Indian reservations (as called in the US) or reserves (in Canada) depicted as brutally impoverished places, often plagued by greedy corporations exploiting nearby natural resources at the expense of the locals and clashes with either authorities or (almost always white) citizens from the settler nation, who will use the jurisdiction differences of reservations to do whatever heinous action they wish, knowing they likely won't face legal actions for it. Residents of such places will often lack basic services and amenities, inhabit dilapidated shacks and trailers/RVs, drive The Alleged Car, and struggle with disproportionately high rates of addiction (especially to alcohol and, more recently, methamphetamine and inhalants), crime, unemployment, and suicide.
Since this aptly describes a lot of reservations—one example being South Dakota's Pine Ridge, which has been infamous in the US since The '70s for its low quality of life—this trope is also Truth in Television. Quality of life on US reservations is extremely poor on average, with high unemployment, low graduation rates, low incomes, and entire families often living in one cramped dwelling space. In 2017, over 80% of Canadian reserves had median income below the poverty line, according to census data.
That said, fiction tends to make this (and the Native American Casino) the only places where modern indigenous people live, but in Real Life, this is far from true. In both the US and Canada, the majority of Indigenous people live in cities or otherwise off-rez — and a variety of legal loopholes mean that many non-indigenous live on reservations. And depictions of all Indigenous people in a work as The Alcoholic, seen more in old-fashioned works, is now viewed as an offensive characterization and a Discredited Trope. Despite that, this trope is still used, often to call attention to the ongoing issues reservations and indigenous people continue to face due to policy conflicts with the settler country, though some have criticized the depiction as being akin to Poverty Porn in its ubiquity.
Subtrope of Injun Country. Tends to be a feature of Twilight of the Old West and New Old West stories. Compare and contrast other settings known for their neglect and poverty like Dying Town, Inner City School, and Wretched Hive. Exaggerated depictions may take this image all the way to Failed State-levels.
Examples:
- Scalped: The Prairie Rose Indian Reservation where the comic is primarily set is a complete drug-addled gang-run hellhole, riddled with crime, drug and alcohol addiction, and poverty.
- Hold the Dark takes place in the tiny Alaskan town of Keelut (named for a Native American creature of folklore) where the locals are predominantly poor Native Americans who are embittered at local white law enforcement.
- Skins: Beaver Creek Indian Reservation for the Lakota Sioux people is depicted as being a poor place with little going for it. Rudy, a tribal police officer struggles to help the town, as well as his brother Mogie, an alcoholic single father to a teenaged boy. At one point, Rudy goes berserk on a liquor store the next town over because it's explicitly profiting off of alcoholic residents from the reserve.
- Thunderheart: The residents of the Lakota reservation live in extreme poverty, are being forced off their Reservation, and are often vitctimized by corrupt men who want to get mining rights to their land.
- Wind River: The Wind River Indian Reservation is the primary setting for the film and it suffers from extreme poverty, lawlessness, and absence of proper law enforcement. Jane, a young white FBI agent stationed out in Las Vegas is assigned to a case at the reservation and is shocked by what she sees.
- Harvesting the Heart by Jodi Picoult's has Nicholas volunteer medical services at a Hopi reservation, as the reservation suffers from a lack of other doctors.
- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian: The Spokane Indian Reservation is a miserable place where everyone is poor and either an alcoholic, a recovering alcoholic or has their life affected by alcohol. Premature deaths, abuse and sadness are common there and Junior hates it.
- Longmire takes place right next to a Cheyenne reservation, and a big chunk of the series involves exploring the political and social issues that the reservation faces. Later on a Native American Casino is built partway through the series.
- Our America With Lisa Ling: "Life On The Rez" features the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the poorest rez in the country.
- Reservation Dogs is set on a Muscogee reservation in Oklahoma, where drugs and poverty run rampant. Despite this, there is room for healing and growth across the generations of people who call the rez home.
- Sons of Anarchy features a reservation in a few episodes. The residents are clearly poorer than the people in nearby Charming, and a local gang leader pretty much runs the place with the Reservation Police in his pocket, using it to grow shrooms and manufacture bullets to sell to criminals in the outside world. As the sheriff's department aren't allowed on the reservation, the SoA and the other gangs in town use it as a Truce Zone or to hold events that they don't want the cops spying in on.
- Yellowstone: The local Crow Indian Reservation is shown to be quite poor, in spite of the local casino. The proud residents maintain their cultural traditions while struggling to make ends meet. The tribe is respectful to Casey, the white husband of a local Crow woman, Monica, but they make it plain that they are not "his people." The reservation also has to worry about brain drain, as shown when Monica resists taking a lucrative teaching position off the reservation, since it would leave the reservation school with one less teacher.
- Red Dead Redemption II: The Wapiti Indian Reservation is a Wretched Hive by design, with the U.S. government sticking the tribe on land they cannot farm, cut off from decent hunting territory, and no way to find gainful employment. And now they'll be moved to an even worse place because oil has been discovered under it. More than that, the local army commander is hideously abusing the Wapiti, tacitly ordering assault, rape, arson, murder and withholding medicine from the sick, all to provoke the tribe into a rebellion he can crush so he can look good.
- In The Secret World, the Wabanaki reservation on Solomon Island, Maine plays with this trope. They were building a Native American Casino (shaped like a tipi that they themselves knew was inaccurate, but that was what the tourists expected) before the Fog arrived and they also have an "authentic Wabanaki village" that serves as a tacky tourist trap. However, most of the native residents actually live in a trailer park.
- Captain Planet and the Planeteers: One episode features an Indian reservation, highlighting some problems that a few reservations face like land not suitable for farming cash crops leading to low development and poverty. Looten Plunder tries to irrigate it, and does give the residents paying jobs, but didn't quite think it through, resulting in environmental damage. By the end of the episode, the natives go back to farming, but they farm crops that are native to the territory and set up wind turbines.
