Sustaining Tribal Fisheries: U.S. Economic Relief Policies during COVID-19

This article reviews the individual spend plans of U.S. states granted a funding allocation under Sec. 12005 of the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act to identify consistency with legislative mandates to support Tribal commercial, subsistence, cultural, or ceremonial fisheries negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, this study identifies state discursive practices in supporting Tribal sovereignty in fisheries management for the advancement of Indigenous Ocean justice. State spending plans (n = 22) publicly available and submitted to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration before July 2021 were reviewed. Few of the state spend plans listed impacts to Tribal fisheries due to the pandemic. Only two state plans included Tribal consultation and direct economic relief for commercial, subsistence, cultural, and/or ceremonial losses faced by neighboring Tribes and Tribal citizens. Overall, the protections within the CARES Act for Tribal fisheries were not integrated into state spend plans. The article identifies best practices for state fisheries relief policy content that is affirming of Tribal fishing rights and uses them to help address the ongoing pandemic crisis facing Tribal fisheries. These findings have relevance for future emergency relief programs that are inclusive of Tribal Nations. Honoring Tribal sovereignty and the federal trust responsibility must be the cornerstone of shared sustainable fisheries.

Tradition, Sovereignty, and Conservation: The Controversy Surrounding the Wind River Indian Reservation Game Code

In December 1983, a highly publicized slaughter of over fifty elk at Wind River Indian Reservation reignited a dispute between the reservation’s resident tribes—the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho nations—over wildlife management. In response to diminished big game populations, the Eastern Shoshone Tribe had passed hunting regulations in 1980, but the people of the Northern Arapaho Tribe refused to do so, effectively derailing any attempt to manage wildlife at Wind River. After the Bureau of Indian Affairs imposed a game code on the reservation in 1984, the Northern Arapaho Tribe initiated a legal battle that culminated in the 1987 case of Northern Arapahoe Tribe v. Hodel. The court ruled that because the treaty rights of the two tribes overlapped in the area of wildlife management and because research conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the request of both tribes had revealed a need for hunting regulations, the U.S. government had the power to impose the Wind River Reservation Game Code. Although the tribes jointly manage wildlife today and big game populations now thrive at Wind River, it is important to examine the controversy that involved conflicting visions of and concerns about cultural traditions, tribal sovereignty, and wildlife conservation principles and practices. Exploring how Eastern Shoshones and Northern Arapahos viewed those subjects differently and how their longstanding rivalry at Wind River shaped this conflict highlights some problems with the simplistic and romanticized concept of the “Ecological Indian.”

Tribal Casino Labor Relations and Settler Colonialism

Sovereignty provides the legal basis for tribal casinos in the United States. However, since the industry’s rapid growth (valued at $34 billion for 2019), courts are now revisiting decades-old precedents in federal Indian law to reinterpret policies in ways that add new constraints to tribal sovereignty. Because tribal casinos often employ large numbers of non-Native Americans, tribal casino labor relations have become a new arena for contests over the boundaries of tribal sovereignty. This article investigates recent tribal casino labor relations court rulings (e.g. Little River, Soaring Eagle, and Pauma) through the lens of settler colonialism in order to understand new revisions to legal precedents. It argues that settler colonialism continues to underlie federal policies and that the growth of tribal casinos reveal that the federal government may intervene to undercut tribal sovereignty.

Learning from Tribal Leadership and the Anchor Forest Concept for Implementing Cross-Boundary Forest Management

In response to the increasing scale of wildfire and forest health challenges in the West, the Intertribal Timber Council, a nonprofit consortium of American Indian Tribes and Alaska Native corporations, proposed creating “Anchor Forests,” where a Tribe would convene neighboring landowners to collectively manage the landscape across property boundaries. This concept has sparked conversation but has not been fully implemented. Amid shifts toward both collaborative decision making and Tribal partnerships on federal forestlands, we asked, “why did the Anchor Forest concept emerge, and what can the field of forest governance learn from its development?” Through qualitative analysis of documents and interviews, we show how Anchor Forests could expand spatial-temporal scales of forest management. We highlight how Tribal leadership could overcome past governance barriers through their sovereign authority and long-term forestry expertise and knowledge. We describe how this concept could function as a tool to enact change within rigid forest-management institutions. Study Implications Scholars and practitioners can learn from Anchor Forests as an example of a cross-boundary forest-governance framework that emphasizes long-term investment and relationships to land as exemplified by Tribal forest management. The Anchor Forest concept also provides a structure in which Tribes are leaders and conveners rather than stakeholders or participants. To achieve broad goals of landscape resilience and forest health, governance structures must be deliberately designed to mobilize Tribal knowledge and stewardship practices through uplifting, rather than undermining, Tribal sovereignty. The Anchor Forest concept offers key considerations to serve as a starting place for partnerships to emerge in their own contexts.

Secured Transactions Laws and Economic Development on American Indian Reservations

Harmonized commercial laws are considered an essential ingredient to commerce and trade and have been called the backbone of American commerce. Key components of these laws are those governing secured transactions. In recent years, Native American tribal governments have moved to adopt commercial codes to increase economic development on their reservations, but many have modified these codes to address challenges to tribal sovereignty and culture. This paper compares reservations that adopted modified secured transaction acts to reservations that adopted uniform laws. We demonstrate that reservations can potentially experience substantial economic gains from either form of adoption.

Reclaiming Emotions: Re-Unlearning and Re-Learning Discourses of Healing in a Tribally Placed Doctoral Cohort

This article is a “talk story” among three Indigenous women who are connected in various ways but most recently through the heartwork of a tribal–university partnership for a tribally based doctoral cohort program. The first tribally based cohort includes representation of tribal nations from Washington State, Utah and New Mexico and all women. The contributors of this talk story include voices of a Muckleshoot partner who is an Indigenous education advocate and two Indigenous faculty members. We share our talk story in identifying the powerful connection of reclaiming emotions through the ability of centering Indigenous narratives, honoring culture and community, and the powerful role of place and space in honoring tribal sovereignty through its existence.

Beyond Land Acknowledgment in Settler Institutions

What does land acknowledgment do? Where does it come from? Where is it pointing? Existing literature, especially critiques by Indigenous scholars, unequivocally assert that settler land acknowledgments are problematic in their favoring of rhetoric over action. However, formal written statements may challenge institutions to recognize their complicity in settler colonialism and their institutional responsibilities to tribal sovereignty. Building on these critiques, particularly the writings of Métis cultural producer Chelsea Vowel, this article offers beyond as a framework for how institutional land acknowledgments can or cannot support Indigenous relationality, land pedagogy, and accountability to place and peoples. The authors describe the critical differences between Indigenous protocols of mutual recognition and settler practices of land acknowledgment. These Indigenous/settler differences illuminate an Indigenous perspective on what acknowledgments ought to accomplish. For example, Acjachemen/Tongva scholar Charles Sepulveda forwards the Tongva concept of Kuuyam, or guest, as “a reimagining of human relationships to place outside of the structures of settler colonialism.” What would it mean for a settler speaker of a land acknowledgment to say, “I am a visitor, and I hope to become a proper guest”? Two empirical examples are presented: the University of California, Los Angeles, where an acknowledgment was crafted in 2018; and the University of California, San Diego, where an acknowledgment is under way in 2020. The article concludes with beyond as a potential decolonial framework for land acknowledgment that recognizes Indigenous futures.