The Comparative Political History of Two Tribal Governments

Abstract

The recent history of two American Indian tribal governments, the Navajo Nation, and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona, provide background for the examination of the paths followed by two tribal governments in seeking to establish and maintain legitimated self-rule within the federal governmental structure of the United States. The Navajo Nation has its capitol at Window Rock, on a reservation of 25,000 square miles, in northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and a small area of southeastern Utah. The Navajo population is estimated between 160,000 and 170,000 people. It is the largest American Indian tribe in the United States. The Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona has the Pascua Pueblo Reservation, with a land area of 892 acres, near Tucson, Arizona, and off-reservation membership in four major villages, Yoem Pueblo in Marana, Guadalupe near Tempe, Barrio Libre in South Tucson, and Old Pascua in Tucson. All of the communities are in southern Arizona. The tribal enrollment was 8,200 at the time of the first election in June, 1988. These two Indian nations are unalike in many ways, but, then, no two tribes are alike, and each tribal government has its own unique history of how it came to be. Both tribes trace their ultimate origins to mythological events in the pre-columbian past. Both have been, in more recent history, included within the political boundaries of the Spanish colonial empire, the Mexican national state, and now the United States. The Navajo Nation retains a part of its ancestral homeland within the boundaries of its present reservation. The Pascua Yaqui communities are separated from their homeland in the Mexican state of Sonora by the United States/Mexican border. Each of these governments, whatever their historical origin, share the commonalities of having passed through the process of receiving federal recognition as a tribal entity (sovereign) from the federal government. These tribes, as all other tribes, have been forced to spend much of their time and energy either resisting negative federal policy or trying to obtain the benefits of favorable policy. Under recent policy as formalized in the Indian Self-Determination Act, P.L. 93-638, tribal governments have moved from being toy governments totally controlled by the federal government, to official establishment as parts of the American governmental structure of states, under the supremacy of the federal government (Wilkinson:1987,86). Some tribal goverments have used this status in some pragmatic ways to develop as governments utilizing the concept of tribal sovereignty of P.L. 93-638 policy to gain control over their own internal affairs. The Navajo Nation is one of those tribal governments which has developed in its particu56