How is it any different where you came from? Once you become a teenager the gangs and predatory "adults" start closing in on you to either join/serve or be an outsider they abuse for amusement.
I say this from similar situation as you but I was 16. Much easier since I could legally work in restaurants (which is what I did). I have no idea how you would make it without the ability to work. I'm not saying that I want anyone to go through what I or you did. However it was blindingly clear to me even as a child that staying was equal to dying. I don't see how these people stay in these places having been there myself.
Someone posted the average income at pine ridge is <$4k. You can work for minimum wage for almost a 400% increase in income by leaving.
Mexico. This people needs the wisdom of a Mexican coacher.
Thriving despite racism, lack of money and no friends in town, but with a golden, fully legal document of citizenship granting free pass, and speaking the same language as everybody else?. Yep, Challenge accepted
I'm guessing however that the reservation was put in the most disadvantaged place for doing such traditional activities. A prarie is useless without it's bison. And bison are probably a protected species.
Many would call that poverty or subsistence but many long for it. It may be romanticised but it seems like the essence of life. Heimo Korth (?) In Alaska been doing it for 40 odd years.
People’s biggest problems are mostly not how to pass a FAANG interview.
Moving is very expensive. Then how can they afford rent in a more expensive area? How will they find jobs?
Once society has deemed you too poor to be useful, it is hard to escape that designation even if you make it out.
Length of history + history of repayment.
She goes back into debt right after.
In her youth, she didn't make much. She has since become a skilled professional though and now makes a very good salary.
She is still in debt.
I have friends who make mind boggling amounts of money and also have amazing debt. As they have made more their debt has gotten worse, not better.
A credit score says whether or not you have paid back your debts. Making more money does not fix the broken behavior - it often times makes it worse.
Biden, when he was VP under Obama, commuted back and forth to Delaware on the weekends still.
So, though I'd been responsible for a long time, it didn't count like it would have if I'd engaged in a lot more borrowing. Problem was, I valued being debt-free sooner for the flexibility it gave me.
After all, look at the etymology of mortgage - mort gage (old French), literally "death pledge". Thanks, but I prefer life without that kind of constraint.
And if one is born into generational poverty, in a place highly dependent on government intervention, its probably really hard to access the mindset and opportunities for education and entrepreneurial examples that could start to break the poverty trend.
Credit scores are intentionally a blend of elements. Generally the advice is to make one or two small credit purchases a month and pay them back - just enough to show consistent mild activity. Some people like using gas for this since credit cards are more fraud protected, but that may or may not be a "small purchase" for you.
When we talk about poverty, we want to seperate out the individual case (Bob is broke) from the group case (Mary's tribe is broke.) Fixing Bob's problems looks very different from fixing the tribes problems. (That doesn't mean the root problem is unrelated.)
Financial literacy education is unfortunately overrun with scams.
I was able to work with members of the Ute and Navajo tribes in Four Corners years ago when our company worked on reservation lands and was required to hire a percentage of local laborers. Those guys worked as hard as the rest of us out in the July sun down in the hot canyons. They laughed at and with each other poking jibes at each other since their tribes were traditionally not allies. It was all good-natured ribbing and I'm sure they knew each other or of each other before working with us. They worked the length of our contract in the area and had few issues with attendance or effort.
Local whites always talked down about the natives but I found them to be as dependable as Mexican and central American immigrants (legal or otherwise) that I worked with in Texas and other states. These people needed jobs and were willing to work to keep a job and the quality of their efforts was on par or better than the quality of local labor.
In contrast, our company cycled through local non-native help. Many of those people appeared and worked long enough to earn a paycheck and then disappeared. Some even played the employment game where a group of friends hired out to each of the three non-local companies and on any given day your rolls would show all of them working with one of your crews, some of them with one of your crews, or none of them with your crews that day. They went where they thought the best pay opportunity of the day would be and had a friend sign them in where they were expected to be so they could earn a check there too. This went on for weeks until one of our crews had a problem in the field and in the process of sorting it out and looking for a scapegoat, they went through the rolls of potential crew members who should have had responsibility and discovered that several people listed as being present and working did not show up at all.
Since the three companies were in the same business and everyone knew everyone else our party manager had a talk with the other guys and they compared employee rolls and discovered all the overlap and the system of sign-ins. All of those people were fired immediately when they showed up for their next day's work. These were ordinary white guys who all lived in that area.