Publications

Misconceptions about Native nations and their sovereignty create obstacles for tribal governments and can lead to discrimination against tribal members. But things are changing in Palm Springs, California. In a groundbreaking partnership, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, the Palm Springs Unified School District, and the school district’s foundation created a robust public school curriculum that educates students on Cahuilla history, culture, traditions, and government. 

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Community development efforts benefit from clean, reliable, and reasonably priced energy, especially in rural areas where fuel supply uncertainties and high costs jeopardize essential governmental operations. Responding to such concerns, Blue Lake Rancheria established a utility authority and built two award-winning microgrids that supply power to local residents and businesses and reduce the government’s carbon footprint.

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Domestic violence and sexual assault are hidden epidemics with heartbreaking consequences. Survivors are often isolated and have nowhere to turn in a crisis. To meet the need for respectful care and advocacy, the Cherokee Nation coordinated wraparound services into a “one-stop shop.” The ONE FIRE program offers culturally grounded support to help survivors recover and rebuild their lives while also advocating to end cycles of violence.

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In coastal Alaskan Native communities, harvesting subsistence foods at low tide is a way of life, and shellfish are one of the most important intertidal food sources. Climate change increasingly threatens the availability of these resources. With no other governmental agency monitoring ocean conditions affecting subsistence foods in the state, the Sitka Tribe of Alaska established a laboratory to serve Sitka tribal citizens and all citizens of coastal Alaska. The Tribe’s Environmental Research Lab provides timely sample testing to evaluate marine harvest safety.

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When the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that state and local governments could not collect taxes on non-Indian homes and businesses built on trust lands, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community moved quickly to establish its own tax authority. Paying attention to both tribal and nontribal stakeholders’ needs, Swinomish developed a taxation system that provides clarity for reservation homeowners, predictability for the neighboring county, and resources to fund local services. The Swinomish Tax Authority cuts through the complexities and contentiousness that often characterize the allocation of tax jurisdiction in Indian Country.

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For at least the last several decades, federal Indian policy in the US has supported tribal self-determination through tribal self-government. The results have been (1) remarkable economic growth across most of Indian Country, and (2) concomitant expansions of the responsibilities and capacities of tribal governments. Hundreds of tribes across the other Lower 48 states now routinely serve their citizens with the full array of governmental functions and services that we expect from non-Indian state and local governments in the US, and increasing numbers of tribes are the economic engines of their regions.

Unique to Maine, the federal Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980 (MICSA) empowers the state government to block the applicability of federal Indian policy in Maine. As a result, the development of the Wabanaki Nations’ economies and governmental capacities have been stunted. Today, all four of the tribes in Maine—Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot—are stark economic underperformers relative to the other tribes in the Lower 48 states.

The subjugation of the Wabanaki Nation’s self-governing capacities is blocking economic development to the detriment of both tribal and nontribal citizens, alike. For the tribal citizens of Maine held down by MICSA’s restrictions, loosening or removing those restrictions offers them little in the way of downside risks and much in the way of upside payoffs.

Importantly, we find in this study that “nowhere to go but up” also applies to the Maine state government and Maine’s non-tribal citizens. From case after case, the pattern that has emerged under federal policies of tribal self-determination through self-government is one in which tribal economic development spills over positively into neighboring non-tribal communities and improves the abilities of state and local governments to serve their citizens. As is the case with any neighboring governments, conflicts can arise between tribal and non-tribal governments. The overall experience outside of Maine in this regard has been that increasingly capable tribal governments improve state-tribal relations by enabling both parties to come to the table with mature capacities to cooperate. Against these upside prospects is a status quo in which all sides leave economic opportunities on the table and ongoing cycles of intergovernmental conflict, litigation, recrimination, and mistrust continue.

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This policy brief showcases how geographic information system (GIS) techniques can be used to identify public and/or protected land in relation to current and historic reservation boundaries, and presents maps showcasing the scope of landback opportunities.

These lands include federal- or state-owned or managed land within current external reservation boundaries; within former reservation boundaries; near or abutting current reservation land; and protected areas designated for conservation management (which can include land held in fee).

The sentiment to give all U.S. national park landback to the stewardship of Indigenous Peoples is gaining momentum. These areas indeed may provide a cohesive set of initial opportunities towards that aim, and can lean on management or co-management agreements in strategic areas that present win-win solutions for both public agencies and American Indian nations in expanding their footprint.

