The Keetoowah, to complicate things further, require that a member be one-quarter blood and have an ancestor on either the Dawes rolls or the United Keetoowah Band Base Roll, which was created in 1949. Up until about 1994, the Keetoowah also gave associate memberships to Cherokees who could not demonstrate via the rolls that they were Cherokee, and they gave associate memberships to folks who were famous or influential, such as Bill Clinton. Some of the associate members were given an enrolment card with a number, but these associate members could not appear on the official Keetoowah tribal rolls, nor could they receive any federal benefits.
Just in case you thought membership in a Native Nation was a straightforward thing.
Currently, the trend among bands and tribes in North America is to try to limit membership. The land base and the resources that Native people control are finite. But Aboriginal populations continue to grow, and the thinking is that tribal assets should only be used for the benefit of those who are “authentic,” a term that is fraught with dangerous assumptions and consequences. Among the Cherokee, you have Cherokees who are Cherokee by blood and who have an ancestor on the required rolls, and you have Cherokees who are Cherokee by blood but whose ancestors were not listed on the required rolls. The one group is “authentic.” The other group is not.
To my way of thinking, such a distinction is self-serving and self-defeating at the same time.
In Canada, where First Nations people are defined by the Indian Act, there is currently no possibility for creating new Status
Indians, apart from birth. Bands may grant membership to non-Status Indians and even to non-Indians, and it’s possible that these individuals could be given the right to vote in band elections and allowed to live on Indian land (though the jury is still out on the question of residency), but they could not share in any benefits that came to the tribe by way of the Indian Act or a treaty.
Sovereignty allows that Aboriginal Nations can either erect barriers to membership or lower those barriers and create new opportunities for citizenship. There are arguments to be made for both of these approaches. Barriers can create security. Numbers can create strength. In the twenty-first-century conversation around tribal membership, I hope that Aboriginal Nations use this sovereign power with intelligence and generosity.
After membership, the second question that Native people have to consider with regards to sovereignty is how we go about creating an economic base for reserves and reservations. If the statistics are correct, there are almost as many Native people on reserves as off reserves, and while off-reservation Native-run businesses are important to the overall health of Native as well as non-Native communities, the development and expansion of on-reservation enterprise is critical if we expect to maintain our communities and our land base.
Up to this point, while reserves and reservations with a large land base have had more economic choices than those with a small land base, the range of the choices itself has been limited. And some of the choices have been downright disquieting.
Garbage dumps, for example.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, North America decided that Native land would be a perfect place to dump its garbage.
Waste-management companies that handle everything from nonhazardous materials to nuclear waste began riding into Indian country armed with beads and promises, hell-bent on convincing tribal leaders that turning part of the reservation into a landfill was good economics. This scenario made for excellent theatre of the absurd, with the waste management companies suddenly championing Native rights and tribal sovereignty. Not that these companies gave a damn about Native sovereignty. But they
were
excited by the prospect that the legal status of Indian land might protect them from the tyranny of environmental regulations.
I don’t want to suggest that Native communities were simply victims in this or that they were completely opposed to the enterprise of garbage disposal. Many reservations were so poor that any business was good business. From small tribes such as the Campo Band of Mission Indians just outside San Diego to larger groups such as the Chickasaw and Sauk and Fox in Oklahoma, the Yakama in Washington, and the Mescalero Apache in New Mexico, First Nations began approaching companies on their own to talk about joint ventures that would create commercial landfills on trust land and generate much-needed money for the community.
The garbage issue was, as might be expected, controversial, and the debate split many of the tribes. What was mildly amusing was watching environmentalists and concerned non-Natives lecture Indians on traditional beliefs and ethical standards. While Native people have, for a long time now, been adversely affected by White development near reservations and reserves—the mercury poisonings at Grassy Narrows in northern Ontario, the General Motors landfill near Akwesasne, the draining of
Pyramid Lake in Nevada, the Kinzua Dam in Pennsylvania—the level of concern seems far greater, the reaction more intense, when White communities are faced with the consequences of Native development.
John Dossett, the general counsel for the National Congress of American Indians, sees the land-use battles as a reflection of race and privilege. “It is more than a little unfair,” says Dossett, “that tribes, who have been among the last to receive the benefits of economic development, would be expected to keep their lands pristine while everyone has developed all around them.”
For a tribe such as the Navajo, the benefits of economic development and the need to protect the land are parts of a long-running deliberation. So far, economic development has carried the day. The Navajo have, since the 1940s, been involved in resource mining. While most of Navajo country is desert, it is also home to major deposits of uranium and even larger deposits of coal. In 1948, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission set off a mining boom in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona when it announced that it would purchase all uranium ore at a guaranteed price.
Uranium meant jobs for the Navajo. No one talked about the hazards of uranium, though the science in and around radon gas, particularly by the 1950s, was reasonably well established. Nor did anyone discuss with the tribe the bottom-line costs to the environment and to the lives of the people who worked in the mines.
Then in July of 1976, a few months after the partial meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, a dam at the United Nuclear Corporation’s Church Rock facility in New Mexico, on the edge of the Navajo reservation, collapsed, and over 1,100 tons of radioactive waste and 93 million gallons of mine
effluent poured into the Puerco River, permanently contaminating the river and the water supply.
Three Mile Island got all the press, but Church Rock was a much larger ecological disaster, and when the Navajo finally banned uranium and uranium processing on the reservation in 2005, all they were left with for their efforts at creating a working economy was a deadly legacy of contaminated tailings, polluted water supplies, abandoned mines, and chronic illness.
