Reservations in the United States, known as Indian reservations, are sovereign Native American territories that are managed by a tribal government in cooperation with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, a branch of the Department of the Interior, located in Washington, DC. There are 334 reservations in the United States today. As of 2008, almost a third of Native Americans in the United States live on reservations, totaling approximately 700,000 individuals. About half of all Native Americans living on reservations are concentrated on the ten largest reservations.
Allen, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, has the lowest per capita income in the country. The alcohol depo of Whiteclay, Nebraska sold over 4.9 million 12-ounce cans of beer in 2010 almost exclusively to Oglala Lakota from the reservation.
The large expanses of land on some reservations are used as garbage dumps for metropolitan areas.
Many believe economic revival must originate on the reservation, and incorporate the cultures of the peoples who reside on them.
An American Indian reservation is an area of land held and governed by a U.S. federal government-recognized Native American tribal nation, whose government is autonomous, subject to regulations passed by the United States Congress and administered by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, and not to the U.S. state government in which it is located. Some of the country's 574 federally recognized tribes govern more than one of the 326 Indian reservations in the United States, while some share reservations, and others have no reservation at all. Historical piecemeal land allocations under the Dawes Act facilitated sales to non–Native Americans, resulting in some reservations becoming severely fragmented, with pieces of tribal and privately held land being treated as separate enclaves. This jumble of private and public real estate creates significant administrative, political, and legal difficulties.
Most Indian reservations, like the Laguna Indian reservation in New Mexico (pictured here in March 1943), are in the western United States, often in regions suitable more for ranching than farming.
Wagon loaded with squash, Rosebud Indian Reservation, ca. 1936
Fort Stanwix, New York
Red Cliff Indian Reservation in Wisconsin during their annual pow wow