Bell Community Development Revitalization Project

The earliest impact of self-determination policy was an increase in community development efforts. These initially stemmed from funding through the Office of Economic Opportunity and the work of organizations like Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity. One major project was led by Chief Ross Swimmer of the Cherokee Nation, a Republican businessman in the 1980s. He saw an opportunity to use grant money to help improve conditions for the poorest members of his tribe. But it was Wilma Mankiller who played a direct role in overseeing the project and ensuring its success.

Local leaders accessed support from both political parties to succeed in their efforts. They could all see how in need their poor, rural areas were. When Mankiller returned to Oklahoma in the summer of 1977, she got a job working with the Cherokee Nation. By the early 1980s she was working in community development and eventually became the director of the Cherokee Nation Community Development Department. As part of this job, she oversaw the Bell Community Revitalization Project under the direction of Chief Swimmer.

Bell, a small community in rural eastern Oklahoma, was widely considered one of the poorest communities within the Cherokee Nation. Many homes were in disrepair and did not have running water. The Bell project funded the building or remodeling of dozens of homes, as well as the construction of sixteen miles of water lines. By March 1983, when the project ended, all but five of the 103 families living in Bell had contributed to the project by helping do some of the work themselves. Political leaders and the community liked that the project required people to do some of the labor on projects that directly benefited them. Mankiller saw a positive reaction to the kind of self-help efforts that community development involved.

FIG. 13.12

Wilma Mankiller and the Bell Revitalization Project

During the early 1980s Wilma Mankiller (center) served as director of the Cherokee Nation Community Development Department. In that position, she oversaw the Bell Revitalization Project team, which worked to install water lines and provide running water to families in Bell, a rural community in the Cherokee Nation. The 2013 film The Cherokee Word for Water was based on Mankiller’s work with the Bell project.

Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society

Mankiller kept track of timesheets submitted by the people of Bell, and she regularly visited the site to check on their progress. When she ran for deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1983, she was elected in part because of the support of rural Cherokees like those living in Bell. They viewed her as really caring about the people in their community. The experience Mankiller gained through her work on the Bell project also provided a successful model that she used for even more development projects when she became principal chief in 1985 following Chief Swimmer’s resignation of that position. (Swimmer resigned so that he could head the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC.) Mankiller was elected in her own right as chief in 1987 and again in 1991. She “went from being a purist (no federal funds) to a master of garnering federal support for everything from rural water lines to a youth shelter.”

Mankiller’s experience is a good example of how community development work in Indigenous Nations became an expression of sovereignty. Tribes were now controlling what happened in their communities. The community development work being done in the Cherokee Nation brought national attention to Mankiller and the tribe. David Boren, an Oklahoma US senator at the time, described the Cherokee Nation as having “the most outstanding community development effort of any tribe in the country.”

However, Mankiller’s experience with the Bell project, the youth center, and other similar projects also made her critical of what she saw as less serious expressions of tribal sovereignty or control. For example, she said it was “hard to get excited about” Indigenous nations, including the Cherokee, issuing their own license plates. Given the meaningful way her community development efforts helped improve people’s lives, her reaction to the license plate program is not surprising. For others, though, the ability of federally recognized tribes to issue their own license plates was an important symbol of cultural pride and sovereignty rights. The license plates served as a vivid reminder that Indigenous people were not simply one more group trying to overcome racism. They held dual citizenship, which involved a complex and sometimes unclear relationship with both the state and federal government.

Expanding Sovereignty

In the decades following the passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act, expressions of sovereignty grew greater and more varied in Oklahoma and across the country. One important issue that emerged in relation to tribal sovereignty was the adoption and fostering of Native American children. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA) was passed just three years after the self-determination legislation. In the same way that Indigenous people had experienced a loss of control over their land and tribal governments into the twentieth century, they also faced greater outside interference when it came to questions about who should raise or care for Native children. The Indian Child Welfare Act was passed to protect Indigenous children from being removed from their homes and their communities. The legislation gave family members and tribes a greater role in caring for children in difficult situations, rather than completely removing them from everything that was familiar. As a result of this legislation, greater effort was made (and required) to place Indigenous children in Indigenous foster homes. It also made it easier for relatives of the children, such as an aunt or an uncle, to adopt them when their parents could not care for them.

FIG. 13.13

Ann Shadlow and Granddaughter Laketa Pratt

Ann Shadlow, pictured left, was of Cheyenne heritage and was raised by her grandmother. Shadlow was a recipient of the National Indian Woman of the Year award as well as the Oklahoma Woman of the Year award. Here she is seen with her granddaughter, Laketa Pratt, at a beadwork class in 1974. Shadlow and Pratt were both raised in Native households by their families, and both excelled within their community. However, not all Native children had this experience. Native American children were frequently removed from their homes and placed with white adoptive parents. These placements deprived those children of access to traditional upbringings in Native communities. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 attempted to rectify this by encouraging placement of children with members of their extended families or with other members of their nation.

Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.

Indian Child Welfare Act

In 1978, the federal government passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). It did this in response to decades of displaced Native children. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the government removed one-third of Native children from their homes, families, and tribal communities. They then placed them in non-Native households. The legislation came about after Bertram Hirsch began looking into the issue. Hirsch worked for the Association on American Indian Affairs. He was also a lawyer in New York. He started looking at data from foster care systems across the United States. His findings showed that the government had removed 25 to 35 percent of Native children from their homes. They placed around 90 percent of them in non-Native homes. This was a major concern for Native nations. Many Native children were losing access to their extended families, communities, and cultures.

