Indians were pushed from the east to the barren west, and most of the Indian reservations were located in remote areas unfit for agriculture, much less for investment in industrial development. Most of the tribes, with scattered reservations of varying sizes, were unable to obtain adequate land for development and were therefore subject to severe development restraints.
There are currently about 310 Native American reservations in the United States, accounting for about 2.3% of the U.S. territory, and not all federally recognized tribes have their own reservations. These reservations are mostly located in remote and barren areas with poor living conditions and inadequate access to water and other vital resources, where 60% of the road system are dirt or gravel roads. On the surface, Indians are no longer the subject of “extermination”, but just “forgotten”, “invisible” and “discriminated against”; yet in reality, they are simply left there for self-extermination.
The U.S. government has also systematically used Indian reservations as toxic or nuclear waste dumps through the means of deception and coercion, subjecting them to long-term exposure to uranium and other radioactive materials. As a result, the cancer incidence and fatality rates in the communities concerned is significantly higher than in other parts of the country. Indian communities have effectively become the “garbage cans” in the development process of the United States.
For instance, in the Navajo Nation reservation, the largest Indian tribe in the United States，about a quarter of women and some infants have large amounts of radioactive substances in their bodies. During the 40-plus years prior to 2009, the U.S. government had reportedly conducted a total of 928 nuclear tests in the area inhabited by the Shoshone tribe of American Indians, producing approximately 620,000 tons of radioactive fallout, nearly 48 times the amount of radioactive fallout from the 1945 atomic bombing in Hiroshima, Japan.