While historically the laws that diminished reservations were intended to create opportunities for private ownership and settlement by non-Indigenous people, it is in fact the case that, 140 years later, six federal agencies currently manage approximately one-third the land that had been within former reservation boundaries.

A quarter of land just outside of present-day reservation boundaries (within a 10-mile buffer) is managed by one of six federal agencies, largely made up of the Bureau of Land Management (11%) and the Forest Service (11%).

Identifying where these parcels are, especially in relation to current or former reservation land, is a powerful first step for tribes and government agencies to begin to develop strategies for landback. Making this information more accessible will help streamline the process.

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The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (“the Act” or “ARPA”) has resulted in the single largest infusion of federal funding for Native America in U.S. history. The core of this funding is $20 billion for the more than 570 federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribal governments. As required by the Act, the Department of the Treasury (“Treasury” or “the Department”) devised and has now implemented a formula for allocating these monies. In this report, the authors find that the allocations that have been made are grossly inequitable and contrary to the policy objectives of Congress, the Biden Administration, and the Treasury Department itself.

This study uses publicly available information to estimate enrollment and employment counts for tribes. These figures are only estimates created for the express purpose of analyzing the appropriateness of the US Department of the Treasury’s American Rescue Plan Act allocations. Our estimates have not and cannot be verified against actual enrollment or employment data submitted to the Department of Treasury by each tribe.  We believe the estimates are as accurate as possible and reliable for the purpose of assessing the relative positions of tribes under Treasury’s ARPA allocations, but should not be extracted and used as accurate for any individual tribe or for any purpose other than how they are used here.

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The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) provides the largest infusion of federal funding for Indian Country in the history of the United States. More than $32 billion dollars is directed toward assisting American Indian nations and communities as they work to end and recover from the devastating COVID19 pandemic – which was made worse in Indian Country precisely because such funding is long overdue.

In this policy brief, we set out recommendations which we hope will promote the wise and productive allocation of ARPA funds to the nation’s 574 federally recognized American Indian tribes. We see ARPA as a potential “Marshall Plan” for the revitalization of Indian nations. The Act holds the promise of materially remedying at least some of the gross, documented, and long-standing underfunding of federal obligations and responsibilities in Indian Country. Yet, fulfilling that promise requires that the federal government expeditiously and wisely allocate ARPA funds to tribes, and that tribes efficiently and effectively deploy those funds to maximize their positive impacts on tribal communities.

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The COVID‐19 pandemic has wrought havoc in Indian Country. While the American people as a whole have borne extreme pain and suffering, and the transition back to “normal” will be drawn out and difficult, the First Peoples of America arguably have suffered the most severe and most negative consequences of all. The highest rates of positive COVID‐19 cases have been found among American Indian tribes, but that is only part of the story.

Even before the pandemic, the average household income for Native Americans living on Indian reservations was barely half the U.S. average. Then the pandemic effectively shut down the economies of many tribal nations. In the process, tribal governments’ primary sources of the funding – which are needed to fight the pandemic and to meet citizens’ needs – have been decimated.

As with the rest of the U.S., emergency and interim support from the CARES Act and other federal measures have helped to dampen the social and economic harm of the COVID‐19 crisis in Indian Country. Yet this assistance has come to the country’s 574 federally recognized Indian tribes with litigation‐driven delay and counterproductive strings attached, and against a pre‐ pandemic background characterized by federal government underfunding and neglect – especially as compared to the funding provided and attention paid to state and local governments.

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The federal response to the COVID‐19 pandemic has played out in varied ways over the past several months. For Native nations, the CARES Act (i.e., the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) has been the most prominent component of this response to date. Title V of the Act earmarked $8 billion for tribes and was allocated in two rounds, with many disbursements taking place in May and June of this year.

This federal response has been critical for many tribes because of the lower socio‐economic starting points for their community members as compared to non‐Indians. Even before the pandemic, the average income of a reservation‐resident Native American household was barely half that of the average U.S. household. Low average incomes, chronically high unemployment rates, and dilapidated or non‐existent infrastructure are persistent challenges for tribal communities and tribal leaders. Layering extremely high coronavirus incidence rates (and the effective closure of many tribal nations’ entire economies2) on top of these already challenging circumstances presented tribal governments with a host of new concerns. In other words, at the same time tribal governments’ primary resources were decimated (i.e., the earnings of tribal governmental gaming and non‐gaming enterprises dried up), the demands on tribes increased. They needed these resources to fight the pandemic and to continue to meet the needs of tribal citizens.

