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Tribal sovereignty and the limits and potential of inter-
governmental collaboration
Kathy Quick
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Forthcoming February 2021. In Jack W. Meek (Ed.), Handbook of Collaborative Public Management,
Edward Elgar Publishing, chapter 16.
ABSTRACT
Inter-governmental relationships involving tribes must be respectful of tribal sovereignty
and native people’s rights, yet most non-Native public managers are not educated about this and
thus are unprepared to engage constructively in collaboration with tribal governments. This
chapter provides a basic orientation to tribal sovereignty, self-determination, reservations and
ceded territories, and Public Law 280, and illuminates their relevance to nearly any policy
domain, including child welfare, education, economic development, land use and planning,
environmental stewardship, and law enforcement. While there are positive examples of
constructive and mutually respectful synergy, unfortunately there are also many instances of
antagonistic failures to collaborate, with damaging consequences for Native and non-Native
communities. I illustrate these complex dynamics through a single policy issue – roadway safety
in reservations – before concluding with a summary of a few key takeaways for exploring
collaboration with tribal governments.
KEYWORDS
● Tribal sovereignty
● Indigenous governance
● Tribes and intergovernmental relationships
● Native self-determination
● American Indian reservations
● Roadway safety in reservations
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Kathy Quick, Associate Professor, is the chair of the leadership and management area of the Humphrey
School of Public Affairs and Academic Co-Director of the Center for Integrative Leadership, both at the
University of Minnesota. Her work focuses on bringing diverse groups of stakeholders together to
collaborate on complex, often divisive public problems. Since 2013, she has been collaborating with four
tribal governments in Minnesota to improve roadway safety in reservations. She advocates for improving
public affairs education to address damaging ignorance about tribal sovereignty, history, and rights. She
received her PhD in Planning, Policy, and Design from UC Irvine. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0574-2866
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Tribal governments in the United States are responsible for residents of their reservations as well
as their tribally enrolled citizens, wherever they may live. Riley and Morgen Johansen (2019, p.
392), public administration scholars specializing in indigenous governance and equity in
governance, call on public administration schools to “expand the curriculum to make space for
indigenous voices, ways of knowing, and worldviews, as well as a discussing the unique legal
structure and governance challenges facing indigenous nations.” It is important to grow tribal
governance capacity, to advance native people to senior positions in other government agencies,
and to build the cultural competence of non-native students to avoid hurtful policies and
damaged trust when non-native governments misunderstand, disrespect, or communicate poorly
with indigenous people (Ortiz, 2002; Ronquillo, 2011; Riley and Johansen, 2019).
In that context, this chapter is intended to strengthen knowledge to support collaborative
relations that are informed and respectful of tribal sovereignty and native people’s rights across
an array of public policy areas in the United States. Its focus is the potential and perils of
collaboration specifically with tribal governments. This edited volume on collaborative
management necessarily covers a broad range of boundary-spanning governance and cooperative
arrangements, including governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders alike (Emerson,
Nabatchi, and Balogh, 2012; Morgan and Shinn, 2014). Indeed, all kinds of entities – other
governments, nonprofit organizations, foundations, public and private educational institutions,
special districts, utility companies, for-profit companies – now seek to work with tribes and
Native communities. In approaching potential interactions with tribes and native communities,
all of these other parties must understand that tribes are governments with their own domains of
authority, forms of responsibility to the Native people whom they represent, and administrative
capacity, expertise, and power. This fact is often misunderstood and neglected, to the extent that
foundational texts on intergovernmental relations, governance networks, and collaborative public
management often neglect to mention tribes at all or even erroneously classify them as non-
governmental stakeholders.
In this short chapter, the priority is to address damaging ignorance about tribal
governments and sovereignty, and thus the intended primary audience is non-Native public
managers. In contrast, tribal government managers already well understand their purviews. In
addition to collaborating with other governments, they also independently use their authority to
drive regional economic revitalization (Henson and Tatlor, 2008), environmental protection
(Kozich, Halvorsen, and Mayer, 2018), energy independence (Seki, 2020), and food sovereignty
(Whyte, 2018). They also effectively collaborate with other tribes through dozens of regional,
national, and international inter-tribal organizations (Evans, 2011), for example on water and
fisheries management (DeWeese et al., 2009) and culture and language revitalization (Hermes,
2012), and individual Native leaders have long been at the forefront of environmental
stewardship and advocacy (LaDuke, 2017; Estes, 2019). Indeed, in many policy areas and
regions, tribes’ expertise, long-standing commitment, and other resources exceed other
governments’ capacities (Brown, 2011; Mogren, 2011).
