Native American Sovereignty and Natural Resource Management

Abstract

The relationship between Native Americans and the Euro-American settlers has evolved from the latter seeking to end the separate identity of the former to one in which the U.S. government uses Native rights to control large-scale resource problems. This new relationship arose out of a need to control water in Western states for irrigation, but has expanded into other areas. The Navajo sheep reductions of the 1930s and 1940s may be seen as an instance of this relationship. Concerns about siltation behind the Hoover Dam justified a program that dramatically transformed the Navajo economy. A second case concerns conflict over a caribou herd in northwestern Alaska. The conflict eventually led to the Federal government taking management of fish and game on Federal lands back from the state government. Both these cases show the development of a technocracy, based on Federal trusteeship over Native resources, concerned with the control of nature similar to that observed in Wittfogel's writings on Chinese irrigation.