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This study dissects the US Department of the Treasury’s formula for distributing first-round CARES Act funds to Indian Country. The Department has indicated that its formula is intended to allocate relief funds based on tribes’ populations, but the research team behind this report finds that Treasury has employed a population data series that produces arbitrary and capricious “over-” and “under-representations” of tribes’ enrolled citizens.

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The COVID-19 crisis poses an immediate threat to three decades of improvement in economic conditions across Indian Country. Federal policies of tribal self-determination through self government have gradually, if unevenly, allowed economic development to take hold in Indian County. Nevertheless, the poverty gap for American Indians is large and hard to close. American Indian/Alaska Native household incomes remain barely half that of the typical household in the US. Tribes now routinely undertake and self-fund the full array of basic governmental services – from law enforcement and public safety to social services and educational support – that we expect any state or local government to provide.

Tribes lack the traditional tax bases enjoyed by state and local governments. Tribal enterprise revenues – both gaming and non-gaming – are tribes’ effective tax bases. Prior to the total shutdown of their casinos, tribes’ gaming enterprises alone were channeling more than $12.5 billion per year into tribal government programs and services . No tribal casinos are operating at this time. The same applies to many non-gaming enterprises and many tribal government programs. The COVID-19 crisis is devastating tribes’ abilities to fund their provision of basic governmental services and forcing tribes to make painful decisions to lay off employees, drop workers’ insurance coverage, deplete assets, and/or take on more debt.

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The Native Village of Kotzebue is the tribal government for the Iñupiaq people of Kotzebue, Alaska. Located on the coast in northwest Alaska, 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Kotzebue often hosts research teams eager to study the region’s ecology. For years, researchers lacked accountability to the local people; they did not consider them as equal partners in research and rarely credited the Indigenous knowledge shared. In the late 1990s, the Village government launched its Environmental Program to advance science-based research, driven by tribal priorities and rooted in long-held Iñupiaq values. Through this approach, the tribe is now a full research partner in the majority of projects concerning its land and waters, benefiting its citizens, and producing Best Available Science through the integration of Indigenous knowledge with western science.

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The opportunity to see a medical professional when needed is something that many people living in the United States take for granted. For those living in rural Alaska however, visiting a medical professional is rarely easy. Communities are isolated, medical needs are significant, and patients' cultural and linguistic backgrounds can affect diagnoses and treatments. The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium has taken on these challenges by educating village residents to serve as the primary medical providers within the state's tribal health care system.

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The United States has a shameful history of displacing its original inhabitants from their homelands and attempting to wipe out their cultures. Such actions had a devastating effect on the Miami people, who, by the 1990s, became scattered across the country, resulting in an ongoing struggle to maintain their cultural identity. In response, the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma created the Myaamiaki Eemamwiciki (the Miami Awakening) program. Rooted in strengthening their kinship ties to one another within a strategic educational framework, Myaamiaki Eemamwiciki helps citizens reconnect to their Indigenous knowledge and value system. And, as tribal citizens reconnect with the knowledge of their ancestors, they are creating a new understanding of what it means to be Myaamia.

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Like many Native nations, the Quapaw Nation relies on gaming income to fund government operations and to create employment opportunities for tribal citizens. But tribal leaders are also committed to diversifying the economy and limiting dependence on casino revenues. Drawing on its people’s farming heritage, the Nation has built an array of businesses that reduce reliance on external food sources and provide tribal citizens and their neighbors with healthy, locally raised food—a win for Quapaw economic development and for Indigenous food sovereignty.

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The safety and well-being of children is vital to a Native nation’s future. For years, tribal and state agencies in Alaska have taken different approaches to the needs of vulnerable families, leading to large numbers of children being adopted outside their home communities. With the goal of securing better outcomes for tribal families, the Sitka Tribe reached out to its state child protection counterparts to build more collaborative relationships to benefit tribal families. The Sitka ICWA Partnership is breaking new ground through brave communication, joint case management, and cooperative staff training.

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Across the US, alcohol and opioid abuse have seriously disrupted countless lives. The Yurok reservation and its surrounding area are no exception—intergenerational poverty, high incarceration rates, and failed treatment attempts combine to create a cycle of violence and despair. In response, the Yurok Tribe is purposefully using its tribal justice system to improve outcomes for offenders with substance abuse problems. By infusing traditional Yurok values into the tribal court’s structure and proceedings, the Tribe’s Wellness Programming is building better futures for all community members.

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