It's taken the coronavirus pandemic to highlight the dismal housing that many Native Americans and Alaska Natives are forced to call home: dilapidated, overcrowded structures without electricity or indoor plumbing.
Why it matters: Native Americans on reservations have lived for decades under these dire conditions. The difficulty in building or even improving homes is traced to federal policies on reservation land and limited access to capital for Indigenous families.
By the numbers: 40% of reservation housing is substandard and nearly one-third of reservation homes are overcrowded, according to the National Congress of American Indians — conditions that have turned private homes into superspreaders of COVID-19.
- Some homes on the Oglala Lakota Nation, for example, have 21 people living under one roof, Thunder Valley Community Development Corp. executive director Tatewin Means told Axios.
- Less than half the homes on reservations are connected to public sewer systems, and 16% lack indoor plumbing, making frequent handwashing more difficult. Now more than 10% of the 173,000 people of the Navajo Nation, for example, have tested positive for the virus.
- Around half the homes lack phone service. Just 46.6% of housing units on rural tribal lands have access to 25/3 Mbps broadband service, a Federal Communications Commission report said, making telehealth impossible during the virus.
- Residents have to travel long distances from isolated rural homes to get basic needs like groceries, putting them at higher risk of contracting the virus.
- The unemployment rates of the Navajo Nation and the Oglala Lakota Nation — the nation's two largest reservations — are 42% and 80%, respectively, preventing residents from saving for a down payment.
Between the lines: Experts say there's little hope of improvement as long as Native American housing and property ownership sit in a maze of federal bureaucracies and underfunded projects.
- Tribal members in need of housing on reservations face long waitlists. Off tribal lands, they face the same obstacles to getting a mortgage as Black and Latino Americans.
- The lack of housing forces some tribal members into homelessness in urban areas like Seattle, Phoenix, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
- 17% of Native American households have at least one “doubled-up” person, nearly 85,000 in all, because they have nowhere else to go, a 2017 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) report found.
What they're saying: Brett Chapman, a Tulsa, Oklahoma, attorney and a descendant of Ponca Chief Standing Bear, said the current poor housing conditions for Native Americans are civil rights violations.
- "It's not that anyone objects to providing Native Americans better housing. It's just that no one cares."
- Means said few Native Americans feel the federal government will solve the housing crisis soon. "We keep expecting a broken system to work."
Where it stands: Tribal governments are watching a housing project by the Thunder Valley Community Development Corp., which teaches Oglala Sioux tribal members the value of homeownership within their culture.
- The tribal members learn financial literacy outside of the traditional U.S. banking system, by raising funds with help from the community to enable tribal members to declare their "independence from a colonial system."
- They're also learning homebuilding techniques using available materials, such as compressed-earth blocks and straw bales.
- The homes are built in a circle with an opening to the east in a Lakota tradition.