Following a description of some essential foundations for work with tribal governments
and communities – sovereignty, self-determination, reservations and ceded territories, and Public
Law 280 – I describe their salience to inter-governmental collaboration. This discussion
illuminates the relevance of tribal sovereignty and rights to nearly any policy domain, including
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child welfare, education, economic development, land use and planning, environmental
stewardship, and law enforcement. And, while there are positive examples of constructive and
mutually respectful synergy, unfortunately there are also many instances of antagonistic failures
to collaborate, with damaging consequences for Native and non-Native communities. I illustrate
these complex dynamics through a brief case study of a single policy issue – roadway safety in
reservations – before concluding with a summary of a few key takeaways for exploring
collaboration with tribal governments.
URGENCY AND CAUTION ABOUT COLLABORATING
Collaboration cannot be forced at the expense of tribal sovereignty and is difficult to engage
where long histories of hostility to tribes have bred mutual mistrust. At the same time, we cannot
ignore the potentially tragic consequences of the lack of constructive, respectful coordination
between tribes and other governments.
As this book goes to press, there is as much urgency as ever before to improve inter-
governmental relations between tribes and other governments. As the coronavirus pandemic
began in the United States, some tribes and states were engaged in pitched battles with one
another over jurisdiction, seemingly unable to join efforts in the interest of public wellbeing,
safety, and efficiency. The governor of South Dakota threatened to sue the Cheyenne River
Sioux Tribe and the Oglala Sioux tribe for setting up checkpoints on state and federal highways
at the entries to their reservations. The governor, describing jurisdiction between the US, state,
and tribal governments as a “sticky situation” about which she sought “clarification,” accused the
tribes of “unlawful” action (Groves, 2020). The tribes responded that they were asserting their
clear and long-established authority as sovereign nations to administer what happens in their
territories and were acting to protect their communities, which are poorly served by medical
facilities, from the pandemic. The conflict escalated from there: the federal government
threatened to force closure of the tribe’s safety checkpoints and to retaliate by seizing control of
law enforcement in the reservation, and the tribe subsequently filed a suit against the president
and senior administration officials for unlawful threats to its sovereignty (Walker, 2020).
Simultaneously, multiple tribes were suing the federal government over long delays in
distribution of $8 billion Congress allocated for tribal governments under the 2020 Coronavirus
Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act (Vega, 2020).
Governance leaders should not presume that collaboration with tribes is needed, desired,
and appropriate. It is essential to actively avoid the well-documented trend of pathologizing
reservation communities by constantly associating them with tragedy, despite the resilience of
these communities and the beauty and meaning and the love that many native people have for
these places (Treuer, 2019). Patronizing and paternalistic attitudes from outsiders about whether
tribes are entitled and capable to self-govern only “impede the restoration of quality and
autonomy” of governance (Kagan and Ronquillo, 2019, p. 45). Simultaneously, however, it
would be hard for tribal governments to operate in isolation: there is strong interdependence of
tribal and other governments to address public affairs issues overlapping their jurisdictions
(Riley and Johansen, 2019). Serious inequities in education, health, income negatively impact
Native communities in reservations and elsewhere (Kunesh, 2019; NCAI Policy Research
Center, 2020).
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In theory, inter-governmental collaboration among tribal governments or between tribal
and non-tribal governments could improve their shared capacity to address these significant
challenges. The origins, manifestations, and policy and program responses to the issues
reservation communities face do not respect geographic or jurisdictional boundaries (Kettl,
2006). Through collaboration, participants can recombine their individual ways of knowing,
skills, material resources, and domains of authority to address complex problems (Weber and
Khademian, 2008; O’Leary and Bingham, 2009; Innes and Booher, 2010).