Part of the reason for the high rates of non-Native adoptions of Indigenous children was a lack of cultural sensitivity in child welfare agencies. Social workers got training on how to understand Native child-rearing practices. They did not know about shared responsibility for children among tribal communities. Oftentimes in Native communities a child’s entire extended family helps raise them. Their parents are not the sole caretakers. On top of this, many Native families lost their children because the families were experiencing poverty. Rather than giving these families the help they needed, child welfare agencies just took children from them.

As more people studied this problem, tribal activists began to take up the cause. Child welfare was a key focus of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. In response to their concerns, Congress created the American Indian Policy Review Commission. It focused on ongoing policy issues. The commission referred to Hirsch’s findings when studying Native American child welfare. It concluded that the mass removal of children threatened tribal sovereignty.

When Congress passed ICWA, it put in place minimum federal standards for placement of Native children. Under this law, case workers must, when possible, place children with their extended family or with other members of their tribe. If either of these options are not available, they place children with members of another tribe. On top of this, case workers must work with the family and the Native nation to find the best placement for the child. This law reinforced the sovereignty of Native nations. It helped cement their authority over their own families.

In 2023, the US Supreme Court heard a case about the constitutionality of ICWA. Supporters of the act believe that it protects the best interests of Indigenous children, families, and nations. Critics say the law goes against the Constitution. They argue that it does this by placing child welfare, which should be a function of the state, under federal law. Others argue that the law is unconstitutional by favoring a certain racial classification. Despite these objections, the Supreme Court ruled in a 7–2 vote that the Indian Child Welfare Act would remain the law. The Court did not think that ICWA broke any laws found in the Constitution. Native Americans across the country saw this ruling as another step toward affirming tribal sovereignty.

The restoration of tribal sovereignty continued to evolve over the next few decades. During the 1980s, the Reagan administration cut federal spending to Native nations. With the reduction in federal funding to Native nations, gaming was one way to promote tribal economic development and tribal business enterprises. Tribal gaming started in the 1970s with bingo halls and horse racing and gained legal support in the late 1980s. In California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians (1987), the Supreme Court held that state regulation of gaming did not apply to tribal gaming operations on tribal land. A year later, Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 (IGRA) as a way to oversee gaming on Native lands and to create the National Indian Gaming Commission. The act defined three classes of Indian gaming. Class I includes traditional or social gaming, which is subject to tribal regulation. Class II includes bingo and similar games, which are subject to tribal regulation and oversight by the National Indian Gaming Commission. Class III includes all other gaming, including casino gaming, which is governed by tribal-state compacts (formal agreements) that must be approved by the US Secretary of the Interior. In short, the IGRA recognized the right of tribes to conduct gaming on tribal land as a source of income as well as an expression of sovereignty and communal values. For many Indigenous communities, gaming was a means of sharing wealth among the community. In Oklahoma, new gaming laws meant that casinos could operate on tribal land, but not elsewhere. As we will see in chapter 15, the growth of tribal gaming in Oklahoma has played a key role in economic development across the state.

Another important sovereignty issue that emerged in the later decades of the twentieth century was the debate over the relationship of Indigenous nations to state and federal governments. One of the surprising and complicated ways that this debate played out was over state taxes on tobacco products. For decades, tobacco products sold in stores on tribal land were not being taxed. The state of Oklahoma argued that tribes should not be able to sell tax-free tobacco to nontribal members. Eventually this disagreement went all the way to the US Supreme Court. In Oklahoma Tax Commission v. Citizen Band, Potawatomi Indian Tribe of Oklahoma (1991), the Supreme Court decided that nontribal members were subject to state sales taxes, even when the product they were buying was sold on tribal land. The ruling also said that tribes had an obligation to assist with the collection of that tax. Some Indigenous leaders saw this ruling as a setback and as a violation of sovereignty rights. The Oklahoma tribes now called the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, the Wyandotte Nation, and the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes were particularly upset with the ruling. They saw this as a loss of rights, and at first they did not want to work with the state of Oklahoma. Other Indigenous leaders had a different view. They decided to use the ruling as an opportunity to show how tribes could work with the state as equal partners. Today Native nations grapple with their relationship to commercial tobacco, and to counter the negative sides of selling tobacco, they fund public health campaigns that encourage people to give up smoking as a regular habit. At the same time, Indigenous people use tobacco in ceremonies and cultural practices.

As chief of the second largest tribe in the country and the largest in Oklahoma, Wilma Mankiller led the effort to negotiate a tobacco-related agreement with the state. The tobacco compact that she helped negotiate for the Cherokee Nation in 1991 eventually became the standard for all tribes in the state. It also served as an example for other kinds of agreements between states and tribes. In the 1991 compact, the Cherokee Nation agreed to a lump-sum tax payment (made in advance of the sale) on tobacco so that the state got its money. This kept the Cherokee Nation from having to make sure that taxes were paid by nontribal members but not by members. The tribe could continue to advertise tax-free smoke shops, which appealed to both tribal and nontribal members. The second and most important thing to come out of this agreement was its language. It stated that the compact was being entered into on a “government to government” basis. This wording would be used in other Oklahoma tobacco compacts. Chief Mankiller argued that the wording was an expression of sovereignty. Despite the criticism she and the Cherokee Nation faced for working on the compact, it became an important example of state-tribal cooperation. The idea of government-to-government agreements between Indigenous Nations and the state has continued to grow in the twenty-first century.