What ‘...sailed the ocean blue’ doesn’t tell you

Contextualizing the finance news you need to know.

Rising property values and the resulting passive income it can generate is one version of the American Dream. And unlocking the secrets of this money stream might just be why you signed up for this newsletter (thanks for reading!). After all, as our friend Money with Katie reminded us when talking about the housing affordability crisis, it’s the land underneath a house that’s the real appreciating asset.

But in the US, that land has a dark origin. If you thought “the talk” with your parents about where babies come from was traumatic, just wait ’til you discover how your American backyard came to be. That’s why “celebrating” Columbus Day—despite its strategic origin to help white society accept Italian Americans, who had been facing widespread discrimination in the US at the time—is more horrifying than the most twisted Halloween tale.

But on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, it’s not enough to recognize the brutality of colonization. The consequences of the violent land theft still negatively affect the personal finances of Native people today, and there’s a persistent wealth gap to prove it.

Consider the Dawes Act of 1887, which was designed to force Native people to assimilate and divide tribal land into 160-acre farming plots per household. “It’s a pretty decent piece of land,” said Andrew Johnson, the executive director of the Native American Chamber of Commerce for Illinois and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, in an interview with Money Scoop. “But with the economic conditions, there was no way that one could hold on to the land.” Often the land was unsuitable for farming—if the new owner even knew how to farm—so generating wealth from it was nearly impossible.

The sudden division of once-communal lands frustrated development, too. “If you’re on a reservation that has been allotted, you might be looking at a reservation that is literally in a checkerboard shape,” Beth Redbird, a Northwestern University sociology professor and a member of the Choctaw Nation, told Money Scoop. “If you want to build any underground infrastructure [going] to that reservation, you have to get permission to go through land that is owned by a completely different person [every other acre]. So, you encounter plenty of reservation lands to which there’s no water, no electricity, and no broadband.”

Today the US Department of the Interior acknowledges that the Act had “unintended consequences, including the dramatic reduction of the amount of land owned by American Indians and Alaska Natives,” to the tune of 90 million acres. (Whoops.)

Native-led movements like Land Back are now pushing to reclaim their territory. (Sometimes that involves buying back those acres—a controversial issue among Indigenous peoples.) And there are various resources to help Native people decolonize and rebuild their wealth, even if that concept looks a little different.

The UN established a framework of minimum standards for Indigenous people to exercise their right to self-determination, but the US still has plenty of work to do to right its wrongs. Last year’s federal recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a start.