What does it mean to be a good citizen? In some ways, the answer is simple: participate in government (vote), pay your taxes, don’t break the law, and contribute to the economic well-being of the United States. But there is more. The definition of being a good citizen is bound up in society’s core cultural values and how those values are practiced in the nation or community. Tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) are on the forefront of the application of tribal core cultural values that are the foundation of good citizenship.

 In the United States, core cultural values include property ownership, wealth creation, and, politically, the idea of a representative democracy in which voters elect people to represent them in political roles. Such roles can be within the government, whether that be state, local, or national, or they can be in other kinds of entities such as corporations, nonprofits, and neighborhood organizations. But there are other American cultural concepts that contribute to expectations about citizenship, including patriotism, civil rights, the concept of one man-one vote, and, more recently, nationalism. There are also laws that are designed to ensure access to political participation and the success of core American values such the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and laws related to access to credit. The core cultural values of the United States are often described as “freedom.”

For the Indigenous nations of the United States, citizenship is characterized very differently than in the country at large. First, we define our standing with our tribal governments as “membership.” The vast majority of our tribal constitutions refer to “members” rather than citizens. This may be because we are members of families and clans, and therefore, by extension, members of tribes. Thus, being a tribal member has cultural elements as well as political ones. However, the term “member” implies that tribes are little more than social clubs or organizations. People who are antagonistic to tribal interests have acted on this assumption. Indeed, this implication has been the basis for at least one U.S. Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Mazurie (1975). The term “member” reinforces that idea that our tribal governments may not be real governments. Of course, such a conclusion is far from true.

 Today’s tribal governments have a relationship with their subjects that is similar to what states have with their citizens. Tribal governments provide services, employment, and other benefits. Although only citizens of the tribe are entitled to those benefits, non-citizens often access them as well through their relationship with citizens (e.g. non-member spouses or children). Thus, Native peoples’ contemporary relationship to their tribal governments is far more than cultural. As the roles of tribal government have changed, so has our relationship to that government. We should see ourselves as citizens and that tribal government provides for many of our needs.

For tribal communities, the core cultural values that define what a good citizen is are very different than those of the United States or any of the individual 50 states. Each tribal nation has core cultural values that are specific to the tribal place and its human and non-human residents. Such values have developed over thousands of years. A tribe’s historical experience also informs how its core cultural values are defined. For example, Pueblo Indians created civilizations in the desert Southwest by harvesting water from rivers to account for the weather and overcome the aridity of the region. This livelihood required permanent, close-knit communities with centralized decision-making and communal public work projects to provide water, sustenance, and protection for the whole pueblo. It is a practice that continues today. The closest neighbors to the Pueblos were the Athabaskan tribes, Navajos and Apaches, whose core cultural values are very different. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish and the introduction of livestock, these tribes led a foraging, semi-nomadic lifestyle with limited agriculture. This societal structure created more individualistic values, including living a distance from other families and having religious expression that was more family than community oriented. But these two groups of people are only a sampling of hundreds of different Indigenous communities living on Turtle Island. Every Indigenous group has developed core cultural values and manners of expression that reflect their history and relationship to the land.

 While each Indigenous nation has its own core cultural values, there are certain values held by most, if not all tribes in the United States. Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO), a nonprofit organization founded by LaDonna Harris and located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has been working for 50 years to serve and empower Indigenous communities. Through their work, AIO has identified four values that are common to most Indigenous nations in the U.S. and to many across the globe: relation ship, reciprocity, responsibility, and redistribution. As Indigenous peoples, we nurture relationships between the humans and other non-human and spiritual entities. We see the value in all life, recognizing the rights of all beings, animate and inanimate. Generally, we do not hoard wealth as exemplified by giveaways, potlatches, and other redistribution ceremonies. And we place spirituality and relationships above material goods and possessions.

Perhaps one of the most important values applicable to tribal communities throughout the U.S. is the commitment to the community, which is privileged over the individual. Historically, without a total commitment to the community, the group could not have survived. Individuals going off to do “their own thing” would destroy a society that provided all their needs through cooperation and communal effort. Individualism is one of the hallmark values of Western civilization and has conflicted with the communal nature of Indigenous societies throughout the Western hemisphere for the last 500 years.

 Tribal communities have the core cultural values that provide standards to define the good tribal citizen. Yet we seldom hear about tribal citizenship, even from leading Native scholars. In his book, American Indians, American Justice (1983), Vine Deloria Jr. focuses on American citizenship and says nothing of tribal citizenship. Moreover, a review of course descriptions at 35 tribal colleges only produced six courses that had the word “citizenship” in the course title or description. Of those six, just two focused on dual citizenship. From this review, it appears that as tribal educators we do not have much dialogue on one of the most basic aspects of sovereignty: citizen participation.

