Abstract
This article presents the concept of social inclusion as a means of addressing problems of poverty and social welfare and reviews the place of social inclusion in U.S. policies toward Indigenous peoples within U.S. boundaries. We argue that there are a number of problems with the present policy application of social inclusion to Indigenous peoples in the United States, including external conceptions of needs, individualization, an orientation to distributional as opposed to positional politics, and the conditionality of inclusion. We review some of the ways that Indigenous peoples are challenging the assumptions that underlie inclusionary policy goals. We then consider how a revised concept of social inclusion that comprehends the distinctiveness of Indigenous aspirations for self-determination, nationhood, and collective self-government might benefit not only Native Americans but the United States itself and how it might contribute to a postracial America. Our argument throughout is not with social inclusion as an ideal but with the particular version of it that has characterized late 20th and early 21st century policy toward Native peoples in the United States.
As a growing body of scholarship has pointed out, settler colonialism is a distinctive phenomenon (e.g., Cavanagh & Veracini, 2017; Hixson, 2013; Veracini, 2010; Wolfe, 1999). Classic colonialism typically involves a largely extractive economic agenda, a minority population of colonists ruling over a majority population that is native to colonized lands, and often the use of that majority population as labor in the extraction of resources. The examples are legion, from British imperialism in India to Belgium’s ransacking of the Congo to French colonization of what is now Vietnam.
In contrast, the primary features of settler colonialism include the more or less complete displacement of Indigenous populations from their lands, the permanent occupation of those lands by settler populations that eventually become the majority, the construction by settlers of a sovereign society derivative of their own cultures, and ultimately the irrelevance of Indigenous populations as anything other than an obstacle to territorial and societal expansion, all usually justified by the supposed racial superiority of the settler population. Examples of settler colonialism include, among others, the United States, Australia, and South Africa.
The difference in the roles of Indigenous populations in these two kinds of colonialism is critical. While they typically serve as a source of labor in the first, they are for the most part extraneous in the second. Indeed, as Patrick Wolfe (1999) put it, “Settler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies” (p. 2).
Elimination, however, can take multiple forms. Especially in the early stages of the settler process, it frequently occurs through physical violence and/or the spread of pathogens unknown to Indigenous populations, but these hardly exhaust the possibilities. Elimination also can take place via “officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations” (Wolfe, 2006, p. 388). The strategies vary, but the intended result is the same: as organized entities, Indigenous populations disappear.
Settler colonialism provides an intriguing context for the subject of Indigenous peoples and social inclusion, as the latter would appear, on the face of it, to have a very different objective. Social inclusion, after all, seems a positive concept: in the Indigenous case, an effort to break down barriers to enhanced social welfare and, in effect, address settler colonialism’s exclusionary and devastating impacts.
This article first presents the concept of social inclusion as a means of addressing problems of social welfare. It then reviews the place of social inclusion in U.S. policies toward Indigenous peoples within U.S. boundaries. Next we identify what seem to us to be particularly problematic aspects of social inclusion policy in regard to Indigenous peoples and discuss some of the ways those peoples, in pursuing their own agenda, are challenging the assumptions that underlie inclusionary policy goals such as “closing gaps,” “decreasing poverty,” and “improving access to health care.” Our argument throughout is not with social inclusion as an ideal but with the particular version of it that has characterized late 20th and early 21st century policy toward Native peoples in the United States. We conclude by considering how a revised concept of social inclusion, one that comprehends the distinctiveness of Indigenous aspirations for self-determination, nationhood, and collective self-government, might benefit not only Native Americans but the United States itself, how it might challenge the thrust of settler colonialism, and how it might contribute to a postracial America.
