A New Way Forward: Native Nations, Nonprofitization, Community Land Trusts, and the Indigenous Shadow State

Abstract

Indigenous sovereignty has been both expanded and restricted in the current self-determination era of federal Indian policy in the United States. This has allowed both the expansion and strengthening of indigenous governments, as well as the continued successful efforts to restrict and regulate these sovereign indigenous nations. The existing models of governance, development, and planning fail to adequately account for these challenges to the fundamental legitimacy of indigenous governments. I propose the model of the ‘indigenous shadow state’ based around community land trusts and other indigenously-controlled nonprofit organizations, as a complementary model, to compensate for these challenges as a means of ensuring the long term viability of indigenous social and political institutions. I discuss how a community land trust can be utilized to perform the role of a government and serve the long term needs of its citizens in the areas of housing, economic development, and land reclamation. I also briefly discuss how this model can be applied in the urban context.