The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

8 WHAT INDIANS WANT

1 9 3 8 what indians want What we need is a cultural leave-us-alone agreement, in spirit and in fact. —Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins A future. What a good idea. But there’s a problem. If Native people are to have a future that is of our own making, such a future will be predicated, in large part, on sovereignty. Sovereignty is one of those topics about which everyone has an opinion, and each time the subject is brought up at a gathering or at a conference, a hockey game breaks out. To be honest, I’m reluctant to mention it. But if you’re going to talk about Indians in contemporary North America, you’re going to have to discuss sovereignty. No way around it. Sovereignty, by definition, is supreme and unrestricted T h e I n c o n v e n i e n t I n d i a n 1 9 4 authority. However, sovereignty in practice, as a functional form of governance, is never an absolute condition. Rather, it is a collection of practical powers that include, among others, the authority to levy taxes, set the criteria for citizenship, control trade, and negotiate agreements and treaties. Aboriginal sovereignty, by the way, is a given. It is recognized in treaties, in the Canadian and American constitutions, and in the Indian Act. It has been confirmed any number of times by Supreme Court decisions in both countries. Just in case you didn’t know. In 2007, the United Nations passed its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, in which it recognized that indigenous people had the right “to self-determination” and that they could “freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” The declaration doesn’t use the word “sovereignty” but the forty-six articles that set out the rights and freedoms and responsibilities of indigenous people are close enough to sovereignty. At least, close enough for government work. The Canadian columnist Jeffrey Simpson, in a Globe and Mail article in August of 2009, offered a more pragmatic approach to the subject of Native sovereignty. “We have been living a myth in aboriginal policy,” said Simpson, “that ‘nations,’ in the sociological sense of the word, can be effective ‘sovereign’ entities, in the sense of doing what sovereign governments are expected to do. When the population of a ‘nation’ is a few hundred people, or even a few thousand, we are kidding ourselves, aboriginal or non-aboriginal, if we think that sovereignty can be anything more than partial.” The Cherokee–Creek scholar Craig Womack is less dismissive and more practical. “Sovereignty, for all its problems and What Indians Want 1 9 5 contradictions,” says Womack, “is a reality in Indian country, embedded in the U.S. Constitution and two centuries of federal Indian law. In short, it is what Native people have to work with, the hand that has been dealt us. This, of course, does not mean Native people should not dream of more, or even advocate for more, but present realities must also be acknowledged.” One of the realities that Simpson may have missed is that the Navajo in the Southwest, the Blackfoot in Alberta, and the Mohawk on both sides of the border have been looking after their own affairs for some time now. All three tribes have taken control of onreserve services for health, education, and housing. Meanwhile, the Iroquois have been practicing sovereignty by issuing and using their own Haudenosaunee Confederacy passports. In 2009, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) finished work on the Embassy of Tribal Nations in Washington, D.C. At the opening ceremony, President Jefferson Keel said he expected that the embassy would allow Native people to “more effectively assert their sovereign status and facilitate a much stronger nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government.” Even American President Barack Obama has spoken publicly about the “nation-to-nation relationship” that North America has with Indian tribes. It all sounds good. Of course, government has been only too happy to download services onto reservations and reserves. Ottawa and Washington still control the budgets and set the regulations , while avoiding most of the liabilities. The issuing of passports is a legitimate exercise of sovereignty, but in 2010, when the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team tried to travel to Manchester for the International Lacrosse Championships on...