Social Inclusion as Concept
Definitions of the term “social inclusion” vary but often are posed against its obverse, social exclusion. Social exclusion refers to the fact that significant numbers of individuals and groups, and in particular minority populations of various kinds, are excluded from the benefits of developed societies around the world. A list of such benefits typically includes gainful employment, adequate housing, quality education, accessible health care, the right to vote, and more generally, participation in the productive social networks and processes of the society-at-large. In the context of these sorts of exclusion, the World Bank (2013) offers a two-part definition of social inclusion: “The process of improving the terms for individuals and groups to take part in society” and “the process of improving the ability, opportunity, and dignity of people, disadvantaged on the basis of their identity, to take part in society” (pp. 3–4). Other definitions accord, more or less, with this one. For example, according to the Charity Commission (2001), regulator of charities in England and Wales, social inclusion “is about enabling people or communities to fully participate in society,” especially by promoting equality of capacities and opportunities (p. 2).
Interest in social inclusion as an interpretive or analytical lens through which to look at poverty or other forms of social disadvantage began to appear in Europe in the 1970s and drew growing attention over the next several decades from governments, academics, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and activists in Europe and beyond. Australian researcher Boyd Hunter (2009), referring to work by Finer and Smyth (2004), argues that the ideas of social exclusion and inclusion gained traction as “the debate about the causes and consequences of poverty has moved away from the rather narrow historical focus on the lack of income” and instead has been concerned with “the dynamic social processes that perpetuate the lack of social participation in the workings of society” (p. 52).
Social Inclusion as Policy Toward Native Americans
For most of the last century, social inclusion has been an either implicit or explicit policy principle in U.S. dealings with American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian peoples. This has been particularly apparent in post-World War II policy initiatives designed to address socioeconomic disparities between Indigenous peoples and mainstream populations. Policy success typically has been measured by the degree to which, according to indices of individual social welfare, Native populations come to resemble non-Native ones, and by the degree to which Native populations appear able to participate fully in the encompassing economy and social life of the country.
But the idea that Native Americans ought to be somehow integrated into the emerging United States has a still longer history, evident in some of the earliest American thinking and law-making in regard to “the Indian problem.” The original version of that problem was the central settler-colonial issue: How to gain access for non-Indigenous populations and markets to lands and resources effectively controlled by Indigenous communities. Through most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, this problem was addressed primarily by diplomacy (negotiations and treaty-making, often under duress), physical violence (warfare and forced removal) and, once Indigenous resistance had been overcome, imposed policies, especially the individualized allotment of Native lands (see, for example, Carlson, 1981; Washburn, 1975), that dramatically reduced Indigenous land holdings. The effect was to drive most Native Americans deep into poverty, excluding them not only from their lands but also from the larger economy those lands now subsidized.
Exclusion, however, was not the whole story. Integration—in effect, social inclusion—was conceived as another means to the same desired end: displacement of Indigenous populations. Inclusion could be part of a bargain whereby Native Americans would receive educational services and other benefits in return for their lands; alternatively, it could be a precipitant of the land transfer process itself. Thomas Jefferson, for example, held a widely shared view that a policy of “civilizing” Indians would open up more land for non-Indians: As tribespeople were given the opportunities and tools necessary to participate in the grand American venture, they would turn from hunting to agriculture, thereby requiring less land (Horsman, 1967; Prucha, 1986). This was social inclusion as a means to land acquisition.
The success of these strategies eventually led to a change in the nature of “the Indian problem.” By the 1920s, the most valuable lands had been taken, moving from Indigenous to settler possession. What remained for most Native Americans were administered communities, suppressed cultures, collapsed economies, and a host of accompanying social problems. The new policy challenge was to deal somehow with the wreckage that settler colonialism had left in its wake. But if the problem had changed, the solution had not: Social inclusion again was key.
