For Us, By Us: Self-Determination and Community Power at the Forefront of Tribal Land Development
Tribal nations have faced barriers to self-determination since the U.S. was founded but multi-sector partnerships focused on providing Tribal members with affordable housing and healthcare become more widespread and are creating space for self-determination.
The relationship between Tribal nations and the U.S. government is marred by land theft, countless efforts to erase Native culture and even genocide. But these and other injustices have only strengthened the commitment to self-determination that is driving Tribal members to spearhead multi-sector partnerships aimed at improving the health, safety and well-being of Tribal nations.
Partnerships, such as the one between the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, which is focused on restoring the land in San Francisco’s East Bay to Indigenous stewardship, and the ecological justice non-profit Movement Generation have taken shape in the last decade. However, there are Tribal governments that have been at the forefront of Native-led partnerships for decades. One is the Blackfeet Nation.
The Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana is home to 7,000 people, or roughly half of the nation’s enrolled Tribal members. Yet, even among this relatively small population, stable, quality, affordable housing and many of the amenities that people outside of the Tribe take for granted — such as adequate heating and plumbing — are not always available.
“Everybody has water issues where we go,” said John Castillo, executive director at Walking Shield, a California-based organization that partners with Tribal governments, urban Indian service organizations, state and federal government funding agencies and other groups to serve Native American communities.
“Housing, water, roads, health; those all come up no matter where we go,” Castillo, who is of Apache heritage, added.
The Blackfeet Nation, together with Walking Shield, has prioritized several projects to help address these needs including the development of 30 units of veterans’ housing specifically geared to home ownership; water delivery and sewage infrastructure for those homes; preventative healthcare programs for adults and children; and expanding access to trauma-informed care on the reservation to reduce domestic violence, substance abuse and teen suicide.
These projects, set to be completed in 2024, are part of a five-year infrastructure development plan. The power of this jointly-developed plan, Castillo said, is to serve as an “organizing principle” that allows both the Blackfeet Nation and Walking Shield to focus on the services most needed on Tribal lands, identified by the communities themselves and subsequently to measure their efficacy in delivering them. Another key partner is the U.S. military which, through its Innovative Readiness Training program, provides armed forces personnel with military training while addressing the needs of communities across the country, according to the Department of Defense.
“We’ve been developing these five-year plans because we don’t want to talk about this in another five or six years: We want to get stuff done.”
Castillo said the five-year plan is an outgrowth of having worked with small Tribes, many of which don’t have the staff or expertise on the reservation to compete for available resources that would bring money for infrastructure or programming. Having a plan in place enables the Tribe to map projects out and ensure that projects are constructed on time and within budget. Moreover, the five-year plans address multiple social determinants including health, housing and education.
“With the plan that we develop, Tribes can match their assets to their needs over the five-year period so they know that this unit in 2024 needs to produce infrastructure, or this unit in 2025 needs to go to health care,” Castillo said. “We’ve been developing these five-year plans because we don’t want to talk about this in another five or six years: We want to get stuff done.”
Nations Within A Nation
There are 574 Native Tribes in the U.S., representing a population of about 6.8 million people, according to the most recent census. Under the Constitution, each Tribe is recognized as a sovereign nation. Historically, however, the ties between Tribal nations and the U.S government have been strong but largely inequitable.
Government departments such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which was established in 1824, are legally responsible for supporting Tribal government as well as Native self-determination, reservation roads programs, law enforcement, and detention facilities on Native lands. The bureau also oversees all activities associated with management and protection of trust and restricted lands, natural resources, and real estate service.
As a result, self-determination, or Tribal Nations’ ability to manage their own resources and determine their own funding priorities rather than the BIA has been a major point of conflict between them and the U.S. government.
