Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1993
Publication Information
46 Ark. L. Rev. 25 (1993)
Abstract
This article will analyze recent legislative efforts. The first section of the article examines the two proposed national tribal organizations, a National Native American Advisory Council and a Tribal Judicial Conference, and demonstrates that they will not in fact represent all Indian tribes. The second section of the article criticizes the plan to create a national policy center in Washington, D.C., the National Indian Policy Institute. While agreeing that some of the data gathering and dissemination functions proposed for the center are needed, the article notes these functions can be more economically obtained than by creation of a new center. The article then raises more serious questions regarding the policy-setting aspects of the proposed center. Being sold to tribes as their think tank in Washington, the Center will instead serve Congress's needs. The proposed center will not strengthen the political relationship between individual tribes and the federal government, but will instead create yet another national power base outside the tribes. Instead, the article calls for strengthening organizations which exist throughout the country, especially as those organizations work with individual tribes and regional tribal governmental organizations created by the consent of the tribes themselves.
All three of the bills discussed contribute to the nationalization of Indian law: a process of reconceptualizing the over 300 Indian tribes in the nation from a diverse group of political entities with unique characteristics and needs, to a uniform entity known as "Indian Country," a monolithic voice representing all tribes as one. The thesis of this article is that while nationalizing Indian law may greatly simplify Congress's desire to obtain the thoughts of Indian tribes on legislative initiatives, this same nationalization obscures differences among the many tribes and subverts the very process of consultation that these legislative initiatives are supposedly designed to facilitate. These methods have as much potential to erode tribal sovereignty as the hostile forced assimilation programs of the past. In place of consultation with the appropriate political unit, the tribe, each program creates organizations that will stand between the tribes and the government and marginalize the voice of those tribes without the power to influence the new organizations. In short, if Indian tribes are political entities, then policymakers must undertake the difficult task of consulting the tribes instead of creating entities outside the tribes. Indian tribes must be actors and not the objects of federal policy.
Recommended Citation
Nell J. Newton,
Let a Thousand Policy-Flowers Bloom,
46 Ark. L. Rev. 25 (1993).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1197