In 1926, the U.S. government commissioned the Institute of Government Research to carry out a massive survey of socioeconomic conditions among American Indians. The result was the so-called Meriam Report (after Lewis Meriam, who led the study; Institute for Government Research, 1928). At nearly 900 pages, it laid out in detail the dismal health, economic, educational, and other conditions in most Native communities. It also stated that the object of work with or for the Indians is to fit them either to merge into the social and economic life of the prevailing civilization as developed by the whites or to live in the presence of that civilization at least in accordance with a minimum standard of health and decency. The first of these alternatives is apparently so clear on its face as to require no further explanation. (p. 86)
Subsequent policy discussions reached similar conclusions. In 1949, the U.S. Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, commonly known as the Hoover Commission (after Herbert Hoover, commission chair; U.S. Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, 1949), devoted a chapter of its final report to Indian affairs, advocating “progressive measures to integrate the Indians into the rest of the population as the best solution of ‘the Indian Problem’ ” (p. 465) and “their complete integration into the mass of the population as full, tax-paying citizens” (p. 466). It argued that “tribal government should be regarded as a stage in the transition from Federal tutelage to the full participation of Indians in State and local government” (p. 468) and envisioned a time when Indians would be fully integrated into the larger society “economically and politically, as well as culturally” (p. 473).
Federal programs moved to realize this vision. The coercive “termination” policy of the 1950s sought to end federal support for tribes, dismantle the reservation system, and place tribes under state jurisdiction, while an accompanying program known as “relocation” moved thousands of Indians into American cities where they were supposed to find ample economic opportunity (Burt, 1982; Neils, 1971; Wilkinson & Biggs, 1977). Even when Indian resistance to termination and relocation challenged these policies, the underlying assumption remained. In 1966, the independent Commission on the Rights, Liberties, and Responsibilities of the American Indian argued that the point of public policy should be to make the Indian “a self-respecting and useful American citizen” and concluded by itemizing the obstacles it saw to the ultimate goal: assimilation (Brophy & Aberle, 1966, p. 3 and chapter 7).
By then, however, Native American political mobilization and a rapidly changing political context were having an effect. The civil rights years, the Lyndon Johnson administration’s concern with racial justice, and the political activism of Native Americans themselves led not away from social inclusion as policy but toward a more collaborative approach. The Great Society and antipoverty programs of the 1960s were not addressed primarily to Native Americans—poor people more generally, including disadvantaged racial and ethnic populations, were the target (Greenstone & Peterson, 1976)—but as George Pierre Castile (1998) puts it, “Indian affairs were inexorably swept along in the tsunami of legislation that the Johnson presidency unleashed” (p. 25). As tribes pushed for a greater voice in their own affairs, they found both funding and organizational vehicles in the new federal programs (Castile, 1998; Levitan & Hetrick, 1971). Social inclusion would proceed with the goal of reducing disparities between mainstream and Indigenous populations in employment, health, housing, and other socioeconomic phenomena, but tribes would now play a more active and prominent role in the process.
Today, these disparities continue (see Table 1), and while the U.S. government has created a number of programs to address them, funding for such programs has become increasingly uncertain (Moffitt, 2015, Walke, 2000), suggesting that the federal commitment to social inclusion itself may be in question. That alone has potentially severe costs for Native American communities. But there also are fundamental issues in the prevailing approach to social inclusion itself.
Comparative Socioeconomic Disparities in the United States in 2018, by Race.
Source. Deweaver (2019); data are drawn from the American Community Survey 1-year estimates for 2018.
Note. Except where noted, data are for populations aged 25 and above. The “only” populations consist of persons who checked a single box in response to the race question on a Census form. Two thirds of the American Indian and Alaska Native only population live on or near reservations (see endnote 1 below).
Problems in the Policy Approach 1
A number of scholars have taken issue with aspects of social inclusion as an approach to enhancing social welfare, ranging from problems of measurement (e.g., Gingrich & Lightman, 2015) to its tendency to ignore fundamental structural factors that inhibit inclusionary goals (e.g., Labonte, 2004). Our concern is narrower, having to do with certain aspects of social inclusion as found in U.S. policies toward Indigenous peoples. At least four related aspects seem problematic.
