[Yale-forests-reading-group] Week 6: Tribal Sovereignty & Land

Reid L reidhlewis91 at gmail.com
Thu Aug 20 09:49:23 EDT 2020


*Tribal Sovereignty & Land*

In recent weeks, we've focused on land theft and the ways it has been used
as a violent tool of oppression by colonizers against Native peoples. Over
the past two installments of the reading group, we learned about the
Morrill Act and King Philip's War, which both involved violent
dispossession and land theft from Indigenous communities. This week, we're
focusing on tribal sovereignty and continuing to learn about the Native
peoples whose land we are on in the area surrounding Yale-Myers Forest. In
the coming weeks, we'll learn about legal mechanisms for land theft in the
centuries after King Philip's War, situating them within the context of
tribal sovereignty and self-determination.


Part 1: What is tribal sovereignty?

Tribal sovereignty is a critical aspect of understanding the history and
present of Indigenous peoples in North America. This week, we're
highlighting several resources we've been learning from about this crucial
topic. Put simply, tribal sovereignty is the inherent right of a tribal
Nation to govern itself and to determine its own future. The United States
operates with three types of sovereigns - federal, state, and tribal
governments. In Indian Country Today, Shaawano Chad Uran points out that a
power inherent in a sovereign nation is conducting relationships with other
sovereign nations:

"Tribes have sovereignty that is obviously older than the US Constitution.
Tribes had their own form of government, and many had legal codes written
into their own documents, their own stories, their own practices, and their
own memories. Tribal sovereignty is derived from the people, the land, and
their relationships; tribal sovereignty was not a gift from any external
government."

"Professor Breaks Down Sovereignty and Explains its Significance" by
Shaawano Chad Uran, Indian Country Today, January 2014

https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/professor-breaks-down-sovereignty-and-explains-its-significance-B8tl2DAAREa05ACzie58hw

To further understand tribal sovereignty, we're listening to J. Kēhaulani
Kauanui's "Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond"
podcast. The two-part episodes we're highlighting today are a recording of
a 2010 panel on tribal sovereignty held at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum
and Research Center. In her introduction to the panel, Kauanui stresses
that tribal sovereignty and governance are issues separate from civil
rights, and cautions against conflating race and Indigeneity. Too often,
she says, "the question of tribal sovereignty is misread through a twisted
notion of racial equality that denies both colonialism and racial
oppression and domination."

Let's start with Part I, in which panelists John Echohawk (co-founder and
Executive Director of the Native American Rights Fund) and J. Cedric Woods
(Director of the Institute for New England Native American Studies at UMass
Boston) offer legal and cultural context for understanding tribal
sovereignty. Echohawk, who describes modeling the Native American Rights
Fund after the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1970, further explains the
distinction between civil rights and tribal sovereignty: "even though we
got our start in the civil rights movement, we were not about equality, we
were about treaty rights." Woods closes out the episode by discussing the
particular challenges that eastern tribes face in defending and asserting
their inherent sovereignty, given the region's long history of occupation.
Although political and legal sovereignty are most talked about, he says,
economic and cultural sovereignty are just as important. Culture is a
process, not a set of actions, and cultural sovereignty can be seen in the
ways that communities work to reclaim their native languages, take control
of how their children are educated, and maintain connections to traditional
lands, among other examples.

"Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond" Podcast, hosted
by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui. Episode 5, 2010: Tribal Sovereignty and Indigenous
Rights, Part I: Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation

http://www.indigenouspolitics.com/2010-2/


Part 2: Tribal Sovereignty, Governance, & Land: the Mashantucket Pequot
Tribal Nation

To begin to understand tribal governance in the context of sovereignty,
we'll start by listening to Part II of the "Indigenous Politics" podcast
panel we began above. This episode features three panelists intimately
involved in navigating issues of tribal sovereignty: Betsy Conway, then an
attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal
Nation and subsequently its General Counsel; James T. Jackson, then Tribal
Council Treasurer for the Mashantucket Pequot; and the late Jackson T.
King, Jr., who was then the General Counsel for the Mashantucket Pequot. An
overarching theme here is the lack of knowledge about tribal sovereignty on
the part of state and federal judges, and other non-Native government
officials.

