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RECLAIMING INDIGENOUS GOVERNANCE Edited by WILLIAM NIKOLAKIS, STEPHEN CORNELL, and HARRY NELSON Foreword by Sophie Pierre RECLAIMING INDIGENOUS GOVERNANCE Reections and Insights from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States e University of Arizona Press www .uapress .arizona .edu © by e Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published ISBN- : - - - - (paper) Cover design by Nicole Hayward Cover image: iStock/Alexei Derin Publication of this book is made possible in part by support from the Native Nations Institute at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona, and by the proceeds of a perma- nent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data are available at the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America ♾ is paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z .– (Permanence of Paper). CONTENTS Foreword vii Introduction , , 3 PART I. STRATEGIC ISSUES 1. From Rights to Governance and Back: Indigenous Political Transformations in the CANZUS States 15 2. The Shareholder Who Never Dies: The Economics of Indigenous Survival and the Development of Culturally Relevant Governance 38 ’ 3. The Evolution of Indigenous Self- Governance in Canada 55 4. Ngarrindjeri Nation Building: Securing a Future as Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar (Lands, Waters, and All Living Things) 71 , , PART II. BUILDING INSTITUTIONS 5. Ancient Spirit, Modern Mind: The Huu-ay-aht Journey Back to Self- Determination and Self- Reliance 107 6. From Little Things, Big Things Grow: Exercising Incremental Self- Governance in Australia 130 7. Whānau Ora: Building Māori Self- Determination in Aotearoa / New Zealand 155 8. Indigenous Commercial Codes: Sovereignty and International Trade Agreements 172 PART III. LANDS AND RESOURCES 9. Place of the Falling Waters: How the Salish and Kootenai Tribes Dealt with Settler Colonialism to Acquire and Name Se̓liš Ksanka Qĺispe̓ Dam 193 . 10. Natural Resources and Aboriginal Autonomy: Economic Development and the Boundaries of Indigenous Control and Engagement 228 11. Creating Space: Comanagement Considerations in Kakadu National Park 269 ’ 12. Land, Public Trust, and Governance: A Nez Perce Account 296 . Conclusion: Building Yourself and Your Community 306 Contributors Index FOREWORD “If you can remember the taste, you can rebuild the recipe.” ere is a com- mon, consistent theme in conversations across the Indigenous world of North America that in order to go forward, we must look backward. In order to rebuild successful governance, we have to remember what that looked like through our own cultural lens, not as “Indigenous people” but as Ktunaxa, Blackfoot, Cree, Anishinabe, and so forth. Terms like indigenize and decolonize are like ice cream; everyone has a favorite ¢avor until they taste something new. e taste that the Ktunaxa people long for is the taste of our own identity. As the original peoples of Turtle Island, we and so many others have been hidden under the blanket identities that the colonial governments covered us with. Many of us have su¤ocated, or are near death. In the forty-plus years that I have been actively involved in what is often known as Indian politics, I have been many things. I have been an Indian, a Native person, an Aboriginal person, a First Nations person, an Indigenous person . and these are just the “politically correct” terms. But I am Ktunaxa, a citizen of the Ktunaxa Nation. is identity lives in my heart, not on a piece of paper. e culture of the colonizers is a paper-based culture where relation- ships are likely to be negotiated and written down, not built in the process of being lived. e spirit of the law is forgotten and the focus is on the letter. e Ktunaxa Nation recognizes the Syilx, the Secwepemc, the Blackfoot, and VIII F OREWORD other nations with whom we have shared thousands of years of interactions. e Ktunaxa Nation recognizes its own citizens. If you can trace your Ktunaxa roots backward into the past, then you are Ktunaxa, and it does not matter what some other government says you are. When we accept the labels that are gener- alizable and portable to accommodate other governments, we chip away at our own identity. e time has come to remember, reclaim, rebuild. Remembering is rebuilding. Less than one hundred years ago, the Ktunaxa Nation was, for the most part, self-su©cient. We still lived a life that re¢ected our own understandings of the world and our long-established relations with each other. ere are tribal citizens alive today who can still recall those days with clarity and purpose. We want to get back to that, but sometimes we get in our own way. Over the years, elders have acknowledged