When the Indian Wars ended after Custer’s demise at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Native Americans found themselves relegated to reservations. Thereafter followed their next war, one to stave off poverty and protect what little wealth they had left.
In that war the federal bureaucracy—mainly the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)—took control of Indian Country, which allowed non-Indians to take huge amounts of reservation lands. In 1887 there were 136 million acres in Indian Country, but by 1933 that number had dwindled to less than 70 million acres. The Blackfeet lost at least one-third of their reservation to the formation of Glacier National Park. Fertile river valleys coveted by settlers reduced reservation land within one mile of a river from 24% in 1890 of reservations to 10.5% by 1915.
Recently the war over resources has pitted tribes against tribes. In the latest battle, the Corps of Engineers on May 9 ruled that a proposed coal terminal in Washington State violated the treaty-protected fishing rights of the Lummi Nation because the terminal would have covered 122 acres of coastal water with a trestle and wharf.
A zero-sum solution
While this was a victory for the Lummi, it was a defeat for the Crow Nation, a Montana tribe hoping to ship its coal through the terminal in which it held a small ownership stake. The Crow Big Metal Mine alone contains 1.4 billion tons of clean burning coal, much of which would have been shipped to Asian markets through the terminal. Such sales are crucial for a tribe with an unemployment rate over 30% and a poverty rate of 40%. Tribal chairman, Darrin Old Coyote points out that, “For the Crow people, there are no jobs that compare to a coal job.” A Harvard University report on the impact of the Absaloka Mine, another of the tribe’s coal deposits, concludes that nearly 20% gross regional output, including the reservation and the surrounding Big Horn County, and 8% of the region’s worker compensation come from that mine alone. For Old Coyote’s tribe, "The war on coal is a war on our families and our children."
Of course, battles between tribes are nothing new—the dreaded Blackfeet and Comanche were noted for stealing horses and people from other tribes—but the stakes today are much higher. When it comes to energy resource like those of the Crow, western tribes are energy rich but income poor. In 2012 the Department of the Interior estimated that Indian lands have the potential to produce 5.35 billion barrels of oil, 37.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 53 billion tons of coal. Yet 86% of Indian lands with energy or mineral potential remain undeveloped.
Bureaucratic red tape
Part of the problem in Indian Country emanates from federal trusteeship over reservation lands and energy. For example, developing a hydraulic fracturing well on the Ft. Berthold or the Ft. Peck reservations sitting atop the Bakken play typically requires going through four federal agencies to get approval for 49 permits. Frustrated with such bureaucratic red tape, Stoney Anketell from the Ft. Peck Reservation said, “It takes too long to get leases approved, to get lease assignments approved, to get rights of way approved. . . . We’re not shortchanging the need for archaeological reviews, but on land that has been farmed for 70 years? It’s been tilled, plowed, planted, harvested. There’s no teepee rings.”
Research by economists Dominic Parker and Bryan Leonard estimates the effect of surface and subsurface tenures created by federal trusteeship on reservation oil development. For the Ft. Berthold Reservation, they find the highly fractionated land base has significantly delayed drilling because is extremely difficult for companies to gather all the necessary approvals. At the height of the Bakken boom, this delay could have cost $12,145 per capita on a reservation where per capita income was only $13,543 in 2010.
Let tribes bargain with one another
The lesson from past takings and from present battles to deprive tribes of their resource wealth is clear—it is time to reform tribal institutions in this post-colonial era. If tribes are truly sovereign nations, let them bargain with one another as states do when issues cross sovereign boundaries. Surely the Lummi and Crow nations could have bargained to a better solution than the zero-sum—Lummi win, Crow lose—decision handed down by a huge federal bureaucracy.
Give control of reservation energy resources to the tribes and let them decide what they want to do with them. As Ron Crossguns from the Blackfeet tribe's oil and gas department puts it, “It's our right. We say yes or no. I don't think the outside world should come out here and dictate to us what we should do with our properties.” That principle should apply to the federal government as well as to other tribes.
