Prof: Poverty pushes Indians away

The rural Wind River Indian Reservation's rampant poverty tends to depress its residents from participating in Fremont County politics, a University of Wyoming sociologist said Monday in federal court

Not even casino gambling will help in the long run, Garth Massey said during the opening day of testimony in a federal civil trial involving Indians who claim Fremont County's at-large system of electing county commissioners violates the Voting Rights Act.

"I'm not optimistic that the socioeconomic (conditions) on the reservation will change dramatically in the next decade," Massey said.

He was among several experts called by the Indians' attorneys during the first day of the expected two-week bench trial in U.S. District Court in Casper.

Under questioning by one of the Indians' attorneys, Laughlin McDonald of the Atlanta office of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation Inc., Massey said in 1998 he oversaw interviews of about 95 percent of the households on the reservation. A household is defined as an independent economic unit.

He found 57 percent of all households had incomes below the federal poverty rate, compared with a nationwide poverty rate of about 13 percent, he said.

Many houses are substandard and 20 percent are uninhabitable; 40 percent do not have telephone lines, Massey said.

The unemployment rate is about 10 times the national average, and three to four times higher than the most depressed rural areas, Massey said.

By age 55, 61 percent of the population had health problems -- diabetes, heart disease, nutritional deficiencies -- requiring medical intervention, he said.

These factors push many Indians into feelings of powerlessness, a lifestyle of just getting by, and not participating in the political process, Massey said.