The BIA has an annual budget of around $2 billion a year, of which 68% is used for Tribal support in the form of contracts, grants or compacts for social services, job training, schools and home improvement. A portion of the remaining 32% goes to operate the Office of Indian Services. These funds are used across a wide range of needs including: disaster relief; child welfare; education; Tribal government; reservation roads; general assistance and Indian Self-Determination; law enforcement; Tribal courts; and detention facilities on Tribal lands.
But the budget doesn’t meet the needs of the Tribal communities. Data from the National American Indian Housing Council shows that 40% of on-reservation housing is inadequate and around 90,000 Native families are either homeless or under-housed. Moreover, as many as 24% of Native people live in poverty, according to data from the 2020 census.
There have been some attempts at a legislative fix for on-reservation housing. At the start of 2023, South Dakota Sen. John Thune introduced the Tribal Trust Land Homeownership Act in the U.S. Senate. The bill, which was passed unanimously, establishes a deadline for the BIA to process and complete all residential and business mortgages on Native land, effectively expediting the mortgage approval process. However, that bill has languished in the House of Representatives.
But getting a mortgage approved isn’t the only hurdle. Tonya Plummer, Native American Housing Programs Director at Enterprise Community Partners and an enrolled Tribal member of Assiniboine, Sioux and Cree heritage with roots in the Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux Tribe of South Dakota and the Fort Belknap Indian Community in Montana, said that paying back the loan can be just as difficult, in her April testimony before the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies.
Plummer noted that foreclosures can also occur because loans provided through the Department of Agriculture’s 502 program which are used for housing on Tribal lands, can potentially leave homeowners underwater. She added that, as a result, properties with delinquent mortgages become vacant, reducing the amount of affordable housing in rural communities and ultimately making areas more dangerous.
The federal government is also required by treaty to provide critical health care services to Native Americans and Alaska Natives, which it currently does through the Indian Health Service (IHS), which was created in 1955, to fulfill those obligations. Members of federally-recognized Tribes are able to receive services through IHS for everything from regular physical health care to mental health care, dental and vision. However, there’s a discrepancy between what Tribal health experts and the federal government say IHS needs to provide and what Native communities are entitled to.
“It’s critical to remember that, in exchange for ceding huge portions of land, many Tribes received a promise from the federal government that carries a duty to protect Native Tribes through departments including BIA, IHS and the Bureau of Indian Education, and while protecting Native Tribes’ relationships with the federal government is critical, it is not enough to replace the equity lost in the ceded lands and years of disparity in resources. There’s a lot of room for private capital investment.”
Last year, the Biden administration commissioned a report from the Department of Health and Human Services that showed IHS’s funding is roughly around 50% of where it should be in order to provide services promised by treaties signed more than a century ago. The Tribal Budget Formulation Work Group, a group of Native health experts that advise the federal government, have asked that the federal government provide IHS with $51.4 billion in funding, amounting to a 700% increase above its current budget.
In January, IHS received $7 billion through advanced appropriations as part of a $1.7 trillion omnibus budget signed by President Joe Biden. Plummer said that federal funding has not kept pace with population growth and inflation. As a result, the disparities are even greater and potentially more difficult to address without additional capital.
“Instead of seeing the good things that tribes have been doing in Tribal industry, we often see the pain point first,” she said. “It’s critical to remember that, in exchange for ceding huge portions of land, many Tribes received a promise from the federal government that carries a duty to protect Native Tribes through departments including BIA, IHS and the Bureau of Indian Education, and while protecting Native Tribes’ relationships with the federal government is critical, it is not enough to replace the equity lost in the ceded lands and years of disparity in resources. There’s a lot of room for private capital investment.”
However, much of that private capital has yet to materialize. David Castillo, CEO of a Tempe, Ariz.-based CDFI, Native Community Capital (NCC), who is of Nahua Indian descent, said that financial institutions and private-sector capital sources continue to redline Tribal communities, making private-sector partnerships with Native communities harder to establish.
