Space, Labor Markets, and History: An Exploration of American Indian Employment Hardship and Socioeconomic Inequality

Too little sociological attention has been paid to questions surrounding the inequalities and deprivation experienced by American Indians. Integrating insights from American Indian history and the race and labor market inequality literatures, I address this gap in this dissertation through a historically-informed labor market analysis of American Indian underemployment, unemployment, income, and poverty---an analysis that gauges how the spatial dispersion of Native inequality across each of these outcomes is shaped by two major demographic and economic shifts: 1) the rapid urbanization of the Native population and resulting heterogeneity in the labor contexts in which Native Americans now reside, and; 2) the proliferation of tribally owned casinos. My analyses draw on novel two-tiered data that embed individual Natives and Non-Hispanic Whites from the 2007-2011 American Community Survey within the local labor markets in which they reside. This allows for comparison of American Indian versus White labor market and socioeconomic inequalities across localities and labor market contexts. A key nuance to this data is its capacity to not only quantify the effect of general local labor market conditions, but also to gauge the effect of the presence of Native-owned casinos. Noteworthy among my findings is the enduring and incredibly rigid nature of American Indian labor market and poverty disadvantages in the U.S.---disadvantages largely unaffected by residence and variations in general labor market opportunity. The inclusion of tribal casino presence, in conjunction with interactions with locality type, shows moderate inequality reductions, though hardly enough to compensate for the significant race/ethnic deprivation that we find across the U.S. I conclude by discussing the relevance/irrelevance of traditional labor market opportunity conceptions for American Indians, the pertinence of Native-controlled employment avenues, and how future sociological scholarship on the topic might effectively move forward.