Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg visited the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana last weekend, and took to Facebook to shed light on how federal policies have failed Native Americans with the current state of reservation economies.
On the Blackfeet Reservation, unemployment is over 10 percent and of those employed, 70 percent work for the tribal or federal government. The most recent startup business, a fabric shop, opened five years ago, and the last hope for industrial development was a pencil company that closed in 1981.
These abysmal economic conditions pale compared to health and social ills: life expectancy on the Blackfeet reservation is 20 years less than the national average; 50 out of 196 babies in 2016 were born with drug dependency from their drug-addicted mothers; and they struggle with “dual issues of starvation and obesity.”
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