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Communities of Color Report Finds Native Americans Are Still Losing ground
Part 1: Deep disparities hurt families and the community
inequity. Compared to Seattle’s King
County, the disparities are on average 36
percent worse. Portland now is home to 28
Native American organizations working to
heal these ills. But as the report details they
have a long climb ahead.
One of the saddest statistics in the report
is that more than one in five Native
American children in Multnomah County
are in foster care, a rate 20 times higher than
for Whites.
For African Americans the rates are twice
as high as for Whites. Yet studies show that
Native Americans (and African Americans)
are NOT any more likely to abuse their chil-
dren. As experts at Tuesday’s (Nov 1)
Shoulder to Shoulder conference on chil-
dren in foster care explained, most children
are taken into care for neglect. And neglect
By helen Silvis
of The Skanner News
T
he Coalition of Communities of
Color has released a report on
Portland’s Native American commu-
nity that shows deep disparities in employ-
ment, income, graduation rates, children
taken into foster care and more…
For anyone who doesn’t already know the
history of Oregon’s Native Americans, the
100-page plus, must-read report is shocking
in its descriptions of “genocidal policies”
that began before the state was officially
founded and continued through the 20th
century. Examples include: broken treaties,
forced relocation, theft of native lands,
forced sterilization, children taken from
families and outright killings of Native peo-
ple.
“Our faith traditions were outlawed until
1993, and our children were forcibly
removed from our care and placed in resi-
dential schools, stripping our youth of cul-
ture and community, ” the report says.
“…we have been forcibly moved from
productive lands several times through his-
tory, with the most recent being in 1956
when we were forced from reservations and
is the second in a series of seven reports,
that will look at Portland’s Communities of
Color in detail. The first, powerful report
took an overview, and each of
the others will profile a single
community in greater detail.
Familiar
to
African
Americans will be this
report’s key points: First, this
long history of brutality and
repression remains a central
experience
for
Native
American
communities.
Healing is a long-term journey. Second, it’s
not just about history. Institutional racism
endures and hurts to this day.
The results can be seen in a host of statis-
tics many extracted from the 2009
American Communities Survey, that show
deep and worsening levels of disparity and
One in five Native American
children in Multnomah County
are in foster care, a rate 20
times higher than for Whites
into poor urban areas – with little more than
a one-way bus ticket. It is this recent histo-
ry which is a key factor in how Portland has
emerged as the 9th largest Native American
population in the USA.”
The Native American Community in
Multnomah County: An Unsettling Profile,
Matt OBrien
is connected with poverty because it often
amounts to families being too poor to feed,
clothe, house and care for their children.
Just look at Native American poverty lev-
els, for example:
One in three Native Americans live in
poverty in Multnomah County compared to
one in eight Whites. That’s more than 11
percent higher than the national poverty
High school students Eddy Ratcliff
and Kayla James attended the 2011
Portland College Fair Nov. 7 through
the Native American Youth and
Family program.
level for Native Americans. And the eco-
nomic downturn has hit Native Americans
far harder. Between 2000 and 2009 poverty
levels for Native American children under 5
more than doubled, rising from 24 percent
to 53 percent. For White children under
five it stayed steady at 12 percent. Look at
the other end of the age range and 21 per-
cent of Native elders live in poverty.
Unemployment is 9 percent for Native
Americans compared to 5.3 percent for
Whites. But as the report shows this doesn’t
tell the full story. Taking account of those
who are recently laid off, those who are not
working and not receiving retirement or dis-
ability income, the real unemployment rate
rises to 31 percent.
“The economy is failing to provide the
vast majority of Native Americans with
decent jobs at decent incomes,” the report
says.
Similarly troubling are the disparities that
exist in housing, healthcare, hunger, incar-
ceration rates and education. Some key fig-
ures include:
Fewer than half of Native children gradu-
november 9, 2011
See report on page 10
The Portland Skanner page 9