External Conceptions of Needs
Social inclusion is a needs-based concept. It begins, in the Indigenous case, with the identification of Indigenous socioeconomic needs. These are identified by comparing indices of well-being in Indigenous populations—levels of family income, measures of health and life expectancy, access to quality housing, and so on—with those in mainstream populations. Where there are deficits—that is, where the gap between Indigenous and mainstream indices is large—policy attempts to reduce them. 2
However, instead of drawing on Indigenous aspirations, these identified needs reflect external assumptions about what should matter to Indigenous peoples. Socioeconomic deficits matter a great deal to Indigenous people, and the needs usually thus identified are by no means spurious. But the process ignores the possibility that the indices that matter most to outsiders may not be those that matter most to Indigenous communities (see, for example, Rainie et al., 2017). The issue is not that policy is need based; it is a matter of who identifies the relevant and most pressing needs.
Individualization
The social inclusion project is fundamentally individualist. As the previous point suggests, the progress of social inclusion typically has been measured with individualized socioeconomic metrics where the primary concern is the degree to which the life chances and quality of life of the average Indigenous person approach those of the average non-Indigenous person. The desired outcome of policy is to close the gaps between the two, thus addressing the needs of the Indigenous persons involved; social inclusion supposedly rises as aggregated data indicate a closing of such gaps. 3 Socially defined groups, in this view, should not matter as anything other than indicators of where the gaps are. The challenge is not how to include Indigenous peoples in the larger society but how to include a more or less undifferentiated mass of Indigenous persons.
To be sure, individualized metrics typically reveal critical quality-of-life issues, products of settler colonialism that disproportionately burden Indigenous populations and need to be addressed. But often missing from the analysis are concomitant measures of the well-being of Indigenous collectives—tribes, nations, communities—and the perceptions of Indigenous peoples themselves. 4 For many of those peoples, long-term survival as culturally distinct and politically empowered entities is at least as important as the well-being of individual citizens. They are likely to reject forms of social inclusion that focus on individuals but ignore the opportunities and capacities of Indigenous collectives—nations—to achieve self-determined goals.
Distributional versus Positional Politics
Those goals are often distinctive. Social inclusion policies assume that excluded populations desire to be included, or at least want the same socioeconomic benefits and opportunities for participation desired by other citizens. Surely for some Indigenous people this is indeed the case, but for many U.S.-based Indigenous nations, any such desire comes with a critical caveat. This caveat points to one of the important differences between many Indigenous groups and other minority populations: the difference between a distributional and a positional politics (Cornell, 2015).
A distributional politics is organized largely around gaining equal access to the benefits—socioeconomic and other—of a developed society (jobs, health care, housing, the franchise, and so forth). A positional politics is organized around the degree of autonomy or power that the collective retains or manages to build within the larger polity.
Indigenous peoples care about the distribution of benefits—no one wants to be poor or unhealthy. But, as our previous point suggests, their own distributional politics are often subordinated to positional politics in which the survival and autonomy of the community or nation take precedence over the statuses of its component individuals.
Apropos of this: In the 1970s, one of the authors of this paper asked some American Indian political activists why relatively few Indians took part in the Poor Peoples Campaign of 1967–1968 and the massive march that the Campaign organized in Washington D.C. The answer was that while Indians supported the goals of the campaign—jobs, housing, and other benefits for poor Americans of all kinds—their own primary political concerns were treaty rights, tribal sovereignty, collective self-determination, and the restoration of tribal lands. Such concerns—inherently positional—were not central to that campaign. Likewise, gender activist Lorelei DeCora Means has argued, “We are American Indian women, in that order. We are oppressed, first and foremost, as American Indians, as peoples colonized by the United States of America, not as women” (Means, quoted in Jaimes & Halsey, 1992, p. 314). Her sentiment is reinforced by research on divorce and real property settlements among tribal citizens that finds that Native women focused “on their nations’ rights to sovereignty ahead of gender rights” (Flies-Away et al., 2005, p. 88).
These examples do not suggest that Indigenous nations necessarily reject social inclusion, but rather that they are inclined to judge social inclusion policies most importantly by the policies’ effects on Native peoples’ position or degree of autonomy—as collectives—within the larger polity.
