The Spokane Indian Reservation By the Numbers

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie, is set on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State. According to the reservation’s website, it is about 159,000 acres (that’s about 243 square miles, about a fifth the size of Rhode Island); of that acreage, 108,874  is forest, 8,552 is agricultural land, and 10,328 is lakes. If that sounds sparsely populated to you, you’re right — as of April 2, 2011, the reservation had a population of 2,708, which is about 59 acres per person, yielding an even lower population density than the state of Alaska. Of course, people are never evenly distributed, and the reservation centers on the unincorporated community of Wellpinit (where the author and protagonist are from). As portrayed in the novel, the poverty rate is quite high, standing at about 32.6% with unemployment at 25.84%. At this point, I’d like to play the role of an armchair economist for just a moment and note that only the adults who are actively searching for a job are counted as unemployed, and that anyone who has simply given up looking for work is excluded from the calculation (unemployment = 100x (unemployed) / (unemployed + employed)); furthermore, anyone who has had any work at all during the survey week, or is off from work for some temporary/transitory reason but has a job to return to (illness, labor dispute, etc.), or is doing more than 15 hours per week of family employment, gets counted as employed. The upshot: unemployment rates can sometimes paint too rosy a picture.

Conversely, the nearby town of Reardan has a population of 571 (at the time of the 2010 census), and has a total area of 0.5 square miles, and is 92.5% white. In an interesting tie-in to the novel’s comments on “DWI: Driving While Indian” tickets, Reardan is an notorious speed trap — particularly for indigenous folks. Also worth noting is that the native protagonist perceives Reardan as wealthy even though the average annual family income is a measly $39,053, which makes it relatively poverty-ridden when compared to the state’s average of $58,405 per household. However, in contrast to the reservation, Reardan is doing quite well with an unemployment rate of 4.9% and an offical poverty rate of just 3.0%. This incongruous juxtaposition — the Spokane Indian Reservation’s probably understated 25.84% unemployment rate and 32.6% poverty rate compared with nearby Reardon’s 4.9% rate unemployment rate and negligible poverty rate — evidences that there is something racially rotten in Washington State. After all, the numbers don’t add up. What do you think?