However, presuming that tribal governments need the assistance of, should naturally wish
to join forces, or are required to collaborate with other governments is to “perpetuate
colonialism, ignore tribal sovereignty, and disregard rights of self-determination … and overlook
history” (Webster, 2016, p. 10). Tribes’ preferences and rights about how other governments
should interact and work with them are rarely researched, nor are the basic principles of tribal
sovereignty and native rights typically taught to public administrators (Aufrecht, 1999;
Ronquillo, 2011). Although there are somewhat positive examples of inter-governmental
collaboration involving tribes in the United States (Reynolds, 1997, Webster, 2016), Canada
(Barry, 2012) and Australia (Porter et al., 2017), American state and local governments
commonly overwrite or resist tribal sovereignty in zones of overlapping or ambiguous native-and
non-native residence and governance authority (Zaferatos, 1998). While tribes need better
cooperation with other governments at all levels, typically the necessity of proper tribal
consultation is better recognized and implemented by federal agencies as part of government-to-
government treaties executed between the US government and tribes, while tribes’ relationships
with states and local governments are much patchier (Reynolds, 1997).
When exploring the possibilities of collaborative public management involving tribes, we
need to pay special attention to the usual cautions that inter-governmental arrangements must
always be carefully structured (Emerson and Nabatchi, 2015), that ambiguity and conflict around
boundaries can prohibit effective responses (Roberts, 2010), and that the balance of unity and
differentiation among participants is delicate (Saz-Carranza and Ospina, 2011). Personally,
having been fortunate to partner with four tribal governments in Minnesota to try to improve
roadway safety in their reservations (Quick and Narváez, 2018), I have become a stronger
advocate for collaborative practices that protect and maintain boundaries while aligning or
translating across them (Quick and Feldman, 2014), for special vigilance to ensure boundaries
are not being violated, and for extra effort to ensure collaboration is not engaged without mutual
consent and for shared benefit.
SOVEREIGNTY, SELF-DETERMINATION, RESERVATIONS, AND RIGHTS
Sovereignty: The Necessity of Proper Tribal Consultation
In the context of inter-governmental collaboration with tribes, respect for tribal sovereignty and
self-determination must be in the foreground. Tribal sovereignty should in some ways simplify
roles and authority for public management leadership in reservations and reservations. In
practice, however, there is frequently confusion or outright conflict over whether tribal, federal,
state, or local government has authority, responsibility, and rights over the people and territory
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involved (Wilkins and Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, 2017). Some of this conflict arises from
ignorance about what sovereignty is. David Treuer (2012, p. 31), a nationally recognized scholar
of American Indian history and culture and a member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe,
observes, “There is probably no aspect of Indian life more misunderstood by Indians and non-
Indians alike than sovereignty.”
One definition of tribal sovereignty is the status of tribes as “distinct, independent,
political communities, retaining their original natural rights,” according to Supreme Court Justice
John Marshall in Worcester v. Georgia, an 1832 ruling comprising one part of the Marshall
trilogy. The Marshall trilogy reaffirmed the standing of federally recognized tribal nations –
those with treaties with the United States – as autonomous, sovereign nations with the right to
self-government, such that states and local governments may not exert their authority within
reservation territories (Cohen, 1945; French, 2007; Anderson et al., 2015). Executive Order
13175, titled Consultation and Coordination with Indian Tribal Governments, issued by
President Clinton in 2000, subsequently confirmed by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack
Obama, affirmed federal government recognition of tribal sovereignty and commits the federal
government to coordinate with tribal governments on a government-to-government basis.
While treaties remain a central reference point in inter-governmental relations and policy
about tribes, they are an incomplete foundation for defining sovereignty. Chumash and Yokut
scholar Kouslaa Kessler-Mata (2017, p. ix) critiques “the overdetermined way in which treaties
were taken to be the basis for tribal sovereignty”; as she points out, the number of federally
recognized tribes in California today far outnumber the treaties signed in the 1850s, many of
which were never ratified, which leads her to conclude that the “basis of sovereignty is not, was
not, and never will be … captured through treaty agreements.” Nor is federal recognition the
same as sovereignty. As of February 2020, 574 tribes in the United States are federally
recognized. Other tribes without this status include groups with cultural identity and history,
sometimes including lands held in common and their own systems of governance, that never
entered into any formal agreement with the U.S. government or that have sought but not yet been
granted recognition (Wilkins and Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, 2017). Some 231 of the federally
recognized tribes are not tribal governments bur rather Alaskan Native “villages” or
“corporations,” as designated by the Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which
clouded the question of whether they are landowners and/or governments (Anderson, 2016;
Wilkins and Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, 2017). The Federally Recognized Indian Tribe List Act of
1994 includes only the 48 contiguous states and Alaska, Hawai’ian people having been denied
the right of self-government (Trask, 1999).
