Counties with Native American reservations have some of the highest income inequality in the state, data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows.
In many of those counties, which are also some of the poorest in the state, a small group of people are relatively well-off while large portions of the population have very low incomes.
The findings come from a county-by-county calculation of the “Gini Coefficient,” a measure of inequality. The Gini index runs from 0 to 1, where 0 means everyone has equal income and 1 means one person has all the income. The United States as a whole has a Gini Coefficient of 0.469, while South Dakota’s is 0.44 – meaning South Dakota has less inequality than the rest of the country.
That’s not the case on many reservations. Of the 10 South Dakota counties with the highest inequality, five have large reservations. Sioux County, just over the North Dakota border on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, has the ninth-highest inequality in the country.
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Mike McCurry, the state demographer, attributed that inequality to the poverty and unemployment on many reservations – and to the presence of well-paying government jobs.
“The pay for the average reservation job is higher than the state median. If you have a job on Crow Creek or Pine Ridge, the chances are, you’re doing pretty well by it,” McCurry said. “But there’s so many people who don’t have jobs.”
Not all reservation counties have high inequality. While Corson, Todd, Buffalo, Dewey and Ziebach counties are all among the least equal, Shannon County – home to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation – is near the state average.
Pennington County is slightly less equal than the state as a whole, with a Gini Coefficient of 0.454.
“Pennington is about what we’d expect from a county that’s got a lot of social stratification but a lot of jobs,” McCurry said.
Minnehaha County, home of Sioux Falls, is just below the state inequality average with a Gini Coefficient of 0.422.
The highest inequality in the state actually is found in sparsely populated Perkins County.
“Perkins County is one of these central counties where the farms have gotten really big,” McCurry said. “You’re basically developing one class that owns a lot of assets and one class that works for a living. The two are very different in terms of income.”
Another oddity in the inequality data comes from eastern counties with growing Hutterite colonies. Because those colonies practice communal ownership of goods, residents there don’t have individual income.
“Since the Hutterites live on colonies without any personal income, that means that out in (heavily Hutterite) Faulk County, 20 percent of residents show no income whatsoever. It really skews the index of inequality up,” said McCurry.
Contact David Montgomery at 394-8329 or david.montgomery@rapidcityjournal.com.