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151 chapter six Political Economy and Tribal Natural Resources Resource Management I decided to organize several tribes into a coalition I liked to call the Native American OPEC. . . . Following our first meeting with the president ’s special assistant in the Department of Energy, we were told to organize ourselves in order to gain White House backing. This we did in a room assigned to us in the D.O.E. We discussed our concerns, trying to come up with a name for our group. . . . It was after midnight, we were tired, and the name continued to elude us. Fighting hunger and exhaustion , I reached into my pocket and removed a package of Certs breath mints. I glanced at the wrapper just before slipping one of the mints into my mouth. Then, joking, I said, “Why don’t we call ourselves CERT?” No one realized I was referring to the mints in my hand, so they asked me what the initials stood for. Thinking for a moment, I replied, “Council of Energy Resource Tribes.” We adopted the name. We were finally able to adjourn and get some sleep. I was grateful that I had not been carrying Tic-Tacs or Life Savers, for had I been, we might have spent more hours trying to find a name. Peter MacDonald, Navajo, 1975 “Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country and some people don’t. People start pollution. People can stop it,” said the public service announcement in a deep resonating voice. Simultaneously, an American Indian dressed in buckskin gets out of a canoe; he stands tall as trash is thrown at his feet from a passing car. He turns his bronze chiseled face slightly as a single tear rolls down the curve of his cheek. This cause célèbre is an unforgettable scene etched in the minds of many older Americans. This commercial aired regularly during the early 1970s, a sign of the times that introduced the environmental 152 · Rebuilding movement.1 Even though Iron Eyes Cody in the commercial was actually Italian, the American people got the message: “Take care of the Earth! Don’t screw up!” Everyone was responsible for the natural environment. The plethora of natural resources on reservation lands in the modern West provoked another epochal struggle between Indians and whites, which has continued into the twenty-first century. Power and control determined who would end up with the final say about tribal finite natural resources remaining on tribal lands. Ironically, for a long time white settlers , ranchers, miners, and railroad industrialists did not desire these seemingly worthless lands. Who would have guessed that rich natural resources would rest under these worthless Indian lands? More important was anticipating the potential of mining tribal resources, and what the consequences were for the tribes. Native leaders, especially those of what would become known as the energy tribes, learned an invaluable lesson from previous generations of Indians that were bilked out of their lands and royalties. These history lessons included gold and silver on Indian lands, then oil, coal, gas, timber, uranium, and water were at risk. And it has been said, experience is the best teacher. But the tribes have learned much more than this. Resource management became a vital tool for tribes in planning, developing programs, and rebuilding their nation with a political economy approach. Political economy here is used as an approach of analyzing the progress of a community in history, economics, law, political science, and sociology . Essentially, by examining how tribal communities have utilized their natural resources in these five areas, one can see their progress over time as their state of economy improved while operating legally under trust relations with the federal government. In addition, by studying the social relations within the community, the political context indicates varying degrees of improvement in the economy. In the case of Native groups, their longtime relationship also with the earth is an ingrained one in their various cultures. By examining the changes within a tribal community over time, we can understand the economic progress and relationships sustained by the people. At the close of the nineteenth century, Wooden Leg of the Cheyenne described his view toward conflicting human-earth relations. His words still hold importance today as they have throughout the western Indians’ struggle to defend their tribal natural resources. He recalled, Another thing the white people appear not to understand: The old Indian teaching was that it is...

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