The Conditionality of Inclusion
In U.S. policy toward Indigenous peoples, social inclusion has long had a strong assimilationist undercurrent. “Indian economic development,” wrote the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (1969) in a submission to the U.S. Congress, “can proceed only as the process of acculturation allows” (p. 333). In other words, you are poor because you are tribal, or Indian, or culturally distinctive, or at the very least, not “us.” Change, and the door will open. Alan Cairns (2000), without referring explicitly to social inclusion, points out a similar theme in Canada’s policies toward its Indigenous peoples. “Difference was something to be overcome on the road to homogeneity. Until that goal was reached one was kept outside, to be invited into full membership when certain criteria were met” (p. 91). In short, you are welcome in the larger polity to the extent that you resemble others participating in that polity.
As this suggests, social inclusion policies toward Indigenous peoples have been at the same time welcoming and conditional. The policy concerns often are well intentioned, and they attempt to address real needs. But the underlying message is that social inclusion has a price: giving up difference, even if that is something Indigenous people value and that many see as fundamental to their identities as individuals and collectives. The problem is not so much social inclusion as the terms of its implementation.
Social Inclusion and Political Organization
U.S. policies of social inclusion targeting Indigenous populations have not entirely ignored collective organization. Indigenous peoples have been encouraged to organize for local governmental purposes, potentially facilitating greater participation in the larger polity. But as with other aspects of social inclusion, this, too, has been conditional, as Native nations generally have had to work within the terms offered by the U.S. federal government.
The most prominent example is the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (IRA). This landmark legislation reversed policies that had fragmented the remaining Indian land base; it also encouraged the formation of tribal governments. Because it has structured much of the contemporary government-to-government relationship between Native nations and the federal government, it continues to shape a good deal of policy and its implementation. Nonetheless, from an inclusivity standpoint (even an inclusivity standpoint that accounts for political collectives), there have long been some critical problems with the IRA.
For one thing, the legislation rigidified group boundaries that were less the result of Indigenous choice than of colonial intrusion. Conflict, treaty-making, land loss, removal, and other forces disrupted not only the geographical and political boundaries of groups but often their social and cognitive boundaries as well, variously subjecting Indigenous peoples to fragmentation or consolidation, usually along lines that reflected the interpretations and/or administrative convenience of the U.S. government. The governmental structures encouraged by the IRA assumed those reorganized boundaries.
In addition, the IRA paid little attention to North American Indigenous nations’ own histories and structures of government. Certainly, some Indigenous governing structures had been undermined or destroyed in the course of relations between Indigenous peoples and colonial powers. But some operated underground; some had been modified in response to radically changed circumstances; and some remained operational and relatively unchanged. Regardless of the status of these institutions, however, as the legislation was implemented, it largely ignored them.
The IRA also went further, urging on tribes its preferred forms of government. 5 Because tribes could vote to reject the IRA, and because some tribes that adopted the IRA continued to govern according to their own preferences, its preferred forms never became universal. But most tribes either adopted these forms or organized similarly, giving rise to Native nation governments with electoral systems, forms of representation, terms of office, and other details familiar to non-Indigenous American citizens.
Finally, while the IRA allowed Indigenous nations to form governments, it also placed limits on those governments. IRA tribal constitutions and amendments to those constitutions took effect only with the approval of the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, who also retained power of approval over the hiring of tribal attorneys, land sales, and spending above certain thresholds, among other things (Deloria & Lytle, 1984; Pevar, 2002). 6 These restrictions, combined with limited economic resources, left many tribal governments dependent on U.S. government decisions and the funding priorities of the U.S. Congress. The result in many cases was entities that were less governing bodies than administrative extensions of federal agencies, providing federally funded social services to their citizens while operating under a veneer of Indigenous governmental autonomy.
These issues reflect the fundamentally assimilationist thrust of the IRA. As one analyst (Spicer, 1962) put it, the IRA was based on the assumption that “influences from Anglo culture could be best assimilated through the medium of the tribe as an organized entity set up to deal as a unit with the outside influences” (p. 352).
In recent decades, as Indigenous nations have moved to reclaim self-governing power, they increasingly have pushed against these limitations. They have done so in three ways.
