What Can Tribes Do? Strategies and Institutions in American Indian Economic Development

American Indian Policy: Self-Governance and Economic Development

Especially since the shift in federal Indian policy beginning in the 1970s toward a greater political and economic autonomy for reservation tribes, the hope has been that greater self-determination would promote increased economic development. For reasons explored in these two volumes, however, that hope has remained largely unrealized; Indian country is littered with development projects left incomplete or gone awry.

What Can Tribes Do? is a collection of research and analytical essays produced by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, an effort funded largely by the Ford Foundation and carried out over a four-year period by faculty and graduate students at the JFK School of Government. The analysis and presentation are of high quality and the volume ranks among the best and most comprehensive academic treatments of the subject to date -- a cogent example of competent applied policy analysis.

Tribal economic progress, the editors suggest, is very difficult, for tribes themselves have only minimal control over several key ingredients of economic development -- among them the availability of natural resources, market opportunity, and the distance to markets -- an only moderate control of such factors as political sovereignty, tribal culture, and access to capital. On the other hand, tribes can exert considerable control over at least three important elements -- their governing institutions, their economic policies, and their choice of development activities. It is to an examination of these latter three factors that the bulk of this volume is directed.

Sustainable economic development in Indian Country requires sound political and economic institutions coupled with reasoned and carefully-crafted development policies. "Indeed, in our research two factors more than any others distinguish successful tribes from unsuccessful ones: de facto sovereignty and effective institutions of self-governance" (p. 14). Though given their status as "domestic dependent nations" and their trust relationship with the federal government, tribes will likely never attain full political autonomy, they can achieve a de facto sovereignty which involves effective decision-making control over most tribal affairs and resources. (Those tribes which are most successful in economic development, they observe, have reduced the role of the Bureau of Indian Affairs from one of economic czar to that of technical advisor.)

Real tribal power over economic decisions, however, depends on the effectiveness of the tribes' governing institutions -- on their constitutions, laws, and political structure -- and on the ability of these institutions to provide a climate in which investors feel secure. And the viability of these governing institutions depends in large measure on the extent to which they are consistent with the tribes' cultural norms regarding political legitimacy. "[W]here tribes' governments are not backed up by accepted cultural standards of propriety, tribal governments can become destabilizing forces that discourage not only the effective exercise of political and social sovereignty, but economic development as well" (p.19). Successful, productive tribal governments are those characterized by a distinct separation of their executive and legislative powers, the existence of an independent judiciary, and the isolation of electoral politics from the day-today administration of tribal business enterprises.

That this prescription involves the adoption of essentially Anglo-American political institutions and procedures will not escape most observers. Moreover, as the authors point out, various cultural attributes of the tribes -- such as their receptivity to hierarchy and commercialization, their attitudes toward interacting with non-tribal members, and the influence of clans -- all have implications for the type and extent of development activities. But large-scale economic development, the authors argue, is not necessarily at loggerheads with more traditional cultural norms.

The study concludes that tribal sovereignty (be it only de facto) is a prerequisite for sustained economic development and applauds federal policies such as P.L. 638 and the BIA Self-Governance Project which are designed to further self-determination. The aim of federal and state Indian policy "should be to enhance tribal sovereignty over economic matters, with federal and state efforts aimed at support for technical assistance."

American Indian Policy wrestles, less successfully, with several of the issues analyzed by the Harvard Project study but lacks the latter's thematic coherence and analytic rigor. Grouped under the two headings of self-governance and economic development and self-governance (sic), the articles by the contributors are quite disparate, some rather tangential to the issues at hand and others lacking analytical bite. The linkage between the two issues is not adequately drawn and the volume falls rather short of the editors' hope that it will provide "a useful resource to individuals undertaking the task of evaluating the efficacy of self-government" (p. x).

Several of the individual contributions, however, are thought-provoking. In a lively analysis of the legal basis of Indian "sovereignty" and a critique of recent federal self-determination policies, Ward Churchill argues that self-determination (as opposed to self- administration) is a legal fiction and a sham. Federal Indian law, he maintains, "is not, and was never, so much a matter of law as it is, and always was, an exercise in rationalizing the extension and maintenance of colonial domination over every indigenous nation [the United States] has ever encountered" (p.40). True self-governance would entail the destruction of the IRA tribal constitutional structure, the severance of all ties with the BIA, and the renunciation of the federal trust relationship -- heady stuff indeed.

Russell Brach argues that recent federal self-governance demonstration programs are nothing more than the usual block-grant funding arrangements. Congress, in his view is not willing to grant any real autonomy to tribal governments nor allow them "to make more decisions for themselves [unless] they are willing to pay for them," a policy which makes sense in Washington as a budget reduction measure but "makes no sense at all on the reservations...where tribes have no visible means of support -- other than gambling and resource liquidation" (p.59).

Other contributors are rather more sanguine. C. Patrick Morris offers the successful tribal college movement as a model of self-determination which works. And Joseph Kalt and Stephen Cornell argue that the "tribe as corporation" model has a proven track record in sustained economic development -- as demonstrated by the experiences of the Mescalero Apache and the White Mountain Apache tribes. The tribes "have acquired the two fundamental ingredients...on which economic development is based: human and financial capital, and the legal and economic environment needed to attract and hold it" (p.143).

By and large, however, this collection of essays represents more of a pot pourri than a comprehensive and integrated treatment of its themes. In this regard, the Harvard Project study is far superior.

Richard L. Schott

University of Texas at Austin