“Jobbing It” On & Off-Reservation: How Tribal Fathers with Criminal Records Find Work

• In Event: 3520 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 5. Family and Religion

Abstract

Many tribal reservations have unemployment rates over 80% (Henson 2008), but they have been excluded from considerations of long-term joblessness and its consequences. The Yurok and Hoopa Valley reservations in northern California are no exception, particularly following the decline of the local logging industry since the 1980s (Slack & Jensen 2004, PPRC 2003). By not studying rural reservations, sociologists limit their theoretical understanding of inequality and impair policy makers’ ability to meet the needs of the families and job seekers who call these areas home.
With this project, the author extends considerations of unemployment to include the experience of American Indian men, using ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with 35 tribal respondents living on and off-reservation to answer the question: how do tribal fathers with criminal records manage the process of finding work? Those tribal men who look for work post-incarceration face the double disadvantage of discrimination in the hiring process (Pager 2003, 2007) and a slack local labor market. In collaboration with the Yurok Tribal Court, the author adopts a community-based participatory research design to provide an in-depth, narrative-based account of their job search strategies, how they provide for themselves in the absence of formal employment, and how living on vs. living off-reservation can shape these processes. In doing so, the author adds a new lens to studies of concentrated disadvantage by describing how the “reservation” represents both a physical space and a social institution that shapes contemporary inequality. With this theoretical insight, this investigation nuances considerations of how social networks and informal employment shape male labor force attachment. This submission is drawn from this work, detailing the specific methodologies used to document the experience of a virtually unstudied population.

Author

• Blythe K George, Harvard University