INVOLVEMENT OF AMERICAN INDIAN YOUTH IN GANGS
Virtually nothing is known about the involvement of American Indian youth in gangs. However, recent evidence suggests that a gang culture and gang membership have diffused to many Native American Indian communities. The purpose of this article is to examine the results of a self-report study among American Indian youth from several western states. The results indicate that about 5 percent of males, but less than 1 percent of females reported actual gang membership. In addition, about 10 percent of male and female respondents reported hanging around with gangs. When compared to non-gang Indian youth, level of drug involvement and involvement in delinquent activities washigherforin-gang youth and those who hang around with gangs. Youth who reported hanging around with gangs also reported higher drug use and involvement in delinquent activities than non-gang youth, but lower than those who reported actual membership in gangs. Conditions of poverty, lack of economic opportunities, discrimination, and the erosion of cultural identity provide the structural conditions for the attractiveness of gangs to Indian youth. The actual diffusion of gang culture is dependent on contact between Indian youth and non-Indian youth with knowledge about gangs. The article considers several important areas for research on gang emergence in Native American Indian communities.
ARRESTS AMONG HOMELESS AND RUNAWAY YOUTHS: THE EFFECTS OF RACE AND GENDER
ABSTRACT This study examined the contributions of race and gender to the likelihood of a first post-run arrest for a more serious and less serious offense in a sample of homeless and runaway youths from four Midwestern states. Event history analysis was used to test the hypothesis that race and gender would interact so that the likelihood of a first post-run arrest for a more serious and less serious offense would be highest for non-white males and non-white females, respectively. Potentially confounding factors—deviant subsistence strategies, substance use, gang involvement and membership, prior arrests, age, prior physical abuse, age on own, and spending time on the street—were controlled in the analyses. The hypotheses regarding the interaction of race and gender were not supported by the data. Non-whites were more likely than whites, and males were more likely than females, to be arrested for a more serious offense, and white females were more likely than non-white females to be arrested for a less serious offense.
American children and the "Children of Nature".
No series of articles on early American child care would be complete without a study of the traditional care given Indian children. They were, it hardly needs to be said, the native American children. Their care and education express the wisdom of people who had lived in contact with the soil and climate of America thousands of years before the Europeans. Moreover, these native ways of child care were a part of the cultures with which the Europeans mixed and fought in the process of conquest. Indian medicine and education were, like all other aspects of Indian culture, examples to be imitated or examples to be avoided—a native background into which some new Americans merged and against which others stood out. As we review these earlier Indian childrearing practices, we gain perspectives on European attitudes toward Native Americans, and at the same time, learn much of attitudes of the American