To better understand the stories and information presented in the podcast,
we're also reading through the website of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal
Nation, which is one of two federally recognized tribes in Connecticut. The
Tribe gained recognition in 1983 as a result of a land claims case started
in 1976, which sought to return land to the Tribe that had been illegally
sold by the state of Connecticut in 1856. Federal and state recognition is
an important topic that we'll focus on more in the coming weeks, but for
now we encourage you to notice the inherent relationships between
sovereignty and land. Outright land theft is one way for a colonial state
to attack Indigenous sovereignty, but seemingly smaller actions also have
large impacts. In the podcast, James T. Jackson describes the damage done
when Mashantucket was assigned the same zip code as another jurisdiction
(the town of Ledyard, CT) in 1963. It wasn't granted its own zip code until
2002, and the effects are still felt today -- a process that Jackson likens
to recovering from identity theft.

"Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond" Podcast, hosted
by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui. Episode 6, 2010: Tribal Sovereignty and Indigenous
Rights, Part II: Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation

http://www.indigenouspolitics.com/2010-2/

Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation website

https://www.mptn-nsn.gov/Default.aspx


Part 3: Upholding and strengthening tribal sovereignty

What role does land play in tribal sovereignty? How can remedying land
theft uphold sovereignty? This summer, we saw examples of Native peoples in
the United States asserting their sovereignty and pushing back against the
settler state. In particular, there have been two major wins, which you
might be familiar with, that can provide some context.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe were
victorious in their lawsuit against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The court
found that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed to ensure that there was
an environmental impact review for the pipeline and therefore ordered the
pipeline to be shut down and emptied. Read more about the long-time
grassroots level fight to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline here:

"Celebrating a Win for the Sovereignty of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne
River Sioux Tribes" on Indigenous Environmental Network

https://www.ienearth.org/celebrating-a-win-for-the-sovereignty-of-the-standing-rock-and-cheyenne-river-sioux-tribes/


The second recent case is the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that much of
eastern Oklahoma is indeed reservation land, specifically that the Muscogee
(Creek) Nation reservation remained such even after Oklahoma became a
state. This means that only tribal and federal courts have jurisdiction on
this land in Oklahoma. As Justice Neil Gorsuch states in the majority
opinion:

"Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an
Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law. Because Congress
has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word."

The ruling is especially powerful because the Muscogee people were promised
a reservation on the other end of the Trail of Tears. In fact, this ruling
may also extend to all of what are known as the Five Tribes - the Muscogee
(Creek), Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Nations - who were
forcibly removed from their homelands in the U.S. South and walked the
Trail of Tears to Oklahoma.

Read more about this ruling here:

"Supreme Court ruling 'reaffirmed' sovereignty" by Kolby Kickingwoman
for Indian
Country Today, July 9, 2020.

https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/supreme-court-ruling-reaffirmed-sovereignty-4KQXSMEtlUW4lpBGSw6pzA


"How the Supreme Court upended a century of federal Indian law" by Graham
Lee Brewer & Cary Aspinwall for High Country News, August 4, 2020.

https://www.hcn.org/articles/indigenous-affairs-justice-how-the-supreme-court-upended-a-century-of-federal-indian-law

These are just two critical moments that have been making news headlines.
However, these moments are part of much greater Indigenous movements as
tribes continue to call for honoring Indigenous sovereignty and for the
return of their lands.

"Land Back" is a Native movement for upholding and strengthening
sovereignty via the return of land to tribal nations. It calls for North
American lands to be returned to Native peoples, who have lived on and
stewarded the land since long before colonization, violent dispossession,
and the formation of the settler state. To begin to understand what this
process can look like, we've been learning from this informative lesson by
Corinne Rice and Andrew Perera:

Corinne Rice @misscorinne86 instagram posts: "Land Back: A Guide to
Returning Stolen Land to Your Indigenous Community"

Part 1: https://www.instagram.com/p/CDJgUcWl_Uu/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link


Part 2: https://www.instagram.com/p/CDJgexIFhqy/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Part 3: https://www.instagram.com/p/CDJgnxalWm9/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link


--

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We would like to express our deep gratitude for those who have shared their
work related to tribal sovereignty, governance, and land rights. In
particular, we are thankful to those creators whose work we've shared here
today. We recognize the responsibility that we have as Forest Fellows and
non-Native people engaging in this learning to do our part to ensure that
tribal sovereignty is recognized and respected by our institutions.

As always, thank you for following along and learning with us. Please be in
touch with any comments, questions, critiques, or recommendations for
further resources.
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