In addition to uranium deposits, the Navajo Nation has one of the largest coal-mining operations in the world. The royalties that the Navajo receive from Peabody Energy account for most of the tribe’s annual budget. As well, coal mining, along with the attendant industries, provides jobs for thousands of Navajo.
But as with uranium, the downside of this industry is huge. If anything, coal is even more polluting than uranium. The Four Corners power plant, which came on line in 1963, operates outside normal regulations, without any significant limits on its emissions. By any measure, Four Corners is an environmental nightmare, emitting over 15 million tons of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon dioxides each year, as well as some 600 pounds of mercury. No other power plant in the United States puts more pollutants into the air and the water than Four Corners. It’s in a category all by itself. The Navajo and Hopi reservations used to have some of the cleanest air in the country. Now, because of Four Corners and the other coal-burning power plants in the Southwest, air pollution on the reservations is at least ten times worse than in a city such as Los Angeles.
I have great concerns about resource mining on Native lands, and I don’t much like the idea of reserves and reservations being
used as landfills. It all feels too much like
Colonialism: Part Two
. I understand that these projects generate much-needed revenues for many Aboriginal communities who are living at poverty levels. But I also know that once the resource is gone and the dumps are filled, all that Native people will have to pass on to their children will be a blasted and poisoned landscape.
There has been a great deal of talk about the prospects of solar, wind, and tidal-surge energy on Indian reserves and reservations. The Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan, the Assiniboine and the Sioux in Fort Peck, Montana, the Blackfeet in Browning, Montana, the T’Sou-ke Nation near Sooke, British Columbia, the Spirit Lake Sioux at Fort Totten, North Dakota, and the M’Chigeeng First Nation and the Wikwemikong First Nation on Manitoulin Island are all engaged in renewable-energy projects that may make the transition from demonstration projects to full-blown industries.
Which brings us back to the previous chapter and the growth of Aboriginal gaming. Compared to commercial landfills, resource mining, aluminum processing, nuclear-waste storage, and waste incineration, Indian ventures in gaming and tourism are relatively pristine activities with a limited impact on the physical environment.
But I’m not going to suggest that the economic development of Aboriginal resorts and casinos is an improvement. The potential downside of gaming—alcohol, drugs, prostitution, gambling addiction, organized crime—may be just as damaging as a toxic holding pond. But casinos and the large amounts of money that they generate have allowed certain tribes to do something I never thought I’d ever see.
I knew that Indian gaming was big business. I knew that many casinos were making a healthy profit from slot machines, bingos, blackjack, and the like. What I didn’t know was what tribes were doing with the profits. I assumed that band councils were giving part of the profits to the members of the tribe as per capita payments or spending it on much-needed infrastructure or buying stocks and bonds as long-term investments.
And they were. But they were also buying land.
In upstate New York, the Oneida Nation has used some of the money made from its Turning Stone Resort and Casino to purchase over 17,000 acres of land. In Minnesota, the Shakopee Sioux have taken money from their Mystic Lake Casino Hotel, have bought 750 acres, and are looking at another 1,000 acres. The Cherokee in Oklahoma have purchased acreage along the major highways in that state, while the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation in southern California is buying up land in downtown San Diego and the surrounding area.
But instead of pursuing the American dream of accumulating land as personal wealth, the tribes have taken their purchases to the Secretary of the Interior and requested that the land they acquired be added to their respective reservations and given trust status. This is not merely a return to a communal past. It is a shrewd move to preserve and expand an indigenous land base for the benefit of future generations.
This type of purchase and conversion is now being emulated by tribes across the United States. In 2003, the Tohono O’odham Nation purchased a 130-acre parcel of land in Glendale, Arizona. The land was converted from fee simple to trust land, and the tribe is making plans to build a $600-million casino on the site.
This acquisition has caused no small amount of consternation for politicians in Glendale, who watched as a perfectly good block of fee-simple land was taken out of local and state control and removed from the tax base.
Raising the Western spectre of wild and uncontrolled Indians, Craig Tindall, the city attorney, warned, “As soon as people step off that land into our jurisdiction, we have to deal with them. Whatever condition they are in, when they come off that land, it’s up to us.”
I had assumed that the “people” Tindall was talking about were Indians, and that his comments were just an intemperate outburst. But now that I think about it, I wonder if he was expressing concern about White Glendalians returning to the city after an evening of fun and frolic at the Tohono O’odham Nation casino.
The fact that the casino will create a great many permanent jobs and stimulate the local economy has not been lost on city planners, but the thought of a reservation on the edge of Glendale has been too much for local bureaucrats. In 2010, the city sued the federal government, charging that the 1986 federal law that allowed the Tohono O’odham as well as other tribes to acquire new reservation property was unconstitutional. But I shouldn’t pick on Glendale. All around America, local reaction to tribes buying up property and having the land converted to trust status has been predominantly negative.
Almost 150 years ago, then Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz said: “Many treaty reservations have turned out to be of greater value in agricultural and mineral resources than they were originally thought to be, and are now eagerly coveted by the white population.… It is argued that the Indians cannot and will not develop
these resources; that the country cannot afford to maintain large and valuable districts in a state of waste.… This demand becomes more pressing every year, and although in many cases urged entirely without regard to abstract justice, it is a fact … which must be taken into account in shaping an Indian policy.”
This nineteenth-century complaint that Native people weren’t using their land base and developing their resources in an acceptable fashion and the veiled warning that Indian land was “eagerly coveted by the white population” remain potent factors in contemporary Indian-White politics. Glendale’s anger is not simply over the new reservation and casino at the edge of town. It is over the fact that the land in question is owned by Indians and no longer available to the city.