Organizational Scope
A number of tribes have challenged the organizational scope of Indigenous governance. In some cases, the challenge is manifest in Native nations’ efforts to create shared, collaborative institutions. Examples include intertribal courts and the various Potawatomi bands’ aspiration for revitalization of traditional “national” governance through the Potawatomi Gathering. 7 In so doing, these nations are building institutional bridges across received political and administrative boundaries, reestablishing intra- and intertribal ties that U.S. government-determined approaches to tribal recognition undervalued or ignored. In other cases, Indigenous polities are pulling apart political collectives forced upon them during colonization—the White Earth Nation’s attempt to withdraw from the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe is one example (Vizenor & Doerfler, 2012). In both instances, tribes are taking advantage of the very connections—kinship relations, shared cultures and values, spiritual relationships to particular lands—that are essential to Indigenous self-concepts but were ignored by colonial organizational impositions.
Governmental Forms
Many U.S.-based Indigenous nations also are moving well beyond the governmental forms that have been offered by the settler-colonial state. A growing number are engaged in constitutional processes that imagine replacing the organizational structures proposed by the IRA or otherwise encouraged by the federal government with their own institutional designs, some rooted in generations-old structures and practices of government, others invented to accommodate new circumstances and relationships (Dennison, 2012; Tatum et al., 2014; Vizenor & Doerfler, 2012). The result is much more diverse approaches to representation, decision-making, dispute resolution, law-making, and other governmental tasks, approaches that in many cases depart substantially from the organizational norms of American government.
Functions of Government
Finally, Indigenous nations are expanding the functions of government beyond the minimalist notions embedded in settler-colonial state legislation and court decisions. Moving beyond externally approved self-administration and self-management, in which Indigenous governments are viewed largely as vehicles for the implementation of settler-state policies, an increasing number of Native nations are attempting instead to govern broadly: They are becoming law and policy-makers, policy implementers, and law adjudicators themselves. That is, they are making and enforcing law, building court and other dispute-resolution systems, entering into trade relationships, developing their own educational systems, negotiating new relationships with local non-Native governments, revitalizing language and culture, taking control of land tenure and resource regulation, and claiming and reclaiming numerous other governmental functions (Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, 2008).
Not all of these things are happening to the same extent everywhere nor are they all following the same patterns, and the outcomes at ground level are diverse. But taken together they constitute a challenge to the idea that a settler-colonial state should be able to tell Indigenous nations who they are, how to organize, or how to govern. Today, many tribal government activities either complement or parallel but do not necessarily replicate those of local, state, and federal governments.
Social Inclusion and Economy
At the same time, some American Indian nations also are rebuilding economies broken by colonialism. As with their strategies for political organization, Native nations’ economic development strategies have a prominent collective component, necessitated in part by their desire to sustain a high degree of political autonomy.
This collective orientation means that tribal government economic development strategies must address several substantial economic tasks. One is to find ways of generating more opportunities for their citizens—those residents on tribal lands and off—to lead productive and satisfying lives, to support their families, and to more effectively pursue their own economic goals. Another is to find the financial means of supporting quality tribal government and building the capacity of those governments to provide needed services. In other words, economic development must generate adequate tribal government revenue to end Native nations’ dependence on federal or other “strings attached” external funds. A third task is to facilitate the intergenerational transfer of land, economic opportunity, language and culture, etc., and thereby to support the long-term survival of their nations. This task is less obviously economic than the other two, but it requires an array of activities from education and strategic planning to intergovernmental negotiations and legal defense that can be costly.