“Someone from the Office of Management and Budget once asked me ‘Why do you feel it’s important for Native people to have homeownership options on reservations?’ That’s the wrong question,” he said. “It’s enough that Native families desire to have a home of their own, that they can purchase on their own but for which the financial system denies them. At NCC, We don’t ask ‘Why should someone be able to buy a home?’ We ask ‘Why aren’t they able to and how can we change that?’”
Opportunities such as Community Reinvestment Act reform and proposed new regulations could potentially spur investment by allowing banks to use Tribal areas as part of their assessments, according to Castillo, but that has yet to happen.
Pete Upton, CEO of the Native CDFI Network and a member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, said that, generally, the partnerships currently seen in Native communities are government oriented and — in most cases — rarely used. He added that a wide range of issues around how property is seen in Native communities have, to date, made collaboration between the private sector and Native communities relatively rare.
“In regard to the private sector and Native communities, the collaboration just isn’t quite there yet,” Upton said. “The land is held in trust, and it’s not that complex to figure out, but put it this way: I think there’s easier lower hanging fruit for those investors. They can go elsewhere and not have to deal with some of the challenges and hurdles and hoops that you might have to [face] in Indian country.”
It will take intentional efforts by private investors to listen to and work alongside communities to find better ways to realize the government’s duty towards Tribes.
A Measure of Success
Although multi sector partnerships are still nascent on Tribal lands, there are a number of projects where Native governments have spearheaded the successful development of infrastructure for the Tribal community. One such project is Nesika Illahee in Portland Oregon.
The 59-unit affordable housing development was constructed in 2020 through a collaboration between the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA) and the Native American Rehabilitation Association of the Midwest. It was financed in part by the Siletz Tribe’s Indian Housing Block Grant, which has historically been used for affordable housing activities on Native lands.
“The Siletz Tribe had done an assessment with its citizens and knew one priority was to create housing outside of the reservation setting,” NAYA’s Interim Chief Executive Officer Oscar Arana said, adding that the Tribe was particularly interested in creating housing in the city of Portland that Tribal members could afford.
According to the city government’s 2022 assessment, the median home sales price rose 17% from 2016 to 2021 to $525,000. Meanwhile, Native Americans’ median annual income was $ 55,172 as of that year.
Arana said that the block grant funding was one of the last resources in the capital stack which, when combined with tax credits and philanthropic resources, allowed the partnership co-owners and co-developers to create a leasing preference for Siletz Tribe members first, followed by anyone from a federally-recognized Tribe.
In addition to creating a subsidy enabling applicants to afford housing, Arana said that the collaboration also enabled the partnership to bring in different approaches to design.
“It was important for us that the building visually looked like it was for the Native community,” he said. “We spent time, effort and funding to include art by Native artists, to ensure that the colors and signage were visually appealing and trauma informed, and that it was designed and built in a way that was welcoming for residents and the Native community.”
Arana acknowledged that while it’s possible to leverage tax credits and block grants to develop projects for Tribal nations, it’s difficult since they are intended to be separate. But he added that support from Home Forward, the city’s housing authority, helped to make a difference.
Nesika Illahee, Mamook Tokatee and Hayu Tilixam provide a model for partnerships with Tribal Nations, but it’s only one. In 2013, Sioux Falls, SD-based Avera Health — a regional healthcare system serving communities throughout the midwestern U.S. — launched the Avera American Indian Health Initiative, which provides “high-quality, sustainable healthcare solutions to benefit Native Americans throughout the Upper Midwest.”
J.R. LaPlante, the former director of Tribal relations for Avera and a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, said that, prior to the initiative, many of the Tribal communities’ needs were not being met by the federal government. However, a partnership between Avera, Urban Indian Health, and the government-run Indian Health Service (IHS), has established public-private partnerships to provide for specialty clinical services in Native communities.