Why do we complain about our tribal governments, see them as illegitimate, or have lower expectations of their abilities or capabilities than we have for other governments? Tribal governments face greater challenges than many other local governments. They lack a tax base, have a high reliance on federal funding, and must cope with a workforce that has little education. At the same time, they have all the problems that other local governments have such as providing necessary services, maintaining a budget, holding elections, meeting constituent expectations, and developing our communities and reservations. Our attitudes towards our own tribal governments have become skewed. People often complain about “the government” and do not like being told what to do, including paying taxes or following regulations. But for tribal peoples, we often complain about the viciousness of tribal politics, nepotism, and apparent favoritism in the provision of services. How are we really different than any other people who dislike government? Through values common to most Indigenous communities, and those specific to particular tribes, we have the basis for identifying the standards of good citizenship. Why don’t we turn to our core cultural values to hold ourselves and our elected leaders accountable?

The American assimilation project can be defined as a series of U.S. policies beginning in the 1870s with Indigenous people but extending well into the 20th and 21st centuries. Besides Native Americans, the assimilation project was directed at immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, as well as Latin America, for the purpose of inculcating American values into those resident populations whose way of life and beliefs were not rooted in the English Protestant tradition.

For Indigenous peoples, the assimilation project was disastrous. In the late 1800s, the assimilation project targeted three aspects of tribal life: notions of law, communal property, and culture. law was attacked through the Major Crimes Act (1885) and the Rules for Indian Courts (1892), removing tribal culture and values from the legal process and making certain tribal religious and cultural practices unlawful. Communal property was attacked through the Allotment Act (1887), which divided reservations and gave acreage to each individual in an effort to instill the idea of private property, a process which resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the tribal land base. The attack on culture continued through the boarding school experiment. Children were taken to regional boarding schools far from their home communities, punished for speaking their language, and taught that their tribal way of life was wrong. Boarding schools stripped Native children of their language and culture, creating several generations of people with confused identities, non-existent parenting skills, an inability to speak their Native language, and cultural illiteracy. The American assimilation project created so much confusion in our communities that it is a miracle we still have some sense of our core cultural values or that we can see ourselves as nations and societies.

In the film In the Light of Reverence, Deloria speaks to the notion of rights and responsibilities as they pertain to the natural world. In his discussion, Deloria stated that the United States has become a society in which our perception of our rights has become more important than fulfilling our social responsibilities. We certainly can see that is the case in terms of our relationship to our planet and the effects of industrialization and consumerism.

Focusing on the rights rather than responsibilities of citizenship is the epitome of Western individualism. Without balancing the two concepts, we have a society that places more importance on individual desires, regardless of their impact on society. We are seeing, during the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals who refuse to social distance or stay home, insisting that their individual rights to play basketball, go to the beach, or party at a bar are more important than the well-being of society as a whole. This way of thinking also allows the individual to take from society rather than give back. We see large tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals, while these same entities often receive subsidies and other benefits.

Unfortunately, this focus on individual rights has also influenced our relationship to our tribal governments. We all want our government to provide services, immunity from state laws, access to tribal resources, cultural privileges, and economic opportunities. But in return, what do we do for the tribal government? If we are unwilling to apply the value of reciprocity in our relationship with our tribal government, the American assimilation project will have succeeded.

There are few commentators who discuss citizenship rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis our tribal governments. For example, Rebuilding Native Nations (2007), a book published by the Native Nations Institute at the university of Arizona, only mentions tribal citizenship in the context of tribal constitutions and neoliberal economic development, while The Rights of Indians and Tribes (2004) by Stephen Prevar, senior staff counsel at the American Civil liberties union, explores Indian citizenship in the context of federal and state citizenship. Sharon O’Brien, a political science professor at the university of Kansas, addresses Indian citizenship and how tribes define their members in her book, American Indian Tribal Governments (1989). But the issue of qualifications for tribal membership seems to take most of the oxygen in O’Brien’s book, as it does in The Road: Indian Tribes and Political Liberty (1980) by Russel Lawrence Barsh and James Youngblood Henderson. Apparently, tribal membership and economic development are more compelling than the actual day-to-day relationship between tribal citizens and their governments.

What do we need to do to develop a stronger sense of tribal citizenship? Tribal colleges are on the forefront of this challenge. Core cultural values point the way to behaviors, manners, and expectations that are foundational to citizenship. Since TCUs are intellectual centers in many tribal communities, it is logical that local discussions of citizenship and core cultural values take place at those institutions.

How do we integrate our core cultural values into the tribal college curriculum? To a large degree we can achieve this through classes on tribal histories, Native knowledge, tribal cultural practices, and Indigenous ways of knowing. We need to have dialogue on tribal rights and responsibilities. In some ways, defining the good tribal citizen is an application of the lessons learned through teaching our communities’ core cultural values.

How do we integrate those localized lessons, values, and practices into contemporary tribal political thought? unfortunately, most political science classes, including those taught at mainstream colleges and universities, fail to encourage the development of new political theories. Such institutions look to their faculty and graduate students to analyze and synthesize political theory with an emphasis on theories with universal application. However, by definition tribal political thought should be localized. Tribal colleges are not necessarily bound by the idea that only the most highly educated can develop theory. For most tribes, the cultural knowledge necessary to integrate tribal values into political theory resides with our elders, those who have extensive cultural wisdom and a sense of community spirit.