Unquestionably, much of the ambivalence about recognizing sovereignty arises from
active hostility to American Indians. Federal, state, and local governments and communities have
consistently been aggressive to sovereignty and the integrity and protection it affords for
American Indian communities’ territories, cultural identity, self-determination, and access to
resources (Deloria and Lytle, 1984; Wilkins and Lomawaima, 2001; Grossman, 2017). As Indian
law scholar Pommersheim (2010, p. 50) observed, even without constitutional authority or
legislative direction to push them in this direction, the courts have become “increasingly inimical
to tribal sovereignty, especially in regard to tribal authority over non-Indians.” In this context,
the figurative and literal boundaries of reservations and of tribes’ jurisdictions to formulate,
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implement, and enforce policies and plans are constantly questioned and contested by federal,
state, and local government authorities (Matha, 2016).
What this means for managers and leaders outside tribal governments who are potentially
interested in collaborating with tribes is that “consultation” goes beyond the usual connotations
of courtesy to comprise strict requirement that include tribes’ rights to decline to negotiate.
Federal agencies often recognize the requirement for proper tribal consultation by virtue of the
US-tribe treaty relationship, but state and local governments are less aware and prepared
(Reynolds, 1997). Indeed, one of their common missteps is to treat tribal governments “as if”
they are local governments, subject to state mandate (as seen in the South Dakota coronavirus
conflict described above) or as peers of counties and cities. When facing these situations, Oneida
scholar Rebecca Webster (2016, p. 30) strongly advises tribes to avoid being “token participants”
in such interactions and to instead “attempt to work with their surrounding state-based
governments to explore ways to work together cooperatively.” Webster suggests combining
taking a regional view of what will “benefit the entire community,” with getting clear on the
jurisdictional limits of each agency and engaging in mutual learnings to “find equitable ways to
acknowledge and compensate each other.”
Self-Determination: Child Welfare, Education, and Economic Development
Sovereignty means more than formal legal status, of course. As prominent Native scholar Vine
DeLoria, Jr. (1979, p. 27) explained, ultimately, “[Sovereignty] consist[s] more of continued
cultural integrity than of political powers, and to the degree that a nation loses its sense of
cultural identity, to that degree it suffers a loss of sovereignty.” More recently, sovereignty has
been defined as an ongoing enactment of a “third space” of ongoing negotiation of the
nationhood of people with rights to their identity, culture, and lands as a colonizing government
seeks their absorption and assimilation into the United States (Bruyneel, 2007, p. xiii). Thus,
sovereignty is perhaps better understood as part of complex nationhood, “a layered and
performative identity fraught with ambivalence and debate” comprised of the interplay of band
and cultural identity, family ties, sovereignty, and the incomplete overlap of all of these features
with reservation boundaries (Shepherd, 2016, p. 125). These conceptions are multiple: tribes
across the United States define sovereignty and its connection with self-determination
differently, meaning that great care must be taken to avoid homogenous interpretations and
assumptions (Wilkins, 2008).
Managers and leaders outside tribal governments who often approach human services,
education, and economic development challenges through collaborative networks of government,
nonprofit, and business organizations need to be particularly mindful of these self-determination
and cultural resilience features of sovereignty. County human services agencies, for example,
must be aware of the Indian Child Welfare Act of, 1978, which prohibits the adoption and
fostering of American Indian children without the involvement of their tribes and families of
origin. Well into the mid-20th century, native children were commonly removed from their
families and placed in board schools to assimilate them, and even after Indian residential schools
were closed, 25‒35 percent of native youth had been separated from their families (Cross, 2006).
The ICWA was created to protect children’s attachment to their communities and cultural
resilience. In the area of economic development, tribally owned casinos make use of tribes’
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rights to make their own decisions about gaming enterprises, regardless of whether the states in
which they are found allows or prohibits gambling (Henson and Tatlor, 2008).
Rights, Reservations, and Ceded Territories: Land and Natural Resources
It is important to accompany the definition of sovereignty with some corrections to common
misunderstandings about it. Treaties did not endow tribes with rights. On the contrary, treaties
are formal agreements between separate nations that recognize the inherent sovereignty Native
nations had at the time of colonization and by treaty agreement retain to this day (Minnesota
Indian Affairs Council and Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, no date).
