Final Project: Corporate Interests Threatening Tribes--Again (Arjan)

While Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has garnered significant opposition due to his agenda--which includes shrinking national monuments containing environmentally sensitive lands sacred to many tribes in southern Utah--his comments suggesting pushing tribes to privatize their lands are particularly egregious to Native communities across the country.

Zinke said to the National Tribal Energy Summit in May 2017: "If tribes would have a choice of leaving Indian trust lands and becoming a corporation, tribes would take it." By advocating for tribes to sell off of tribal lands, these comments are extremely similar to the sentiment that the US government took during the period known as Termination.

Primarily under the Eisenhower Administration, the US government took steps to dismantle sovereign tribal governments across the country by ending the relationship between the federal government and tribes through the revocation of their reservations--primarily with the goal of assimilating Native people and reducing their financial support of tribal governments. Through this shrinking or termination of reservations, industries like mining were able to expand into those areas and utilize the natural resources--all without the consultation of tribal governments.

The policy was so catastrophic for Native communities that it was ultimately abandoned in 1970. Though many tribes were able to fight off attacks on their sovereignty, the many that did lose their reservation status were forced to reapply or otherwise accept their tribe's loss of self-governance.

Zinke's proposal to allow the privatization of reservation lands would prove equally as catastrophic for Native communities. It represents a further attempt to sell off lands to companies that wish to exploit their resources and devastate their cultural significance, much like with the revocation of Bears Ears and Gold Butte National Monuments in Utah and Nevada, respectively. 

Trail of the Iron Horse by C. M. Russell. The expansion of railroads into places like Montana without the consultation of Native tribes represents an important example of the US government supporting corporate interests in squandering the rights of Native peoples and allowing the violation of treaties.

Unfortunately, these attempts to force a corporate agenda on Native peoples is not new: the US government has been doing so since the beginning of its relationship with tribes after the American Revolution. For instance, tribes in the South were chased out in the early 19th century on the Trail of Tears in order to make room for commercial farming and expansionist settlers. Tribes in the Midwest saw their tribal rights destroyed by the expansion of homesteaders and commercial interests like railroads expanding eastward. Such breaches of treaties and tribal rights are an egregious theme that continues to this very day, though many people may believe that it ended decades ago.

As Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "By steering the government toward Termination-era policies. Trump threatens the health and prosperity of Native Americans and drags us all backwards. This approach has devastated Indian Country before. We cannot allow it to happen again."