Congress take such a position when it largely carried out its earlier policy, which was part of a broader goal to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream American life, without question. He concludes that this revised policy was part of a far-reaching but complex strategy to manage common property rights, especially water rights west of the Mississippi where irrigation was often indispensable for agricultural productivity.
Using this strategy, the federal government was able to streamline the management of water rights by first asserting indigenous resource rights, and then, upholding its custodial role over Indian affairs, it was able to control the allocation of these resource rights. Managing these common properties with so many private and diverse interests asserting claims, Flanders argues, would have been impossible under state and/or private control. Had land been apportioned in 65-ha lots, as was common east of the Mississippi during colonization, the chances were that many farmsteads would have been unsustainable. Such apportions were insufficient to sustain the average family unit in these semi-arid lands; many units would have been without adequate water supply as the doctrine of ‘prior rights’ would have prevailed that appropriated all available water, sometimes to land owners far from the riparian.
Interestingly, the precedent for federal intervention over native resource rights was made in 1908 when the federal government asserted a treaty right for water for the Fort Belknap reservation in Montana. This precedent claimed similar rights for American Indians settled on reservations and was directed against outside interests, mainly non-natives, who would otherwise claim a prior right to water flowing through reservation land (Shurts, 2000). This policy of asserting indigenous rights over the years helped the federal government assert its pre-eminence in natural resource management in the West and allowed it to take a leading role in natural resource management and allocation. To a large extent, the states, private interests and Native Americans acquiesced to Congress in natural resource management.
In some instances, this strategy allowed the federal government to execute far-ranging resource reallocation projects such as the construction of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. This single construction project has had far-ranging impact on natural resource allocation and management in the US Southwest. On the one hand, the Hoover Dam provides water to large cities such as Phoenix and Los Angeles and transforms deserts into farms and golf courses throughout much of Arizona. On the other hand, it restricted resource development in the Upper Colorado and denied Mexico its international treaty rights to the Colorado’s waters (Ravenet al., 1993).
While the assertion of water rights in the West has in many respects deflected much of the direct conflict among private interests and state government in the USA, a visit to various Internet sites suggests a rather unsettled picture concern- ing Native Americans and natural resource management issues throughout the USA. The full extent of these impacts is yet to be played out in natural resource management. For example, in 1998, the Oneida Indian Nation used the courts to convince the federal government to expand a previously unsettled lawsuit dating back to 1974. Now the revised lawsuit includes land claims against the
County of Oneida in the state of New York for 250,000 acres as well as back-rent and damages. Some other land and water rights settlements are much larger.
Although a temporary stay by a federal judge for the State of New York to pay nearly US$248 million to the Cayuga Tribe for the illegal purchase of 64,000 acres of land some 200 years ago puts this particular claim on hold (Reeves, 2002), it clearly illustrates the turmoil that may be festering below the surface concerning land tenure throughout the USA (Cronin-Fisk, 2001). At issue here is a federal law passed in 1790 that states emphatically that Congress must approve the purchase of Indians’ resource rights and, at least in this particular case, no such approval was given.
Besides the failure to follow its own laws, some points of argument have resulted from mainstream government gradually attacking the traditional rights of indigenous populations. For example, in the state of Wisconsin, the state government has repeatedly tried to restrict ‘on-reservation’ hunting and fishing practices of the Anishinaabe Nation (Silvern, 2000). While there have been a number of significant settlements in favour of Native Americans, not all settle- ments have gone their way. For instance, again in Wisconsin, the Menominee asserted a right to fish and hunt off-reservation, based on Article Six of its Treaty of 1831, but the US Supreme Court extinguished this claim. In fact, the ‘Indian question’, as it is often referred to in the USA, has plagued successive presiden- cies, with little sense of resolution. By the mid-1870s, the beginning of the disappearance of the buffalo signalled a greater need for American Indians to explore other forms of subsistence including agriculture. Whereas non-native settlers could and did move on from areas to which agriculture was unsuited, American Indians were largely restricted to reservation land that was frequently unsuitable for farming. In addition, they were often discouraged from pooling capital to buy technology that may have solved many of their problems, and they were also discouraged from building ethnic community networks, which proved so successful among many European settlers, including the Czechs and Germans (Bateman, 1996).
In the end, poverty ensued among many Indian nations and, despite a succession of presidential decrees to address this problem, it is persistent.
For example, President Johnson inaugurated the era of self-determination, and this was followed by President Nixon’s special message on the ‘American Indian’
in July of 1970. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 followed. A similar message came from President Ronald Reagan, who largely echoed Nixon in reaffirming a government-to-government relationship and the goal to self-determination for American Indians (Stull, 1990).
The focus of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s on increasing natural resource revenues on Indian lands was largely unsuccessful, and the era of self- determination, for the most part, resulted in greater economic dependence of American Indians on the federal government. The question that looms strongly on the horizon, then, is to what extent can Native Americans’ rights to natural resources break the poverty cycle in the future and to what extent will Native Americans’ reasserted claims to land and resource rights change the complexion of natural resource management in the USA and elsewhere.
Over the last decade or so, native peoples’ land and natural resource management claims have swept several nations, including Canada, where in some regions quite extensive shifts in land management from provincial and territorial governments to native and co-management arrangements (as in British Columbia) have occurred. Some shifts have led to seemingly impossible parallel management regimes where First Nations and provincial governments have imposed separate and often conflicting management prescriptions on both land and water resources. Other approaches have included the ‘co- management’ of various areas where specific lands are managed by a coalition of First Nations, provincial and federal groups. For example, Bradford Morse, a University of Ottawa law professor, predicts that First Nations (as North American Indians prefer to be called in Canada) will soon have sovereign juris- diction over 5–10% of land in Canada’s ten provinces. First Nations have won landmark decisions in the East that acknowledged aboriginal rights to natural resources that go well beyond previously recognized limits for indigenous natural resource custodial care and consumption (Beltrame, 1999).
In Zimbabwe (formerly the British colony of Rhodesia), the violent reclaim- ing of lands by native populations bears witness to the historic injustice of colonial powers and the complexity of modern resource management interests, especially when repatriation is accompanied by plummeting agricultural produc- tion and a predicted overall increase in poverty (Maslund and Newton, 2002a).
In April 2002, the re-elected president of Zimbabwe called for international aid to combat a famine. The cause of this famine is, however, a focus of much heated debate between past colonial masters and the Zimbabwe government.
Many believe it is a direct result of the Zimbabwe government’s land tenure policy. In South Africa, after the displacement of the white minority regime and despite the National African Congress’ balanced budget – whose fiscal policies are the envy of many established Northern hemispheric governments – the indigenous population became increasingly impatient with the slow pace of land reform and measurable gains in economic welfare (Mabry, 2002). As in Canada, Australia was slow to embrace the inherent and historical rights of Aborigines.
Australia only recognized the Aborigine’s right to vote in 1962 and only acknowledged them in the national census beginning in 1967. Since that time, Australia has, as a nation, accelerated its recognition of Aborigine rights to the present point, where some 15% of the land base is either owned or controlled by Aborigines (Beck, 2000).