The story of the wealth gap in Massachusetts has mostly been told in context of Black and white residents – leaving the Native American perspective largely ignored.
A new report released Tuesday from Boston Indicators hopes to change that narrative with in-depth analysis of not just the amount of wealth in the state’s Native American community, but how wealth is defined among the community.
“For Native people to address these inequities in wealth, it’s not just about growing a bank account, increased retirement savings [or] increased home ownership,” said J. Cedric Woods, director of the Institute for New England Native American Studies at UMass Boston and co-author of the report. “It’s being able to restore those connections with homelands and home waters.”
The report found that 36% of Native Americans in Massachusetts have an income over $100,000 per year, compared to 50% of non-Natives.
The report also highlights other gaps in education and labor. The research found 44% of Natives in Massachusetts have a high school degree or less, compared to 31% of non-Natives. Forty-one percent of Native Americans in Massachusetts are homeowners, compared to 63% of non-Natives.
The Boston Indicators report is the first of its kind to dig into the wealth data and perspectives of the Native American community in Massachusetts. It largely uses data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and responses from a focus group of 18 Native community members living in Massachusetts.
Woods said that the effects of historical discrimination still linger to this day. For example, the 1869 Massachusetts Indian Enfranchisement and Allotment Act severed Native families from their ancestral homelands by fragmenting Tribal lands into taxable individual plots. Many Native families then lost those lands to tax liens. More than a century later, the state could’ve helped right that wrong by establishing an Indian Housing Authority in 1977. Instead, the Commonwealth elected not to, thus depriving Native families access to affordable housing and exacerbating the wealth gap in the state.
“When we’re talking about that reconnection, we’re talking about Native peoples having to work doubly, triply hard to undo and to mitigate the harm that’s been caused to their communities as a result of the state policies,” Woods said.
For Woods, who is a member of the Lumbee Tribe in North Carolina, nothing from the report was a surprise. Having spent more than three decades in Massachusetts working with the Native American community, the findings of the report were a “validation” of what he’s heard from the local Native community.
While wealth is typically thought of in a monetary sense, the Boston Indicators report found that Natives tend to gauge their wealth in terms of community and culture.
One of the 18 focus group participants said, “If we’re talking about disparities in… monetary wealth, that’s one thing, but in terms of talking about wealth from a Native perspective, it’s a whole different concept.”
This participant said “from an Indigenous point of view, the idea of wealth disparities, or some people having wealth and some people having nothing, is not the way we would look at things.“
Jim Peters, executive director of the Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs, seconded this point of having to grapple with two different definitions of wealth – the definition of the dominant white culture and the one that he grew up with among other Natives.
Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, lives in his grandfather’s fishing shack on the southeastern coast of Cape Cod. Surrounded by his affluent neighbors and with the overdevelopment of the land in recent years, Peters says he doesn’t have the same relationship with nature or the community that he grew up with.
“That pristine relationship with nature that I grew up is no longer here. How do you compare that with money? Our value systems are very different,” Peters said. “Try to eat those dollars.”
