A future. What a good idea. But there’s a prob­lem. If Native peo­ple are to have a future that is of our own mak­ing, such a future will be pred­i­cat­ed, in large part, on sovereignty.

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.

One of the con­tentions cur­rent­ly in vogue is that Native peo­ple in North Amer­i­ca need to be res­cued from reserves and reser­va­tions, Canada’s Indi­an Act, the Cana­di­an Depart­ment of Indi­an Affairs, and the U.S. Bureau of Indi­an Affairs. Abo­rig­i­nal peo­ple have suf­fered undu­ly from gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence and bureau­crat­ic oppres­sion, so the think­ing goes, and the only solu­tion is to abro­gate treaties, elim­i­nate fed­er­al guar­an­tees, divide First Nations land into fee-sim­ple blocks, and allow Native peo­ple to par­tic­i­pate freely in the eco­nom­ic mar­kets that West­ern cap­i­tal­ism has created.

Tribes are obso­lete forms of gov­er­nance. Treaties are an obsta­cle to Native – non-Native rap­proche­ment.

Slade Gor­ton, the Wash­ing­ton State politi­cian, made a polit­i­cal career out of pur­su­ing a ter­mi­na­tion vendet­ta against the tribes in his state and around the nation. In 1998, Gor­ton spon­sored a Sen­ate bill, which he disin­gen­u­ous­ly called ​“The Amer­i­can Indi­an Equal Jus­tice Act.” The leg­is­la­tion was a direct attack on trib­al sov­er­eign­ty. Item 8 under ​“Find­ings” argued that the idea of Native sov­er­eign­ty ​“frus­trates and pro­vokes social ten­sions and tur­moil inim­i­cal to social peace,” while item 9 called on Con­gress to do away with Indi­an sov­er­eign­ty because ​“no gov­ern­ment should be above the law.”

To his cred­it, Gor­ton did not stand with the angry mobs who gath­ered in Wis­con­sin dur­ing the Wall­eye War of 1989 to throw rocks at Indi­ans and shout racial epi­thets, includ­ing old favorites such as ​“tim­ber nig­gers” and new­er cre­ations such as ​“wel­fare war­riors,” nor did he hold up one of the signs that said ​“Save a Fish, Spear a Squaw, Save Two Fish, Spear a Preg­nant Squaw.”

Still, he prob­a­bly agreed with the res­o­lu­tion that John Flem­ing intro­duced at the 2000 Wash­ing­ton State Repub­li­can con­ven­tion that called for the ter­mi­na­tion of all trib­al gov­ern­ments in the state. Flem­ing bragged that if the tribes resist­ed such an effort, ​“then the U.S. Army and the Air Force and the Marines and the Nation­al Guard are going to have to bat­tle back.” You might want to write Flem­ing off as a clown and his res­o­lu­tion as a piece of polit­i­cal rhetoric, but the res­o­lu­tion passed on a vote of 248 in favor and 2 against and became part of that state’s Repub­li­can Par­ty platform.

All else con­sid­ered, the main attrac­tion of this line of rea­son­ing is that it is sim­plis­tic and requires no nego­ti­a­tion or com­pro­mise. Let’s get rid of Indi­ans as a legal enti­ty, and let’s do it now.

The won­der­ful irony of Abo­rig­i­nal sov­er­eign­ty is that if we col­lect­ed the Indi­an Act, the treaties, the Cana­di­an and U.S. con­sti­tu­tions, the Cana­di­an Char­ter of Rights and Free­doms, the U.S. Bill of Rights, all the Supreme Court deci­sions, along with the cas­es that the Cana­di­an Human Rights Com­mis­sion has gen­er­at­ed, we would have a com­pos­ite and con­tra­dic­to­ry man­u­script much like the Bible. A man­u­script in which both saints and scoundrels can find sat­is­fac­tion and val­i­da­tion for con­trary prin­ci­ples and beliefs in the same pas­sage, where they can find a prece­dent for every com­fort and every larceny.

But per­haps dis­cussing sov­er­eign­ty as an absolute con­cept is a waste of time. Per­haps we should con­cern our­selves instead with prac­ti­cal sov­er­eign­ty and ask the ques­tion, what part of sov­er­eign­ty is crit­i­cal to Abo­rig­i­nal Nations in North Amer­i­ca? Each Nation will, of course, have to answer that for itself. How­ev­er, I sug­gest that we con­cen­trate on the issues of trib­al mem­ber­ship and resource devel­op­ment. In Cana­da, Native peo­ple are divid­ed, more or less, into three cat­e­gories: Sta­tus Indi­ans, Treaty Indi­ans, and non-Sta­tus Indi­ans. In most instances, Sta­tus Indi­ans and Treaty Indi­ans are the same. Legal Indi­ans. Non-Sta­tus Indi­ans are sim­ply not Indi­ans, or, more accu­rate­ly, not Legal Indians.

In the Unit­ed States, Legal Indi­ans are mem­bers of a tribe that is rec­og­nized by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, while the rest of Native peo­ple in that coun­try are, like their coun­ter­parts in Cana­da, not Indi­ans. In fact, with the pas­sage of the Indi­an Arts and Crafts Act in 1990, Native artists who pro­duce and sell their work can­not call them­selves by their trib­al affil­i­a­tion unless they are offi­cial mem­bers of the tribe. To do so is to risk fines of up to $250,000.

The Arts and Crafts Act was designed to stop the trade in counter­feit ​“Native art” that unscrupu­lous deal­ers were bring­ing in from places such as Japan, Tai­wan, Korea, and India, and in this regard, the act was a wel­come law. But the unfor­tu­nate side effect of the act was to ​“ter­mi­nate” a great many Native artists who were Indi­ans by blood but who, for a vari­ety of rea­sons, were not offi­cial mem­bers of a tribe. Many of them had home com­mu­ni­ties. Many of them had blood rel­a­tives liv­ing in those com­mu­ni­ties. Yet under the terms of the act, they could be pros­e­cut­ed for claim­ing they were who they were because, legal­ly, they weren’t.

Today, almost all Abo­rig­i­nal Nations con­trol their mem­ber­ships. While the rules and reg­u­la­tions dif­fer from tribe to tribe, band to band, the gen­er­al require­ment is that a blood rela­tion­ship exist between a reg­is­tered Indi­an or an ances­tor on the trib­al rolls and an indi­vid­ual seek­ing mem­ber­ship. Some­times there is a blood-quan­tum require­ment as well. The Black­foot in Alber­ta and the Comanche in Okla­homa, for exam­ple, cur­rent­ly require that, in addi­tion to a blood tie, their mem­bers be at least one-quar­ter blood. But they could, if they wished, low­er that blood-quan­tum require­ment or dis­pense with it alto­geth­er. This is what the Ottawa, Semi­nole, Wyan­dot, Creek, Choctaw, and Chick­a­saw have done. For these tribes and oth­ers, any descen­dant of a trib­al mem­ber is also enti­tled to be a mem­ber of the tribe, regard­less of blood quantum.

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.

Sov­er­eign­ty allows that Abo­rig­i­nal Nations can either erect bar­ri­ers to mem­ber­ship or low­er those bar­ri­ers and cre­ate new oppor­tu­ni­ties for cit­i­zen­ship. Bar­ri­ers can cre­ate secu­ri­ty. Num­bers can cre­ate strength. In the 21st 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. 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 non-haz­ardous 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 the­ater 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 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 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 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.” I have 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.

This essay was adapt­ed from The Incon­ve­nient Indi­an by Thomas King, Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta Press. (Copy­right 2012 Dead Dog Café Pro­duc­tions, Inc.)