Additionally, they obligate the federal government to provide certain services and benefits to
tribes. While the US has not upheld many aspects of these agreements, they are the foundation
for some current programs, such as health care through the Indian Health Service (Kagan and
Ronquillo, 2019). In conjunction with this, one of the features of Native identity is that it is a
political status for enrolled members of Native nations and Alaskan Natives; American Indians
are often seen as one “minority” group among many in the United States, but racial and ethnic
groups do not sign treaties that affirm rights associated with that status. Not all Native people
have this formal status, however. Notably, Native Hawaiians (Kagan and Ronquillo, 2019) and
members of tribes without federal recognition lack the rights and protections of enrolled
members.
Misunderstandings over reservations also need to be dispelled. David Treuer (2012)
emphasizes that reservations are not lands “given” to native nations by the United States, but
rather territories where the respective sovereign nation reserved their full, inherent rights.
Finally, native nations did not give up all of their rights outside of reservations; in the “ceded
territories” outside of the reservations, through their treaties, they retain many previous rights –
notably including rights to hunt, fish, and gather resources. It is also true that many native people
were forced into reservations, when the US government subsequently violated these treaties.
Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, forced tens of thousands of native people to
leave their ancestral homes in the eastern U.S. to migrate west; many died on the Trail of Tears,
and many survivors were relocated on reservations of other tribes with which they had no
previous relationship. And, of course, reservations do not include all areas where Native people
live; as of the 2020 census, only about 22 percent of people identifying as American Indian or
Alaska Native live in reservations. The majority of people who identify as Native live in urban
areas, while many others live in Oklahoma tribal statistical areas, Native Alaskan villages, and
the lands of native Hawaiians or tribes that are not federally recognized.
Often non-tribal townships, cities, or unincorporated areas of counties lie fully or
partially within the reservation boundaries. The jurisdictional overlaps follow the “confusing
patchwork” (Fletcher, Fort, and Singel, 2010, p. 43) of land ownership found in most
reservations due to the historic “allotment” of Indian lands under the Dawes Act of 1887, which
split land held in trust collectively for the tribe into parcels owned by individual families
(Anderson et al., 2015). Anton Treuer (2012) estimates that through allotment approximately two
thirds of all land in reservations all over the United States was lost to non-tribal entities, sold to
natural resource companies for private commercial use, purchased by non-native people for
residences (often by county governments for non-payment of taxes), or taken by non-tribal
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governments (e.g., for state parks, national forests, and federal military installations).
“Reservation,” “Indian Country,” and “tribal lands,” are used as if they are interchangeable in
some literature, but they are not equivalent. Tribal lands include lands held in trust, which may
not meet the legal definition of Indian Country (as per U.S. Code Title 18 [Crimes and Criminal
Procedure] Section 1151 – Indian country defined). Each of these formal classifications comes
with a different interpretation of federal preemption, which is the aspect of sovereignty and
federal–tribe relationships that protects tribes from state infringement on tribes’ land and rights
to self-government in those areas (Paschal, 1991). And, as mentioned above, multiple tribes do
not have federal recognition, and their lands are not included in the definition of “Indian
Country” or provided the same protections.
One key take-away for leaders and managers outside tribal governments is to never make
assumptions about what areas are under tribal ownership, are subject to tribal jurisdiction, or are
culturally important to Native communities. The “checkerboard” interspersion of residences,
businesses, and settlements of tribal and non-native people greatly complicates clarity, authority,
and responsibility for policy and governance. Matters of responsibility and authority – who has it
and who may exercise it – are constantly in question and often contested in most reservations.
Tribal sovereignty is constantly salient. In particular, public managers seeking to collaborate on
environmental and natural resource management need to be aware of the genesis and the
particularities of treaty rights in ceded territories and the limits of local and state jurisdiction over
resource management in reservations. Indeed, in many regions, tribes and states are already
involved with federal agencies in the design and implementation of shared governance
institutions for environmental stewardship, for example for water management (Chief, 2018). I
suggest they should also actively counter anti-Native jealousies and prejudices stemming from
the misconception that Native people enjoy “special” or “exceptional” rights to these resources.
In fact, Native people are exercising rights they have always had, which cannot be granted or
taken away by the Congress, the President, or non-tribal agencies.