“We had Tribes come to us and say ‘We need help with specialty clinical services. We need help with public health research. We need help with infrastructure,’” LaPlante said. He added that, while healthcare has been nothing short of a debacle for Tribal lands historically, it enabled Avera, Tribal communities and their partners to identify gaps in the health care system that IHS doesn’t provide, such as specialty clinical services, underlining the importance of community leadership for success.
“There is scarcity, there is necessity and there’s unmet need, but what I’m saying is that there has to be kind of an identification of what the need is, an agreement on what the need is. And identification of the need has to be done by the local community,” he said. “That’s step number one.”
The second step according to La Plante is relationship building. He noted that, while a given need or crisis may bring people together to seek solutions, there’s a history of mistrust that would-be partners have to contend with when seeking to develop partnerships with Tribal Nations.
“For over 100 years, well intentioned organizations, private sector, nonprofit organizations, religious faith based organizations, states, corporations and individual people with expertise have come to these Tribal Nations and said ‘We promise we’re going to do this and we’re going to help you with your problems’ and then they come out and they do their research or they create their idea, or they create the nonprofit and nothing ever comes out of it,” he said. “So there’s a history of broken promises.”
According to La Plante, the most effective partners are the ones that have been fostering relationships with the community, governmental actors and community actors alike. That takes time and a degree of patience since there may be no immediate result. But, La Plante also noted that even though Avera, which recorded $1.4 billion in revenue for 2022, helped develop specialty clinics alongside Tribal Nations, self-determination was always one of the goals associated with the development.
“We were just the provider of record. The bricks and mortar belong to the Tribe, the land obviously belongs to the Tribe and, and we actually just leased the clinic from them,” La Plante said, adding that self-determination lay at the heart of the initiative.
“We really wanted to promote self determination and local autonomy, [understanding that] it’s going to be better if it’s an indigenous clinic, if it’s run by the Tribe.”
Mariano Diaz, a senior fellow at Walking Shield, said that public health has increasingly become a factor in infrastructure development on Native lands.
“Twenty-five years ago, nobody talked about the intersection between housing and health,” he said. “When I look at it in my framework of comprehensive community development, if you’re working across any of those sectors, and you’re doing it well, it’s leading to better health outcomes.”
But, while the newfound focus on health is encouraging, it’s still relatively nascent. Lanalle Smith, senior programs officer, capacity building, at Longmont, Colo.-based Oweesta Corporation and a member of the Navajo Tribe, of the Dibelzhini (Black Sheep) clan, born for the Naaneesht’ezhi tachii’nii (The Charcoal-Streaked Division of the Red Running Into the Water) clan, said that while partnerships for housing and financial security on Native lands have been successful, tying those to healthcare services has not generally been done to the same degree.
“If you’re offering homeownership, the tendency is that you have a stable household. Your children are healthier, you’re healthier, and there are a lot of health benefits to that versus living in flux or in public housing within the Tribal communities. I feel like that piece is missing,” she said.
Smith also noted that not every Tribal community has a clinic or a hospital, so access to those services can be impacted because of the rural nature and lack of transportation. But it’s possible for CDFIs to help Tribes create what she calls a “holistic addition” to the services that are being offered and provided.
“CDFIs can partner with Tribes and create enterprises,” she said. “I’ve seen organizations create senior homes, daycares and really look at the business aspect too because, when you look at rural Tribal communities, there are a lot of gaps in services.”
There are, however, some hurdles to creating these enterprises.
“People looking at multi-sector partners have to ask what their missions and values are. If those partners’ values and missions are far apart, the partnership is not going to work when it comes to prioritization or operations.”
A recurring issue for Diaz is how to work within the federal government’s parameters in order to make healthcare more accessible for Native people living on Tribal lands. He said that, while Walking Shield works with Native Tribes to help them determine what their needs are and how best to pursue them, for the most part, infrastructure projects don’t align with the federal definition of a health program.
“Nobody would argue that having clean water and wastewater management on the reservation is a determinant of health but a health funder doesn’t necessarily want to provide us with resources to build a new well,” he said, adding that the organization is willing to work with any partner in order to deliver the health outcomes most important to the Tribe.
