I asked Anthony Morse what life is like for teens and young adults in the Lower Sioux Indian Community. The subject came up again last year when I was interviewing some American Indian young people for an earlier MinnPost project and I first heard the term “18 Money.” But none of the Ojibwe bands pay enough in per capita money to be called a living wage, so a good education - beyond high school - seems of extreme importance.
While the lump sum received as a young adult may be significant, Minnesota’s Ojibwe bands offer only modest monthly per capita payments through adulthood - or none at all. I remember wondering how many Ojibwe kids really did use this coming-of-age windfall for post-secondary education. Sometimes people “buy lots of things” when they get the money, he said. He told me his mom wanted him to go to college. Thousands of these Minnesota kids expect to receive large sums of money when they reach adulthood.
The student was explaining a high-stakes tradeoff facing American Indians who grow up in the era of tribal-run casinos. The money, he said, would come from the reservation where he was an enrolled tribal member. You can read the whole series here.Ī few years ago, one of my 5th grade students, who is Ojibwe, told me that he would get “a lot of money” when he grew up.