Public Law 280: Law Enforcement
An additional complication of authority and jurisdiction comes from Public Law 280 (“PL 280”),
enacted in 1953, through which Congress shifted jurisdiction for the prosecution of crimes in
some parts of Indian Country from the federal government to state governments (Ortiz, 2002).
PL 280 mandated the transfer of authority in Alaska, California, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon,
and Wisconsin and expanded state authority over some reservations in Florida, Idaho, and
Washington (Anderson et al., 2015). This is a confusing over-write of what treaties establish as a
tribal government-to-federal government relationship. It is particularly salient in law
enforcement, because it means that state and county police can make arrests for felonies and
misdemeanors in reservations (French, 2015), but the reverse is not necessarily true: tribal law
enforcement has variable levels of authority on and off the reservation.
Fletcher and colleagues (2010, p. 43), leaders of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center,
summarize the practical complexities of law enforcement in reservations succinctly: “Officers …
must consider the location of the crime, their current location, the political identity of the alleged
perpetrator, the political identity of the alleged victim, and the nature of the alleged crime before
deciding what action, if any, they are authorized to take.” Repeated court cases have established
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that generally tribal police have jurisdiction over crimes committed by Indians against Indians,
but not over crimes committed by non-Indians against Indians or other non-Indians, even when
they occur on their reservations (Wakeling et al., 2001). There are tragic consequences to these
persistent gaps. Notably, non-natives who sexually assault American Indian women in
reservations often cannot be charged without federal intervention (Erdrich, 2013). Justice has not
been served for thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls (Hargreaves,
2017; Lucchesi and Echo-Hawk, 2018).
Public managers should be aware that PL 280 certainly does not prohibit collaboration to
improve law enforcement and criminal justice. In PL 280 areas “the norm is usually to allow
non-Indian law enforcement onto the reservation to make arrests, while Indian police do not have
the same authority off the reservation” (French, 2015, p. 70). A sheriff’s office may decline to
deputize or otherwise limit the reach of tribal law enforcement “for political reasons or general
distrust” (Fletcher et al., 2010). In some reservations, tribes defend strongly their sovereignty and
self-determination and find that it is vital for mutual trust and safety to have their community
members interact specifically with tribal police department officers, and thus do not welcome
engagement from other law enforcement entities.
However, through cooperative agreements – such as deputation, cross-deputation, or
mutual aid agreements – tribal, county, and state police departments may expand the powers of
each to enforce laws across a region, regardless of the location and legal identity of the
perpetrator. For example, the city and county of Mahnomen are both located entirely within the
White Earth reservation in Minnesota. In 2016, the tribal and county boards began exploring
potential areas of mutual interest and alignment, the three jurisdictions identified public safety as
a shared interest and embarked upon a feasibility study to create a new, joint public safety and
law enforcement center (Alcantara, Berg, and Nelles, 2017). The city now contracts with the
White Earth Tribal Police for law enforcement in the city. The city administrator explains that
this kind of tribal–city–county cooperation is increasingly relevant as federal and state
governments are pushing more responsibilities to tribes and counties, which are having to do
more with less, and is a far better outcome than litigious dynamics which drain the resources of
tribes, cities, and counties, reinforce racism, and sour prospects for rebuilding trust and respect
(Berg, 2020).
POTENTIAL AND PERIL: THE EXAMPLE OF ROADWAY SAFETY IN RESERVATIONS
Roadway Safety Issues
A deeper exploration of the dynamics of sovereignty, rights, and jurisdiction in a single public
management context – roadway safety in reservations – provides some instructive lessons for
public managers from tribes and other jurisdictions who seek to collaborate. Improving roadway
safety in reservations depends on the quality of coordination among the “4Es” of roadway
Engineering, driver Education, Emergency medical services (EMS), and law Enforcement
specialists and across tribal and non-tribal governments (Letourneau and Crump, 2016). This is a
high-stakes issue: the fatality rate from motor vehicle crashes is higher for American Indians
than for any other ethnic and racial group in the United States (Pollack et al., 2012), and an
average of 656 motor vehicle fatalities occur each year in reservations and other areas where
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tribal governments have responsibility for the area (Tribal Transportation Safety Management
System Steering Committee, 2017).