One challenge that can arise when working with partners is making sure that their priorities are the same as those of Tribal Nations.
“People looking at multi-sector partners have to ask what their missions and values are,” Arena said. “If those partners’ values and missions are far apart, the partnership is not going to work when it comes to prioritization or operations.”
A Delicate Balancing Act
According to the Government Accountability Office, one of the main barriers to Tribal groups’ obtaining credit is the U.S. government.
In a 2022 Tribal economic development report, the office said that programs supporting Tribal governments’ economic growth are fragmented across seven agencies, including the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Housing and Urban Development and the Interior. While the Secretary of Commerce is responsible for helping Tribal governments determine what opportunities are best for them, Native governments generally have to do the work themselves since the department doesn’t keep records on federal programs specifically geared to economic development on Tribal lands.
The only drawback is that many Tribal governments lack the resources to do the work required to access those programs.
The complexities of finding capital partners, managing relationships with the federal government are hard enough but leveraging community power can be one of the most difficult challenges in getting any project over the line.
NCC’s Castillo noted that, while Tribal leaders are key to the process, many are not professional politicians. Instead they have either been elected to the position or had it thrust upon them by the Tribe, and often have to prioritize addressing the social distress of the Tribe.
The consequence of centuries long structural racism built in across various systems has a broad impact.
“Writing about the African American community, Casey Gerald, in his masterful essay entitled ‘The Black Art of Escape,’ writes that it is not enough to be woke, we must ‘commit to be well.’ That in and of itself is also a huge challenge for Tribal communities also,” he said.
Castillo went on to say that Ta-Nehisi Coates references a concept coined as “relative deprivation” in his writings that describes community-based trauma, and added that “when communities are scattered, when our leaders are having to work on so many different historic and complex issues — many of which affect their own families as well — it’s overwhelming.”
“For tribes it’s the Indian Child Welfare Act, water rights, gaming, voting rights, it’s all the social trauma,” Castillo said. “The pressure of it all, including the high level of incarceration, joblessness, drug addiction, homelessness, single parent headed households, it’s just crushing.”
Castillo noted that, for Tribal leaders, garnering support for programs can be extremely difficult in the face of all the societal pressures faced by the Tribe as a whole.
“If an individual or group of Tribal citizens is interested in developing a homeownership program but the Tribal council doesn’t support them [that’s problematic]. “From a Tribal leaders’ perspective, the myriad and urgent social and governance issues a citizen governance body must look after is daunting, so much so that their time in Tribal leadership may be very short-lived because they may be voted out at the next Tribal election.”
Castillo also said that the contemporary Tribal government system is also a minefield since the dependence on federal resources affects their ability to rally community power. But he added that Native CDFIs have the ability to influence development.
“Whereas Tribal governments have significant federal funds flowing through them, and are really the only focus of power because there is a very limited if any private- and non-profit sector operating on Tribal lands, now you have Native CDFIs that are leveraging outside dollars and new sources of capital, not to compete with the tribe, but to augment and provide resources to Tribal members who may not able to get access to those resources through the Tribal government or who are forced to use more predatory providers.”
A Bright Future
Self-determination has been critical to Tribal Nations’ survival, and it is also key to helping them thrive.
Plummer said that, even though legislation enacted by the U.S. government, such as the Native American Housing Assistance and Self Determination Act of 1996 and the Helping Expedite and Advance Responsible Tribal Homeownership Act of 2012, have put pressure on Tribal communities by increasing the need for housing, Native people have responded by learning business and industry and establishing strong Tribal enterprises.
As sovereign nations, Tribes have the ability and the opportunity to leverage community power in transforming Native lands. Partnerships provide a framework for addressing decades of inequity, and Tribal members are defining what those needs are and partners have to let them lead, in order for any collaboration to be successful.
