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Hi guys,

I'm planning a 3 month trip after Xmas and one idea I have is to spend some time in the southern states of the US. I have a real interest in the native american reservations. I'd like, if possible, to stay in a native community for a while but the only contact I have with Americans is you guys and I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions or contacts that might help me do this. I'm on a really low budget but I am keen to contribute however I can to people's projects by way of exchange and to integrate myself. Maybe this is a crazy idea and too complex a thing to just organise in a couple of months - any info would be really appreciated.

I gotta run right now (better ideas later), but you should look at this website: http://www.bia.gov

Native American communities tend to be very closed off to letting outsiders stay with them, a byproduct of decades of general abuse and getting the short end of the stick. A lot of them do a lot of outreach though. I know in the pacific northwest they do a lot of educational programs to teach about their culture, most of it is geared towards youth or during their holidays. There are native Americans throughout the US though, so don't limit yourself to the south.

From my experience growing up in the pacific northwest, this could be different in other areas

That sounds about square with the tribes up here, too.

I have to admit I'm a little skeptical this plan, though. From what I know about reservations (my old roommate is/was some significant percentage -- he counts for government work, if you will) they are not exactly places people vacation.

In MN, you'd be looking for trouble if you went on a reservation, unless it's on Casino property (in the casino/ hotel). Ironically, natives are not allowed to gamble in the casinos.

A lot of reservations are really poor, and no one will want you there. It's a shitty situation and there are a lot of people suffering in this country. One that comes to mind is Pine Ridge Reservation in SD.

Pine Ridge is the eighth-largest reservation in the United States and it is the poorest. The population of Pine Ridge suffer health conditions, including high mortality rates, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, malnutrition and diabetes, among others. Reservation access to health care is limited compared to urban areas, and it is not sufficient. Unemployment on the reservation hovers between 80% and 85%, and 49% of the population live below the federal poverty level. Many of the families have no electricity, telephone, running water, or sewage systems; and many use wood stoves to heat their homes, depleting limited wood resources.

You have really poor neighborhoods with mostly minority populations in the UK? Like Syrian refugees maybe? Walk in, oh hey, I'm here to meet Muslims, want to integrate myself, etc.

My point being someone struggling to survive isn't going to welcome leisure class gawkers.

Agreed ^ I don't think you meant for it to come off as sort of cultural tourism but there's shades of it in the idea.

"Oh hey, displaced descendants of ethnic genocide, mind if I get a 'vibe' for a while?" is not really the most thoughtful thing you could be doing with your time.

I agree with all that has been said.

I have a friend from high school that works in social.work with California reservations (he is native American but great up off the reservation)...and down here in southern CA it's kinda sad to see the casinos and the horrible conditions of the reservations around it.

In our national park system and throughout the west/southwest there are some great museums and places that are more focused on teaching.

The reservations are in a pretty sad state overall which is pretty awful. My parents live right next to one up in the Pacific Northwest (like under a mile) and there really isn't much interaction and the economic differences are so freaking drastic it is crazy.

I know there is currently a fight between a tribe and pot farmers in northern California. The pot growers are illegally stealing the reservation's water.

My family has Lakota Indian and enough to go on reservations. My sister used to go to South Dakota to visit for years, we even made friends, donated money and did all kinds of stuff. I've been to sweats (which really suck LOL) and a lot of other things I don't quite understand about my heritage. There is some cool aspect to the whole thing, but a lot of the reservations are overrun by drugs and child trafficking/prostitution, which is incredibly sad. They are not allowed to work normal jobs if they live on the reservation or they forfeit their rights to be there, or at least that's the way I understand it. So they turn to illegal methods of making money and it's become a huge problem. The reservation my sister had been going to for almost a decade turned out to be smuggling meth all over the country, and they were using a vehicle we donated to them to do some of it, which blows. Also, she was close friends with a little girl, who she adopted spiritually as her own because of her being abused and neglected.

So my point is, it's probably not the best place to visit. If you want a good Native experience, you are probably better served visiting Mexico.

TS just wants to take peyote and buy cigarettes tax-free.

I was actually going to mention Mexico, jwar. Good call.

Sorry to hear about all that too. (I have some distant Cherokee...but not enough that I would ever imagine any sort of claim...it just used to bother me the things my friend would say even though he was/is part of a relatively integrated tribe).

There are problems in Mexico too though but immersion would fell less intrusive because at least some of their economy is tourism based (I used to see racism on the job site between factions just like here...luckily everybody kinda liked me haha).

I did a charity service trip in Cambodia when I was younger. We raised a bunch of money, built some stuff there, gave them a satellite that could download email for them and all the neighboring villages. (they actually had an email delivery service where some guy would go by with a moped, download the emails, and deliver it to nearby schools and villages). We paid families to send their kids to school and did some guest English teaching in this rural village. Philanthropy tourism is a weird thing to get into, and the benefits to it are often better served hiring locals to do the work for it. Honestly it felt weird as hell when I did that like 13 years ago, and you get a sense of guilt for not being better equipped to help out. The only way I can really justify it in hindsight is that we brought awareness about what you could do to help out in the area, we were invited to speak about it at the UN, and a whole bunch of other schools came to us to help them help out (big thanks to Nicholas Kristof for bringing awareness about us bringing awareness). A couple of the cambodian kids went on to become doctors a decade later and thanked us for it when they made it to college, but really it still feels as if that sort of trip is geared as tourism more than anything, a way for the privileged to write off their guilt as having made a difference. And It's really hard to make that not the case.

Really opened my head to thinking bigger picture and I will eternally be thankful to those people for inadvertently teaching me so much about life.

So if you're really set on going and meeting native Americans, think about what you are really giving them versus what you want to get out of it yourself. It's a tricky thing to navigate properly. If all you want is tourism, go someplace that has museums about them, get some books, schedule a couple of interviews with their representatives.

As far as mexico, be safe. Every year in my childhood, we used to spend a day when we were visiting family down there and just cook food and give grocery bags to whoever we found that could use it, but it's really not as safe to visit the rural areas as it used to.

Best advice I can give you is that no one cares what you want. People only care about what they want. Find a way a way to make your visit benefit them and be welcomed with open arms.


Nora.

Do you guys think a non-American would be received differently by Native Americans?

all yuppies probably