New Trail of Tears

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on issues of child welfare, as well as a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. A former New York Post columnist and a former Wall Street Journaleditor and writer, she is the author of several books on education, religion and family.Ms. Riley’s writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, and the Washington Post, among other publications. She appears regularly on Fox News and Fox Business and CNBC. She has also appeared on Q&A with Brian Lamb as well as the Today Show.She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with degrees in English and Government. She lives in the suburbs of New York City with her husband, Jason, and their three children.

“The New Trail of Tears is a much-needed revelation of heart-breaking conditions on American Indian reservations—and of the attitudes, incentives, and politics that make the people living on those reservations even worse off than other low-income minorities, including American Indians living elsewhere in American society. The laws and policies behind these human tragedies have wider implications for welfare state assumptions and politically correct decisions, including the grossly misnamed ‘Indian Child Welfare Act.’ This book is an insightful and much-needed introduction to a subject that deserves much more public attention than it gets, both for its own sake and for what it reveals about the political and ideological climate of our time.”—Thomas Sowell“I've grubbed in the data regarding American Indian poverty for years, but none of my numbers will have the effect of Naomi Riley's investigation and prose. Through clear thinking and personal accounts, she articulates why this ignored minority remains in poverty and how they can escape it. The New Trail of Tears is a must read if you care about the plight of poor people, in general, and American Indians, in particular.”—Terry L. Anderson, author of Unlocking the Wealth of Indian Nations and senior fellow of The Hoover Institution at Stanford University“Clear evidence of the tragedy that results when individual property rights are equated with group rights.”—Amity Shlaes, presidential scholar at the Kings College and author of Coolidge and The Forgotten Man“The New Trail of Tears is a powerful antidote to the romantic nonsense about the history of American Indian groups that pervades our school curriculum today, and a stinging indictments of the paternalistic public policies that continue to keep most Indians mired in poverty even now. Written in lively and lucid prose, it is my candidate for the book-of-the-year on racial issues in the United States.”—Stephan Thernstrom, Winthrop Professor of History Emeritus at Harvard University