conducted according to the government's orders, not according to the plans of capitalists and entrepreneurs, eager to profit by best filling the wants of the consumers. When we allow society via the state to control people's economic and cultural decisions, we end up with utter chaos and a rejection of individual people's wants and needs in favor of political whims. This is all bad enough without any racist brutality and intentional mistreatment. And of course, that's been a pretty common theme among socialist states, too. The US government has treated the Indians like children forever. Even as far back as 1831, Chief Justice Marshall, in his ruling in Cherokee Nation versus Georgia, called Indian tribes domestic dependent nations. He added that the tribe's relationship to the federal government was that of a ward to his guardian. Under this flimsy justification, the federal government essentially eliminated private property rights on Indian reservations. 75% of reservation land is in tribal trusts, though it's actually titled to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Another 20% is held in individual trusts, meaning an individual can own an interest in the land. But the title on that land is held by the BIA as well. This fake version of private ownership is further complicated by legally mandated fractionation. That is, when whoever owns an individual interest in a piece of land dies, inheritance has to be split equally among that person's heirs. As you could probably imagine, after a few generations of this kind of division, that land is essentially dead capital, since the law requires consent from a majority of the owners of a plot of land to do anything with it. In reality, only about 5% of reservation land is truly privately owned. So, I mean, when 95% of the land is owned by the state, when it's essentially impossible to access the resources on it or use it as collateral without majority approval, yeah, that's what collective ownership over property actually looks like. In other words, socialism. All the excuses in the world cannot change that fact, and it's happening right here in so-called capitalist America. It's shameful and it needs to stop. As a group, American Indians have been horribly subjugated for hundreds of years, and they are now the only group in America who are forced to live under the exact kind of socialist central planning that impoverished people in the USSR and China, and everywhere else those ideas have been implemented. I don't know about you, but I'd actually like to fix this problem. So, maybe instead of focusing our attention on performative virtue signaling like land acknowledgement statements, renaming sports teams, or politically correct terminology, we should actually try to get the government out of the way for once. The only real solution to any of this is individual freedom. People need to be allowed to make their own choices with resources that they actually control, and they need to be able to earn their successes and learn from their mistakes instead of being treated like children. American Indians aren't being given that opportunity. Their cultures, economies, and very lives are controlled by the U.S. government, and that was just as true for their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents going back hundreds of years. It's time for that horrible experiment in authoritarian socialism to end. Returning basic property and decision rights to the individual people living on reservations could unlock an astonishing amount of wealth and well-being for American Indians, and for people brimming with entrepreneurial creativity, that would be an amazing thing. But don't take my word for it. Allow me to leave you with some final thoughts from Russell Means. Freedom is what's important to Indian children. The only way you can be free is to know that you are worthwhile as a distinct human being. Otherwise, you become what the colonizers have designed, and that is a lemon. Get in line, punch all the right keys, and die. Without freedom, then life is pointless. The more dependent you become on a centralized power, the more easily you are led around. Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. As we're coming to the end of this series, this is one episode I'd have absolutely regretted never doing. I hope you enjoyed it and want to talk about it in the comments. As always, I want to thank our supporters on Patreon and SubscribeStar, and give a special shout out to our associate producers. Thank you. For everyone else, definitely still subscribe to the channel, click that bell icon to get notifications for the final few episodes of this show and all of our new content coming up, and follow us on all the social media. I'll see you next time.