Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Though forty years have passed since the American Indian Law Review published Economic Development in Indian Country: What Are the Questions? by Professor Frank Pommersheim, many of the same challenges and questions about economic development remain. This brief Essay looks back at Pommersheim’s work, surveys the state of scholarship on economic development today, and offers a few ideas about the future of such work. To this day, economic development remains a backwater among law professors compared to sexier topics like criminal jurisdiction, civil authority over nonIndians, and whatever is the most recent opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court. But that does not mean that economic development does not matter— Pommersheim described development as the “paramount” issue in the world and in Indian Country—only that it fits awkwardly with the skill set and preoccupations of legal scholars. The facts on the ground can be sobering. Twenty-five percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives were below the poverty line in 2022, a rate significantly higher than any other group, and more than double the country’s overall rate of 11.5 percent. Relatedly, according to one expert, “the average reservation unemployment rate has been 50 percent for decades.” The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s most recent assessment of the housing needs of American Indians and Alaska Natives found that ten percent of such “households had plumbing and/or kitchen deficiencies” and an additional eleven percent of such households were overcrowded. Focusing on just one tribe, the per capita income on the Navajo reservation is persistently roughly a quarter to a fifth of the average income in the United States, and thirty percent of residents do not have running water. More than half the people in Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota, located entirely within the Pine Ridge Reservation, live below the poverty line, unemployment is “in the 80% range,” and the high school dropout rate is “over 60%.” Far too many tribal members suffer from the often debilitating effects of widespread poverty, lack of economic opportunity, and poor housing conditions on their reservations. In the four decades since Pommersheim’s article was published, there of course have been changes in the economic fortunes of some tribes. Indian gaming took off, giving quite a few tribes located near non-Indian population centers a sudden infusion of cash. Other tribes found success through government contracting or by empowering dynamic entrepreneurs who were able to create engines of growth across diversified sectors of the economy. But as the statistics above demonstrate, economic growth has proven elusive for many tribes even as the scholarship surrounding what leads to tribal economic development has continued to expand. The core lesson from Pommersheim’s article is that the best approach to development for each tribe will depend on its history and community expectations—something summarized by Professor Douglass North as the notion that “institutions matter”—rather than on broad theoretical pronouncements divorced from the realities of reservation life. This Essay proceeds in three parts. Part I: Past gives an overview the main takeaways from Pommersheim’s 1984 article. Part II: Present provides a bird’s eye view of the work done by legal scholars on tribal economic development from 1984 until today. And Part III: Future offers a few ideas about scholarship about tribal economic development work going forward.
External Links
https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1789&context=ailr
Repository Citation
Ezra Rosser,
Institutions and Economic Development,
49
Am. Indian L. Rev.
1
(2025).
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_lawrev/2359
Included in
Indigenous, Indian, and Aboriginal Law Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Law and Society Commons