DO YOU THINK LIVES OF HAWAIIANS WOULD IMPROVE UNDER THE AKAKA BILL ?
Just look at these comments from the Senate Indian Affairs Committee March 11, 2003 letter to the Budget Committee justifying their budget request for fiscal year 2004.
"Native people in the U.S. continue to rank at or near the bottom of nearly every social, health and economic indicator as compared to all other citizens.
"Natives continue to suffer the highest rates of unemployment and poverty, live in substandard housing, have poor health, receive an inadequate education, and contend with disintegrating social systems, all of which erode both the quality and dignity of life in Native communities.
"Improving effectiveness in the Indian agencies is important but also recognizes that these agencies have witnessed a pattern of under-funding for decades and that, in part at least, increased resources are needed to alleviate the dire conditions in Native America and address the basic human needs Native people.
"The educational attainment for Native youth is deficient compared with other groups in the U.S. For example, Native youth receive fewer high school and college degrees.
"An aggravating factor in educational achievement is the continued inability of the Federal government to ensure adequate, safe and clean educational facilities conducive to learning.
"There is also unmet demand for electricity in Native communities: a recent Department of Energy report estimated that 14.2% of all Native homes on reservations have no access to electricity compared to just 1.4% of all U.S. households.
"With unemployment averaging 43% and poverty rampant, Native communities are particularly sensitive to high energy prices. Given the near-complete absence of a private sector in most Native communities, 31.2 % of Natives live in poverty.
"In the U.S. today, the unemployment rate is 5.8%, whereas the rate for Natives is near 50% - twice that of the national unemployment rate in the Great Depression.
"The earning capacity of Natives also lags behind that of other Americans - for every $100 earned by the average American family, an Indian family earns $62. The per capita income for Indians averages $8,284.
"Most striking are the health statistics involving Native people - diabetes, tuberculosis, alcoholism, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) and increasingly, AIDS, plague Native communities at rates far and above the incidence for other Americans."
