Editor’s note: This is the second in a periodic series about regional trends and issues that were examined in the 2005 Colorado College State of the Rockies Report Card.
Around the West, Native American nations are recapturing control over their lives, communities, tribal lands and heritage. Examples of this trend include:
The Southern Utes in southwest Colorado are trying to save their culture and language from extinction, while equipping their children with the education necessary to succeed in today’s world. They have established the Southern Ute Academy, reacting to what the mother of one student argued: “When you lose your language, you lose yourself.”
The Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico has fought long and hard to recover Blue Lake, considered the source of their creation and essential to the very identity of the Taos Pueblo people. After 64 years, the lake and surrounding land are now available exclusively for tribal use.
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana petitioned to regain control over the bison range intricately tied to their culture, finally reaching an agreement with federal agencies to have significant management responsibilities for the National Bison Range. Fred Matt, tribal chairman, says, “The tribes’ presence on the Bison Range is something everyone will benefit from. We owe this to our ancestors.”
As professor Charles Wilkinson of the University of Colorado law school has noted, “Over the past two generations, the tribes have achieved dramatic successes. … Tribal governments now are clearly the real governments in Indian country.” What is going on around the Rockies to fuel these and other examples of Native Americans recapturing control over their lands and lives? The question can’t be discussed without considering the matter of tribal sovereignty. The National Congress of American Indians states that Indian nations are sovereign governments, recognized in the U.S. Constitution and in hundreds of treaties, providing a broad range of governmental services on tribal lands throughout the country. However, one must keep in mind that, in the words of 19th century U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall, tribes are “domestic, dependent sovereigns” over which Congress has authority. The challenge facing tribal governments, then, is to maintain and exercise their powers of self- governance in the context of their relationship with the federal and state governments.
The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development takes a different slant, first admitting that the term “sovereignty” has multiple meanings, interpretations and implications, even when applied to Indian affairs. At the term’s core, however, is “the inherent right or power to govern.”
So there are three dimensions to our approach toward tribal sovereignty: Indian tribes possess inherent power over all internal affairs; States are precluded from interfering with tribes in their self-government; and Congress has full power to limit such sovereignty. So, tribes possess powers of self-government other than those that Congress has specifically removed.
The Colorado College State of the Rockies Project has spent six months sifting through dozens of examples of Native American individuals, communities and tribes exercising their sovereign authority to regain self-governance in areas of culture and language, social and political conditions, and environmental and natural resources. The following examples from the 2005 Colorado College State of the Rockies Report Card stand out, both for the energy and enthusiasm embedded in actions taken, and for the range of activities Native Americans are tackling. Not all may approve of outsiders, or even other Native Americans, but the freedom to choose tribal futures is inherent in the proper use of sovereignty:
Isleta Pueblo, N.M.: Acting under the amended Clean Water Act that authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to treat Indian nations as states with regard to water quality, the pueblo sued the city of Albuquerque over discharges from its waste-treatment facility into the Rio Grande, 5 miles upstream from the Isleta Pueblo Reservation. The court upheld the right of the pueblo to establish more stringent water quality standards than those applied by the federal government.
Navajo Nation in portions of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah: With 60 percent of reservation residents without phone service and the cost of connecting some homes by landline in the range of $100,000, the tribe has established Sacred Wind Communications, a Navajo-run company creating a hybrid system of wireless communications to serve even the most remote residents.
Skull Valley Goshutes in Utah: Nuclear waste disposal usually creates the ultimate “not-in-my-backyard” response from those who live near a proposed storage site. But the Goshutes of the Skull Valley Reservation in Utah are pursuing the opportunity to create on the reservation a “temporary” storage site for thousands of tons of nuclear waste, considering it an economic boon for this small, 18,000-acre reservation with 500 members. Authority exists under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act for the federal government to seek out volunteer candidates for temporary storage until a permanent facility is completed.
The state of Utah and many other opponents do not believe “temporary” storage means what it says, given continuing problems with the Department of Energy’s proposed “permanent” storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Other examples can be found in the 2005 Rockies Report Card. Not everyone will agree that all cases of exercising sovereignty are “positive,” and some may not even agree that Native Americans should have the right to such sovereignty. But researchers at the Rockies Project find this wave of actions by tribes and reservations an exciting and encouraging trend throughout our region, one that will bring control of lives and communities back down to the people who are closest to the problems and whose solutions are most innovative.
Professor Hecox is director of the State of the Rockies Project at Colorado College. Rebecca Schild is a project student researcher and is majoring in international sustainable development.
For more information on the Rockies Report Card, go to www.coloradocollege.edu/stateoftherockies.