For many American Indian nations, pursuit of these tasks is hampered by the legacies of settler colonialism, among them historical trauma and related social problems, underdeveloped human capital, subjection to external decision-makers, historical loss of marketable resources, isolation from markets, and more. Despite these obstacles, however, a growing number of nations are making substantive economic headway. In fact, the decades since the 1980s have seen a dramatic change in the economic circumstances of many Native nations in the United States. While the public perception of change has tended to focus on the gambling industry and tribal casinos, change has been happening in multiple arenas, from extractive resource development to citizen-owned small businesses, from tourism to international trade. 8 Reservation communities generally have been among the poorest communities in the United States 9 and most tribes have started from a very low baseline. Consequently, the economic challenge remains enormous. But development is gradually transforming many Native communities. 10
What are the keys to these economic development successes? The link between political organization and a Native nation’s economy is amply evident. Research beginning in the late 1980s has identified at least three keys to the economic transformation of tribal communities: self-determination (freeing American Indian nations to decide for themselves how to govern and how to develop), capable Native governance (backing up governing power with institutions that provide fair adjudication of disputes, limit political interference in economic decision-making, and get things done), and cultural match (a fit between those formal governing institutions and community beliefs about how responsibility or authority should be organized and exercised). These factors largely determine whether assets such as natural resources, location, and education will be squandered or put to effective use (Cornell & Gil-Swedberg, 1995; Cornell & Kalt, 1995, 1997, 2000, 2010; Jorgensen, 2007). In short, while political organization benefits from economic development, sustainable development requires capable political organization.
But neither tribal economic strategies nor the forms of tribal government need necessarily follow mainstream models. The key is to allow Native nations to develop their own approaches to both governance and development while giving them leeway to make mistakes, learn from mistakes and successes, and learn from each other.
This observation returns attention to the three substantial tasks for tribal government economic development listed in the second paragraph of this section (above). Only the first—improving tribal citizens’ access to the full array of opportunities in the mainstream economy—is a typical component of a social inclusion agenda. Funding self-government and ensuring the sustainability of nationhood across generations are not. Indeed, the latter might be understood as fundamentally at odds with a mainstream social inclusion agenda. Together, however, these tasks outline economic aspects of an Indigenous form of social inclusion.
Implications for Policy
There are implications here for both federal and tribal policy-makers.
For the U.S. Government
Since the Meriam Report of the late 1920s, the federal government has struggled to find ways to address a revised “Indian problem”—no longer wholly defined by government aspiration to colonize Indian lands with white settlers but instead by the presumed obligation, given contemporary sensibilities, to address the catastrophic, long-term effects on Indigenous peoples of that earlier colonial project. The IRA, termination and relocation, and social welfare programs of various kinds all had the idea of social inclusion—usually in these cases a synonym for assimilation—at their core. None got the job done. This suggests to us that what the policy of social inclusion may need in the Indigenous case is less a search for a more perfect suite of social welfare programs than a reconceptualization of the notion of social inclusion itself.
The observed progress in economic development over the last few decades among a growing number of American Indian nations argues for just such a reconceptualization. It would include collective self-determination: The idea that these nations should decide for themselves what kind of future they want and be free to pursue it in ways of their own choosing. As Vivian et al. (2018) point out, “Indigenous peoples do not conceive of themselves as mere stakeholders or minority groups. Instead they expect to be acknowledged and respected as separate and distinct polities within the boundaries of the nation state” (p. 226). In short, they imagine participating in the larger polity and economy not simply as individuals but as collectives, operating on their own terms. This idea is central to the government-to-government, polity-to-polity, nation-to-nation relationships that are embedded in the original treaties with America’s Indigenous nations, and it remains central to the aspirations of many of those nations today. It is a form of social inclusion that allows those nations to participate—to the extent that they wish—without having to sacrifice their desire and ability to be themselves.
To gain substantive traction, such a relationship will require education and a changed perspective on the part of the U.S. government concerning the distinctive nature and aspirations of Indigenous peoples. For example, the new perspective will require an openness to Indigenous conceptions of well-being. The indices tracked by government agencies are not irrelevant to Indigenous peoples, but other indices, such as language fluency, ceremonial or cultural participation, or multigenerational households, may be equally important in sustaining healthy communities and nations.
For Indigenous Nations
Despite the progress of the last few decades, many Indigenous populations in the United States remain poor, often desperately so. Federal funding streams provide vital assistance to Native people in the form of social services and jobs, and they inject badly needed cash into impoverished communities. But over time, they also have generated a debilitating dependence on outsiders, their funds, and their decisions. Those outsiders often have only limited understanding of the people they are trying to serve and often conceive those people as just one more needy interest group struggling for access to government benefits.