The Tribal Transportation Safety Management System Steering Committee, which is
comprised primarily of representatives of tribal governments, has raised many concerns about
these inequities and about the quality of data available for analysis of contributing factors and
problem-solving. To help them gather more information about this issue, Guillermo Narváez and
I collaborated with their staff to include questions in the 2016 Tribal Transportation Safety Data
Survey about the quality of communication, data-sharing, and funding and other resource
availability between tribes and states (Quick, Larsen, and Narváez, 2019). Between, 2014 and
2019, we were also fortunate to be involved in collaborative research with the Red Lake Band of
Chippewa, Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, and
Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. The purpose of our collaboration was to investigate opportunities to
improve roadway safety in their reservations by documenting their knowledge of reservation
residents and tribal government specialists with the immediate, lived experience of roadway
safety issues. Their experiences, which they gave us permission to publish, include positive,
synergistic collaboration and antagonistic, damaging relationships with federal, state, county,
city, and township governments (Quick and Narváez, 2018).
Ignorance of Sovereignty
Both the national survey results and the variations in the experiences of the four tribal
governments with whom we worked demonstrate that constructive collaboration – or the lack
thereof – among tribal governments and overlapping jurisdictions is highly consequential for
community wellbeing. Tribes and states responding to the national survey both consistently
expressed a wish to improve their relationships, particularly relating to data quality and sharing,
with both sides identifying the need for tribes to have more resources for data documentation and
analysis.
States did not seem adequately prepared to do this, however. Only half of the state
respondents have a standard method or process for interacting with tribes. Many also seem
ignorant of the special status of tribes, because fully one quarter of state respondents responded
to the effect that they work with tribes “like any other local unit of government.” The states’
desire to support tribes is positive, but equating tribes with local governments, with the usual
nested hierarchy of state government having some authority over local governments, is
inappropriate in the context of tribal sovereignty.
Perils of PL 280
Minnesota is a mandated PL 280 state, which (as described above) means that the state of
Minnesota claims jurisdiction over some aspects of law enforcement in reservations. Our work
with the four Minnesota tribes demonstrates how this can undermine coordinated effort on public
safety where inter-jurisdictional relationships are antagonistic. The Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe
has a reservation is comprised of three, non-contiguous districts in central Minnesota. As
established in the Treaty of 1855, the land area of the reservation is approximately 61,000 acres,
and tribal members retained the rights to hunt, fish, and gather on millions of acres of ceded
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territories outside the reservation boundaries. In the intervening decades, some county
governments and the State of Minnesota have refused to recognize the full extent of the
reservation area and band members’ hunting and fishing rights (Treuer, 2012; Smith, 2017).
Indeed, the Band has been nationally prominent in defending sovereignty and rights in ceded
territories through a series of precedent-setting court cases (Anderson et al., 2015; Jorgensen,
2007). In, 2004 Mille Lacs County lost a case disputing the reservation boundaries in the US
Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and in, 2016 the Department of Interior again sided in favor of
the Band’s definition of its boundaries (Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, 2018).
Seemingly as an expression of their resentment of this decision, shortly thereafter the
County government unilaterally severed a longstanding joint law enforcement agreement
between the Mille Lacs County sheriff’s department and the Mille Lac Band’s police department
(Benjamin, 2016). This occurred over the objections of the Band’s tribal council, whose
members repeatedly asserted that the break-down in law enforcement cooperation had serious
and negative consequences for the timeliness, consistency, and overall quality of public safety
services, not only on the reservation but throughout the county, for native and non-native people
alike. After 15 months with no resolution, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton urged the county
and band to end what he described as a “public safety crisis” (Smith, 2017). A whole year later –
after two years and three months without an agreement, the County agreed to reinstate the MoU
on the condition that the Band drop a lawsuit it had brought to defend its sovereignty. The
backdrop for the County’s claim was a misplaced fear that recognizing the reservation
boundaries would somehow give the tribe control over all kinds of matters involving non-native
residents of the reservation. This is not true, and in the end seemed to be a calculated campaign
of misinformation to instill fear and anti-Native sentiment, as some County officials and
businesses continued to broadcast this fear despite many, very public efforts by the Band to
correct this information and dispel these anxieties. Things continued to escalate as the County
filed a claim that the reservation “does not exist,” which is obviously a perilous foundation for
any kind of coordination of activities between the governments, even in such a high-stakes area
as timely public safety response.
