1 CHAPTER 1: AMERICAN INDIAN SELF-DETERMINATION AND ...

While tribes possessed an inherent right to run their
own affairs, exercising self-determination proved far more
difficult. Federal policies have all-too-often decimated
Native American economies, and with it the ability to control
and develop the economic resources necessary to exercise
self-government. These federal policies have included
dividing up tribal lands into individually-owned plots,
allowing non-Indians to benefit from the use of Indian lands
and resources at the expense of the tribes, reducing
livestock herds, and flooding Native lands as part of water
development projects. 15 Hence, many Indian peoples lacked
the resources to effectively exercise their right to self-
determination. 16
Consequently, the AICC called on the federal government
to live up to its "responsibilities" and its "positive
national obligation" to assist tribes with developing their
15 For just a few of the works on the subject, see
Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to
Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984); Michael L. Lawson, Dammed Indians:
The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944-1980
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982); Janet A.
McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887-
1934 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Melissa
L. Meyer, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and
Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabeg Reservation, 1889-
1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Richard
White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment,
and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).
16 Gerard, interview.
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