Indigenous Self-Governance and Development on American Indian Reservations

Abstract

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People promotes self-governance as a matter of justice rather than economics. How will self-governance affect the incomes of indigenous people? To gain insight, we compare long-run income growth on American Indian reservations with and without federal oversight through the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. Reservations with more autonomy had 12-15 percent higher income per capita in 2016, even conditional on 1930s income. However, these more autonomous reservations also experienced wider income variance with more downside risk. The findings are consistent with theory emphasizing the development trade-offs between local and centralized governance.

Cooperation between First Nations and Municipalities: Do Water-Sharing Arrangements Improve Drinking Water Quality?

“…Past research on the relationship between centralized control of Indigenous lands and resources and economic development is extensive in Canada and the U.S. (Trosper, 1978;Carlson, 1981;Anderson and Lueck, 1992;Alcantara, 2007;Anderson and Parker, 2009;Aragón, 2015;Anderson and Parker, 2017;Aragón and Kessler, 2020;Frye and Parker, 2021). For example, in the U.S., Frye and Parker (2021) find positive income growth effects associated with tribal self-governance.…”

“…Past research on the relationship between centralized control of Indigenous lands and resources and economic development is extensive in Canada and the U.S. (Trosper, 1978;Carlson, 1981;Anderson and Lueck, 1992;Alcantara, 2007;Anderson and Parker, 2009;Aragón, 2015;Anderson and Parker, 2017;Aragón and Kessler, 2020;Frye and Parker, 2021). For example, in the U.S., Frye and Parker (2021) find positive income growth effects associated with tribal self-governance. In contrast, Anderson and Parker (2017) find that homogenization of systems of contract enforcement resulting from centralized state jurisdiction over law and order on American reservations was positively correlated with income growth.…”

The Country They Built: Dynamic and Complex Indigenous Economies in North America before 1492

“…This was also a region of independent crop development and diffusion of such plants as squash, sunflower, marsh elder, and others 1 Economic history research has focused primarily on the post-Dawes period and allotment. See, by way of example, Carlson (1978), Dippel (2014), Frye andParker (2021), andMiller (2015), among others. There is a broader literature by historians of early America.…”

“… 1 Economic history research has focused primarily on the post-Dawes period and allotment. See, by way of example, Carlson (1978), Dippel (2014), Frye and Parker (2021), and Miller (2015), among others. There is a broader literature by historians of early America.…”

Indigenous Nations and the Development of the U.S. Economy: Land, Resources, and Dispossession

“…This paper complements the emerging literature on Indigenous economic history, which focuses heavily on the Dawes Era (1887–1934) but is largely separate from that on the development of the American economy 11 . Papers in this literature focus on natural resource loss (Feir, Gillezeau, and Jones 2019), forced co-existence of different Indigenous nations on reservations (Dippel 2014), the extent of federal oversight on reservations (Frye and Parker 2021), and residential schools (Gregg 2018). Each had major consequences for Indigenous economic growth but would have been impossible without the political, legal, and economic changes before 1871, which are the main focus here.…”