What's Fair?

Once long ago, a wise old man who grew up on the Rosebud Reservation told me how, when he was a boy a century past, he saw his people quite regularly take advantage of Brule Sioux who lived all around their farm. 

That story didn't come as a shock. He was born on the reservation because of the Dawes Act, which determined, basically, that doling out money or land would take the "savage" out of Native people (an old Anglo reference). What it did was simply allow white people--like his own parents--to buy what had been reservation land (land held "in reserve" for Native people).

The Sioux would come around, he said, because they were receiving "reparations" by way of treaty obligations--blankets, food stuffs, often things they didn't use or care to. They knew their white neighbors would pay for such things, and they preferred the cash. They'd sell, white folks would buy, and everyone would be happy. Still, often as not, Native folks took a beating, he told me (his people were Dutch Calvinists, by the way).

Now life on the Rosebud Reservation, circa 1890, was no picnic for red or white. The Great Plains is an unwelcoming taskmaster, land as flat and dry as a soda cracker. Hot, punishing winds can lay out a crop in a single afternoon. No one had it easy on the Rosebud back then. Everyone suffered. No white folks lived in the lap of luxury. There was no luxury. There wasn't even a lap. Everyone was dirt poor.

The difference between my old friend's family and their Brule Sioux neighbors had little to do with money or food, and everything to do with worldview, broadly speaking. The white folks had left the Netherlands, even Sioux County, Iowa, on a whim and a dream, taking new opportunities and hoping for a new life. Their visions were so huge that many could never reach them. They wanted to build a good life, and to that end they had immense faith in their God and his Son, who they believed loved them, often more exclusively than anybody else on the prairie, in fact.

Meanwhile, the Brule Sioux were devastated, their culture destroyed. When the buffalo were killed, they'd lost what they were, what they valued, and how they even made judgments about anything; the very nature of their faith was theirs no longer. They may have had some government-issue blankets and flour, but they were a people without a vision, a people whose past was destroyed, whose way of life was gone. 

When a bunch of Indians rode up to a hardscrabble white farmer on the Rosebud Reservation in 1890, everyone was hungry, everyone was suffering, everyone was spending their strength on sheer survival. 

The only difference was the Native people had free blankets and flour, or so white folks thought; and that wasn't fair. They couldn't help thinking that, I'm sure. That they did made
gouging the neighbors easy.

This week Harvard economists crunched the numbers in a way that makes a way of life in the neighborhood where I live, Sioux County, Iowa, seem almost dreamy--marriages last, schools teach, jobs are ever available. It's the kind of place poor kids can grow up with a shockingly good chance of staring down their own poverty in a rear-view mirror. A beautiful thing--it really is. We lead the nation. We actually do. The entire nation. 

But much of it is a gift, a legacy, a heritage. Opportunities are only partially what people earn. The moment one begins to believe that everyone else in the nation can have what we have if they simply live like we do, we make assumptions that aren't fair. Some of us have incredible reparations that go far beyond hard, cold cash.

What Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren have determined about Sioux County, Iowa, helps me understand why the neighborhood is also so conservative. We work hard here, after all. We pledge ourselves to our families. When we see a problem, we lick it. 

So should you, dang it. 

We may well pride ourselves in our bootstraps, but we were never bootless. Never. Not even when we didn't have money.

Jesus may well have commended a child-like faith, but for me at least it takes superhuman strength I haven't got to admit it's eternally better to give than to receive and then to live that way.