that it is often our own internal struggles that hold us back in our ªght to rebuild systems of our own for governing our lands and communities. e Canadian courts and the governments of Canada increasingly recognize our rights, but the hard part is the internal e¤ort to put meaning to those rights, to give them practical e¤ect on the ground. at requires leadership. Politics and leadership are not the same. Today we need fewer politicians and more leaders. Many of the people who are actively involved today in Ktunaxa nation rebuilding are descendants of Ktunaxa hereditary chiefs, of men and women who knew how to be leaders. ose nations that have replaced politics with leadership and who are remembering what self-government is in terms of cultural beliefs and practices—they are the ones most likely to win the support of their citizens. ey are the ones most likely to advance in spite of the uncer- tainties of the broader environment that we have to live in. To me, nation building or rebuilding is about nations reclaiming their identi- ties. It is about nations reclaiming their own version of the relationship between individual and community. Call it citizenship or whatever you like, but that relationship is rooted in what we share—our culture, our obligations to each other, the understanding of our roles in our communities, our roots in the past. Nation rebuilding is about getting out from under the Indian Act in Canada or, in another country, getting out from under whatever colonial mechanism keeps you accountable to someone else’s idea of who you are or who you should be. When the Ktunaxa Nation entered into the British Columbia Treaty pro- cess in , we decided that our purpose was to create our own government, something that re¢ected our people’s vision and could bring it into being. We F OREWORD I X wanted internal recognition of the authority that the nation has by virtue of inherent right, and then to build culturally legitimate institutions that could e¤ectively exercise that right and represent us in interactions with the other governments around us. Self-determination through self-government was our ªrst priority; if that led to a treaty with the other two levels of government, that would be good too. For two years we held meetings, most of them in our own citizens’ homes, sitting at the kitchen table, talking about what our people wanted, searching for that vision. Our people focused in particular on four things: our land, our language and culture, our people, and our government. ose were the things we wanted to be in charge of and to take care of. We talked a lot to the young people during those two years, because we knew they would have to live with whatever we created. ere was one young woman on our sta¤ who met often with young people to talk about the future of the nation. One of the things that came out of her conversations was an idea of the nation as a kind of a tipi—a wide circle of multiple poles that meet together at the top. Each pole was one element or activity that our young people felt was important for the nation, a critical piece of the picture. A tipi is a strong structure because of that circle of poles, their feet on the ground, joined at the top. It is a sturdy structure that can protect you. As you strengthen each pole, you strengthen the structure. In the course of conversations like those, we began sharing our ideas and rebuilding our nation. We began building a government of our own, a govern- ment of laws. e concept of law is not foreign to the Ktunaxa; living within the natural law that was given to the Ktunaxa by the Creator is at the core of our being. e Ktunaxa creation story is the source of the Ktunaxa Nation’s respon- sibility; Ktunaxa citizens were entrusted with the responsibility to act as stew- ards within their homelands. e Creator owns the world and we are to care for it accordingly. e Ktunaxa creation story has been handed down for thousands of years and is a comprehensive, multilayered accounting of how human beings, including the Ktunaxa, came to be. It describes relationships. e Ktunaxa lan- guage describes concepts of how humans relate to our environments: social, spiritual, and physical. ese relationships are what we would describe as our culture. e concepts embedded in the Ktunaxa language inform us of how we are to behave, how we are to govern ourselves. is shared language, our stories, our history, and our concepts of relationship make us unique. We live and act within the natural law, developing structures, systems, policies, procedures . X F OREWORD governing. e Ktunaxa Nation has created a shared vision of our future, and our citizens are collaboratively working toward it.

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