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

CornellThe U.S. government had inadvertently stumbled on the onlypolicy that—in three-quarters of a century of federal attemptsto improve socio-economic conditions on American Indianreservations—actually made significant progress againstreservation poverty. While the United States may not haveintended the “self-determination” policy launched in the 1970s toinclude constitutional authority and expanded tribal jurisdiction,a number of Indian nations chose to interpret it that way andbenefited enormously from doing so. Self-determination, itturned out, was an effective anti-poverty policy—the first ever inU.S. relations with Indian nations.The transferability of U.S. resultsThe American Indian experience connects self-determinationand self-governance with overcoming poverty. It argues that theway to attack socio-economic disadvantage among Indigenouspeoples is not primarily by organizing centrally designedprograms addressing poverty and its related social pathologies—although such programs can provide tribes with needed resourcesand expertise—but instead by substantially expanding thejurisdictional authority of those nations and empowering themto develop capable governing institutions that in turn can supportsustainable, self-determined economies and social programs oftheir own design. Nothing else has worked.But how generalizable is the U.S. case? Can it be extendedto Australia, New Zealand and Canada? Could expandedjurisdiction and constitutional authority, backed up by effectiveand culturally congruent governing institutions, yield comparableresults in Indigenous economic and community well-being?19