To escape that dependence and replace it with their own conceptions of inclusion, Indigenous nations need to continue to invest in their own governmental and economic development capacities. This will involve building institutions that: can avoid the internal politics of scarcity that leave factions fighting over diminishing federal or other resources; can resolve the disputes that inevitably accompany change; can represent and respond to their people’s needs; and can effectively pursue their people’s goals in ways that resonate with their people’s own understandings of how to govern. This is nation rebuilding, a return to the tradition of collective self-government that sustained those peoples for many generations before European arrival on the North American continent, revitalized and revamped to serve Indigenous purposes in today’s very different circumstances. Nations already engaged in the effort—from Ysleta del Sur Pueblo to the Oneida Nation, and from the Tulalip Tribes to the Eastern Band of Cherokee, to name only a few—may offer models for those yet to begin.
This work is demanding and will require not only Indigenous direction and determination but also a break with the fatalism and learned habits of dependence that have become embedded in many Indigenous communities and that make prevailing, individually focused social inclusion policies attractive. Because so many tribes have limited resources, it also may require U.S. government support for constitutional or other institutional development work needed for Native nations to expand what Native scholar Angela Riley (2007) calls “good (Native) governance” (p. 1049)—which may itself depart from mainstream assumptions of what good governance involves. 11
Indigenous Social Inclusion in a Postracial America
Political philosopher Will Kymlicka (2000) has argued that “the problem of how states deal with ‘nations within’ is not a marginal issue: it is one of the key issues, perhaps even the central issue, for states in the 21st century” (p. 223). Many settler states exhibit what New Zealand historian Judith Binney (2009) calls “the inability of human societies in general to accept that different forms of tribal, or even communal, self-government can coexist with the nation state without challenging national sovereignty.” This, she says, “is the essential, and repeated, issue in the relationship of indigenous communities to the larger polity within which they live” (p. 8).
It also is an essential issue in received conceptions of social inclusion. By ignoring the collective and its aspirations, those conceptions in effect encourage Indigenous people to immerse themselves in the mainstream, replicate mainstream characteristics, and ultimately disappear. That is one version of a postracial America: An America in which racial characteristics no longer affect the life chances of individuals. And yet, both the nonracial political character of American Indian nations and their own positional politics argue that a postracial America need not be—and should not be—a posttribal one.
What might that Indigenous version of a postracial America look like? Charles Wilkinson (1987), one of the leading authorities on American law as applied to Indigenous people, has argued that a particular idea was central to the treaties and treaty substitutes with Indian nations: to establish for them “a measured separatism” capable of preserving tribalism (p. 14). 12 One can interpret his term in various ways, but it seems to us to point toward a reconceived form of inclusion for Indigenous nations in contemporary times. It does not subvert tribalism in the name of individual welfare; instead, it builds on tribalism on behalf of both individuals and collectives, and it enables for Indigenous people forms of participation in the encompassing society that respect their own aspirations for nationhood.
Furthermore, it has compelling evidence on its side. Recent decades of growth in Indigenous self-government and economy have made clear not only that viable Indigenous nations need not threaten the sovereignty of the United States but also that a reconceived policy of inclusion might eventually relieve the U.S. government of its current iteration of “the Indian problem”—picking up the pieces in the aftermath of settler colonialism (Cornell, 2005)—while at the same time respecting the right of Indigenous peoples to be themselves.
Footnotes
Authors’ Note
The listed order of authorship is solely alphabetical. The present article draws in part on an earlier paper (Cornell & Jorgensen, 2019) that, among other things, compared social inclusion policies toward Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States. Our work on this topic benefited from the generous support of the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation and from feedback at the 2018 colloquium, “Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Peoples: Sovereignty, Sustainability, and Reconciliation,” sponsored by Fulbright Canada, SUNY Plattsburgh, and the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa.
Miriam Jorgensen is also affiliated with Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, Cambridge, USA and University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported in part by the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation.