Potential for Shared Problem-Solving
Yet, at the same time that the Mille Lacs band was in an unresolved dispute with Mille Lacs
County over policing, it was strengthening its policing coordination agreements with Pine
County, which overlaps other parts of the reservation (Smith, 2017). And, for the Leech Lake
Band of Ojibwe, another tribe with whom we partnered, inter-governmental collaboration has
been positive in some respects. The Leech Lake reservation is large, intersecting with four
counties in northern Minnesota. The sheriff’s departments of all four counties cooperated with
the Band’s police department in, 2017 to disrupt illegal drug activity on the reservation (Bemidji
Pioneer Staff, 2018). The tribal government, the reservation’s school district, the county, a
township, and the state Department of Transportation all collaborated to improve trails and road
crossings so middle and high school students could safely walk or bike to school. Finally, the
tribe, county, and state collaborated on a high-stakes construction project to reengineer a
dangerous country road that serves one of the largest tribal housing areas. Both band and county
leadership stated in interviews that $1 million in funding from the tribal government for the road
construction, combined with and the tribe’s advocacy to prioritize this particular road, “pushed
11
the project to the top” of the county’s road construction and improvement list and described it as
a success story (Quick and Narváez, 2018).
LESSONS FOR COLLABORATION
It is not productive to recommend a single set of best practices to improve inter-governmental
relationships involving tribes. The specifics of the previous examples of divergent experiences
around law enforcement demonstrate that, even with the context of a single policy area (law
enforcement), law (PL 280), state (Minnesota), or reservation (Mille Lacs), there can be no
standard approach to approaching these relationships. More generally, as a matter of principle it
is not appropriate to take a homogenous approach: the essence of sovereignty is self-
determination, and that means that tribes choose the terms under which they wish to engage, or
not, in inter-governmental collaboration. With hundreds of tribes and tens of thousands of other
governments in the United States, there is no prescription for these interactions.
A few basic guidelines apply, however. It is incumbent on leaders and managers of
entities wanting to engage with tribal governments that they be informed and respectful of tribal
sovereignty and native people’s rights. Sadly, most public administration programs do not train
their students in these areas (Ronquillo, 2011; Riley and Johansen, 2019), and thus miss the
opportunity to foster tribal governance capacity and to improve the readiness of non-tribal public
managers to avoid harm. The ethnographic work with tribes in which I have been involved
indicates that many county and state agency managers are not well prepared to collaborate
(Quick and Narváez, 2018; Quick, Larson, and Narváez,2019).
Thus, one stepping-stone in exploring possibilities of collaboration is to acknowledge the
harm that has been done by settler colonialism and persistent supremacist attitudes and to begin
with a stance of repair. Generally, American education in history and public affairs fails to teach
about Native history, sovereignty and rights. In trying to remedy these harms and deficiencies,
the work begins with non-Native entities’ building respect for sovereignty, the recognition of
interdependence, a spirit of inquiry, and approaches to collaboration that respect boundaries
(figurative and literal) by aligning across them rather than violating them. It is especially
important to pay attention and due respect to the knowledge and wishes of tribal government
leaders and residents with intimate familiarity of their rights, needs, and desires for engagement.
The troubling paucity of American Indian scholars’ and community voices in discussions
of the potential and perils of collaboration for tribal governments and communities is a serious
ethical, empirical, and methodological problem. As a White, non-Native person, I wish to reverse
rather than exacerbate these problems. In this chapter, I have foregrounded the perspectives of
Native authors with immediate, informed knowledge of practices to respect sovereignty and to
reduce the perils for Native communities of collaboration with non-native governments. I
strongly encourage readers to prioritize Native perspectives; their work is prominent in the
bibliography, and Indian Country Today’s website is an excellent, current resource for Native-
led journalism about contemporary policy issues and politics. The necessity of beginning with
Native voices is particularly true for non-Native policy-makers, scholars, and students who are
still educating themselves on collaboration between tribes and other governments.
12
I gratefully acknowledge the tribal governments of Red Lake Band of Chippewa, Fond du
Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, and Mille Lacs Band of
Ojibwe for their partnership on the study of roadway safety in reservations. This experience and
their generous teaching launched my learning about sovereignty and rights. I am also thankful to
my collaborator, Guillermo Narváez; to research assistants Brynn Saunders, Sarah Dufour,
Victoria Fiorentino, and Sonia Narváez-Quick for assistance with literature reviews, data
collection, and analysis; and to Craig Shinn and Jack Meek for helpful suggestions on an earlier
draft of this chapter.
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