Indigenous Peoples, Poverty, and Self-Determination in Australia ...

Cornellusual economic factors such as natural resource endowments,educational attainment or location, which vary widely across themore successful of these nations. Nor is the pattern easily explainedby internal colonialism or dependency. While their histories ofinteraction with the colonial power have varied, Indian nationsin the United States, excluding Alaska, have been subject to abroadly similar regime of legal and political domination. 12 Thatregime readily accounts for their descent into poverty, but not fordifferential success in escaping poverty.Explaining the patternIn the mid-1980s, the Harvard Project on American IndianEconomic Development began a research effort designed toexplain the emerging pattern of Indigenous economic success.What was enabling some Indian nations to break away from theoverall pattern of seemingly intractable poverty? What were theconditions for sustained economic development on AmericanIndian reservations?This research effort, continuing today through the HarvardProject and its sister organization, the Native Nations Institute forLeadership, Management, and Policy at the University of Arizona,has produced results with policy-significant implications. Acrossa sample of nearly seventy Indian nations, the most consistentpredictors of sustainable economic development on Indianreservations are not economic factors such as location, educationalattainment or natural resource endowments but rather largelypolitical ones. Three have proven particularly important.• Sovereignty or self-rule. Indigenous peoples have to havegenuine decision-making power in their own hands, fromconstitution-making to law-making to policy. The primaryreason for this is accountability: it links decision-makers andthe consequences of their decisions.12. On Alaska, see Case and Voluck (2002), Berger (1985), and Cornell andKalt (2003).13