[mklim]

Up until 2015 there was a related but more consequential issue that made it extremely hard to prosecute crimes committed on reservations by non-Natives. Tribal governments couldn't prosecute non-Native offenders, instead those crimes fell under federal jurisdiction--and the federal government itself is generally uninterested in prosecuting petty crime. [1] Off-reservation offenders would deliberately go onto the reservation and target the population there because they knew that it was practically impossible for them to be prosecuted, allegedly. Native American women experience sexual violence at much, much higher rates than the general population at least in part because of the jurisdiction issues. [2] VAWA passed in 2013 though, closing the loophole as far as I'm aware. [3]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/on-indi...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/us/native-americans-strugg...

[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/06/vawa-native-america...

[hermitdev]

Former resident of Montana. A lot of the eastern reservations are considered no-stop zones. i.e. you better have enough gas to get through. Western reservations, not so much. Western reservations are pretty congenial and open to others. Flathead reservation strikes one point, but my high school also had a friendly rivalry with Polson (also on a reservation).

[fapjacks]

I was married to a mostly white girl (one-quarter Indian) that grew up on the Crow reservation and we visited frequently. I found the Crow reservation to be nothing like I'd heard. People were friendly to me and I could count on one hand the number of times I ever got a mean mug. At the time, my unit had just reclassed from infantry to cavalry, so I was a US Army cav scout married to a Crow Indian. Anyway, I realize it's anecdote and only one point on a graph. But people were always friendly to me and I never felt unsafe, or like I should just keep on driving.