Research on U.S. and Canadian nations
indicates jobs come with tribal control

By Stephen Cornell and Miriam Jorgensen
for Headwaters News

There are more than 600 First Nations in Canada (the equivalent of American Indian tribes), and more than 675,000 Native people – some 2.2 percent of the Canadian population.

In the United States, by contrast, there are more than 550 American Indian tribes (nearly half of them in Alaska), and more than 2.5 million Native people – approximately 1 percent of the U.S. population.

While generalizations are always risky -- there are always exceptions to the rule -- economic evidence suggests that as a group, Native nations in Canada have been economically less successful than their counterparts in the United States. It is worth asking why.

In 1986, a research effort called the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development began work with a similar question in mind: Why are some American Indian nations more successful than others at building sustainable economies on Indian lands?

For a long time, the first peoples of North America have been its poorest peoples, as well. They need not be.

Today, the Harvard Project and its sister organization, the Native Nations Institute at The University of Arizona, are continuing to work on that question, and have been looking at First Nations development and governance issues in Canada as well. This comparative work has begun to suggest some explanations for the differences between the two countries.

First Nations in Canada differ from American Indian nations along several dimensions. They typically have smaller populations than many U.S. tribes, are on smaller land bases, and are more isolated from markets and non-Native population centers.

Obviously such differences affect economic opportunities. Indian gaming also is more widespread in the U.S. than in Canada, although only a minority of U.S. gaming tribes – particularly those near major population centers – are making the kind of money that can transform their social and economic situations.

While these kinds of factors clearly play a part in U.S.-Canadian differences, research suggests that a very different element is even more important – how Native nations are governed.

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Tribes set to help themselves,
sometimes in spite of neighbors

By Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
Aug. 14, 2002

The big player in U.S. tribes' economic development is, of course, gambling, a panacea for some tribes, scrupulously avoided by others, and for some, a reason to be sued by their white competitors.

Northern Idaho tribes have tried for several years to clarify the legality of their gambling machines, but their last effort -- a compromise negotiated with Gov. Dirk Kempthorne -- was rejected by the Legislature.

They have an initiative they hope will be on the November ballot, a measure that would make their bustling gaming industry clearly legal and allow it to expand moderately over coming years.

Opponents, including officials of surrounding towns, legislators and local clergy, have sued to stop the initiative, saying expanded gambling would lead to a further decline in moral values.

The state Supreme Court was expected to hear arguments this week.

One Nez Perce tribal official said he wished the tribe could "pack up this whole economy we've built up here and take that down there and drop it in front of the Supreme Court."

The Arizona Legislature in May killed a compromise pact Gov. Jane Hull had struck with gambling tribes. Hull accused the racetrack industries of undermining the agreement to protect their own gambling interests, and the tribes promised to put the measure on the ballot.

Another factor in U.S. tribes' mistrust of government is the ongoing Indian trust fiasco, a century of accounting mismanagement by the Interior Department. What's emerging as a big step toward sovereignty is tribes' rising insistence that they could manage their own trust funds better than the government, no matter how extensive are agency reforms.

Two dozen tribal leaders from across the nation are members of a Tribal Trust Reform Task Force, and at a recent meeting in Billings, they said tribes have different situations, different needs and different solutions.

Some tribes aren't getting promised services, others aren't getting promised payments. The Bureau of Indian Affairs manages 75 percent of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, for example, and is to place any grazing and lease revenue into a trust account. An Arthur Andersen audit of BIA records from 1973 to 1992 found $2 billion missing from that and similar accounts nationwide.

Tribal leaders worry the federal solution will be another layer of bureaucracy, and they insist the remedy should start from the bottom up, with the tribes largely managing their own land, revenue and accounts.

Underlying much of the relationships on both sides of the border is a century of attitudes that are paternalistic, at best and exploitative, at worst. Alberta tribes are incensed at a provincial government proposal to create one tribal police force for all the First Nation reserves, an attitude that one tribal official said is "something we faced for a couple of hundred years, (the suggestion) that we don't know what's best for us."

Yet, some tribal leaders, including the chief of an aboriginal police force in Manitoba, said the plan would save tribes millions of dollars by cooperating, and a Senate appointee from Calgary, one of five Indians appointed to the body, said the issue is a chance for tribes to express their sovereignty and to negotiate government-to-government.

Other signs of Alberta bands' growing clout are showing up in the province's economic plans. Provincial officials have drafted a model that guarantees Indian bands in the north participation in oil and gas developments, in exchange for promises the tribes won't use treaty claims to impede projects.

Recent headlines have also include a variety of examples of tribal economic development from both internal and external catalysts.

Montana's Crow Tribe signed a deal with Barrett Corp. of Denver to develop reservation reserves of coalbed methane, the first tribe in the northern Rockies to pursue its gas deposits. Barrett officials said the area may become a hotter spot than Wyoming's Powder River Basin, and it could contain as much as 600 billion cubic feet of methane. The company could drill as many as 400 wells and extract gas worth as much as $2 billion. The tribe would receive an undisclosed royalty.

In New Mexico, Sandia National Laboratories, which pioneered the science of microsystems, is helping develop related companies in Gallup, between the Zuni Pueblo and the Navajo Reservation. The techniques needed to install the cell-sized machines into larger assemblies are remarkably similar to those of the Indian weaving arts, and Zuni officials say a planned manufacturing facility would be a desperately needed boost on a reservation where employment hovers around 50 percent.

The White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona collected more than a dozen outside investors in a unique and complicated plan to finance a $25 million housing project that could set a precedent for Indian Country.

And Montana's Blackfeet Tribe is considering construction of a multimillion-dollar luxury resort near the east entrance of Glacier National Park.

"Everybody's optimistic. I haven't heard one dissonant voice yet," said a spokesman for the tribally owned contractor for the project.

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Headwaters News is a project of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana.