Wed,
Jul. 17, 2002
American Indians finding
success at nation building
Newsday
To most Americans, nation building seems part of our past. Yet
today, American Indian nations are rewriting constitutions, establishing their
own courts, hiring their own police, running everything from sewage systems to
schools, delivering health care, collecting taxes, regulating businesses,
negotiating with city, county, state and federal counterparts and managing
growing financial portfolios. They are building institutions and delivering the
services expected of any successful government.
For more than a century, institutions of tribal governance were
toothless and alien, as the U.S. government made the decisions in Indian Country
and imposed its ideas of how tribes should be governed. Now, as Indian nations
struggle for independence in the courts and Congress, genuine self-rule and
economic self-sufficiency are changing that.
As with other nations around the world, Indian self-government can
lead either forward to successful development or backward to underdevelopment
and disgrace. But the successes are mounting.
At the Choctaw reservation in Mississippi, a tribally owned and
largely manufacturing-based economy supports full employment, rising incomes,
disappearing welfare dependency, resurgent native language and culture and a
full array of Choctaw-provided public services. Phillip Martin, 75, became chief
of the Mississippi Band of Choctaws 22 years ago and is credited with leading
them to more prosperity.
At the Flathead reservation in Montana, capital investment flows
into the reservation's private, Indian-owned businesses and vacation economy
because the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes run a government and court
system that is a model of efficiency. The citizens of Cochiti Pueblo in New
Mexico live and govern by ancient traditions and run a retirement resort
community.
At the Ho-Chunk Nation in Nebraska, an independent tribal
corporation runs hotels, convenience stores and dot-coms by insulating business
from politics; the nation's unemployment has dropped from 70 percent to less
than 15 percent in five years. At the Fond du Lac reservation in Minnesota, the
Ojibwe have built a foster-care program that is a model for state governments.
The successes in Indian nation building share three key attributes.
First is the assertion of maximum tribal control over tribal affairs. Second is
the ability to self-govern. This requires solid constitutions, courts that
impartially uphold tribal law and the separation of business affairs from
politics through privatization and/or separately chartered tribal corporations.
The third key is the trickiest: finding a "cultural
match" -- a fit between the structure of government and the community's
norms about how authority ought to be used. There is traditional theocracy at
Cochiti Pueblo and parliamentary democracy at Flathead. In both places, a rule
of law is protected from petty politics by institutions that the people respect.
What works well in one Indian nation does not necessarily guarantee
economic or cultural success in another. And culture is subtle. It isn't taught
in classrooms; it is lived. Legitimate self-rule works because it relies on
those with the best chance of figuring out which institutions will work for
them.
Stephen Cornell, of the University of Arizona, and Joseph P. Kalt of Harvard, founded and co-direct the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development.