In the search for tribal political theory, the role of the American assimilation project again rears its ugly head. Through 150 years of assimilation policies, we as tribal nations have become fractured communities, breaking into groups with different ideologies that can be mutually antagonistic. Yet we remain a part of our Indigenous nations, whether we are urban or reservation, traditional or Christian, young or old, addicted or clean, hip-hop or country, powwow or rodeo. To overcome the ongoing attempts to assimilate us, we need to strengthen our sense of community, regardless of the divisions. It will take a herculean effort.

The development of the White Earth Nation’s constitution is a good example of such an effort and one that illustrates the challenging issues related to tribal citizenship. With the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) in 1934, tribes were encouraged to adopt a constitution. The Bureau of Indian Affairs facilitated this process by developing a model to help guide tribes as they created their own constitutions. Highly controversial, many saw the model as forcing tribes to assimilate their governments into something acceptable to the BIA rather than maintaining tribal ways of governance. The IRA model constitution was more oriented to the electoral process and enhancing the power of the tribal government than to the relationship between the tribes and their citizens.

Over a period of years, the White Earth Nation in Minnesota wrote and voted to ratify a constitution that broke with the IRA constitutional model. The White Earth constitution addressed many aspects of the relationship between the tribal government and its citizenry, including mutual expectations, individual rights, and the extent of tribal governmental power. However, due to our colonial relationship with the United States government, the Secretary of Interior refused to accept the constitution even though tribal voters had approved it. Nevertheless, the lesson here is that the White Earth Nation constitution is an example of a tribal community doing the heavy lifting to craft an organic document that addresses issues of tribal citizenship.

With the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act (1924), Indigenous peoples became citizens of the United States as well as their tribal communities. This unusual situation has fascinated commentators, resulting in several books and law review articles on the concept of dual citizenship. However, the discussion of dual citizenship seldom ventures into the realm of tribal citizenship beyond access to tribal membership. As a result of our dual citizenship, we have the right to participate in federal and state electoral processes as well as other federal or state governmental functions. This includes voting in elections, participating on boards and commissions, taking part in election processes such as caucuses and conventions, and running for and being elected to state or federal office.

As we move into the United States’ election season, Native people have the right to participate in American politics at the federal, state, tribal, and local levels. We will hear a lot about freedom, democracy, citizenship, and the right to vote. Of course, it is important to vote and be involved in the election process, but as citizens of any jurisdiction we have the responsibility to participate positively in society, not only by voting. Such participation should be defined through our core cultural values.

Tribal Colleges are on the forefront of development in tribal communities. They are developing employment skills, reclaiming Indigenous languages and knowledge, and fostering an aware tribal citizenry. As we look to our tribal colleges for the application of our core cultural values, we must keep in mind that for many Indigenous communities, our electoral season coincides with the American electoral season. To fulfill our responsibilities as tribal citizens, we need to embrace our core cultural values and how they are defined in our communities. We must remain aware of our own individual responsibility to our tribal societies. We cannot simply vote, expect the elected leadership to take care of all our problems, and then complain when they are unable to do so. As we prepare to choose our leaders, we need to keep our core cultural values in mind. How do we care for each other? How do we care for the Earth? How do we ensure the viability of our languages? How do we develop our communities for future generations? What are our leaders doing to build and strengthen our communities? How do we, as individuals, contribute? These are the questions that a good citizen should ask.

Stephen Wall, JD (Ojibwe) is faculty emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the former chief judge of the Mescalero Apache Tribe.

REFERENCES

Barsh, R.l., & Youngblood, J.H. (1980). The Road: Indian Tribes and Political Liberty. Berkeley: university of California Press.

Brave NoiseCat, J. (2015, September 3). Rand Paul Thinks “lack of Assimilation” Is Native Americans’ Problem.

Huffington Post. Retrieved from https://www.huffpost.com /entry/rand-paul-assimilation-native-americans

Sacred land Film Project of Earth Island Institute (Producer). (2001). In the Light of Reverence. Oley, PA: Bullfrog Films.

Deloria Jr., V., & Lytle, C.M. (1983). American Indians, American Justice. Austin: university of Texas Press.

Indian Citizenship Act, P.l. 69-175, 43 Stat.253 (1924).

Jorgensen, M. (Ed.). (2007). Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development. Tucson: university of Arizona Press.

O’Brien, S. (1989). American Indian Tribal Governments. Norman: university of Oklahoma Press.

Prevar, S. (2004). The Rights of Indians and Tribes (3rd ed.). New York: New York university Press.

United States v. Mazurie, 419 U.S. 544 (1975).

Vizenor, G., & Doerfler, J. (Eds.). (2012). The White Earth Nation: Ratification of a Native Democratic Constitution. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.