It is not hyperbolic to describe the 2020 fire season as historically catastrophic. Records for both the largest wildfire and the total number of acres burned in California have already been shattered this year, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis, and the past decade’s fire seasons have been demonstrably larger and more intense than the decade before it. The pictures of smoke choking the sun from San Francisco, of fires ripping through the exurban and suburban West are not an aberration; they’re the future. 

The causes of today’s wildfires are complex. There is no doubt that global climate change is changing the intensity, size, and duration of wildfires in California. But the fires have ties to the historical and social injustices done to Indigenous peoples — genocide, slavery, the destroying of cultural rites — which have led to the mismanagement and overdevelopment of California lands. 

Now, in such a dire fire season, the state has invested new resources into Indigenous fire management techniques, like controlled burning. But this begs the question: How do Indigenous peoples in California feel about being asked to use their cultural practices to help a state that has largely sought to erase them?

The Indigenous scholars I talked to stressed that their communities have always burned as part of their culture — and yet many are still not in control of their own lands because of California’s long history of colonialism. The way forward, many say, is not just for the state to incorporate Indigenous practices but to understand their importance in the culture and reckon with this history.

When Indigenous peoples were stripped of their land, they were stripped of their cultural practices

With wildfires out of control around the world, there has been much discussion about Indigenous fire practices in recent years. A recent executive order signed by California governor Gavin Newsom  included the use of prescribed or controlled burning — planned fires for forest restoration — as a strategy to conserve land in the fight against climate change. Cal Fire and the Forest Service also signed a pact earlier this year to increase the use of controlled burning, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. 

But tribes like the Karuk in Northern California have been pushing for the state to incorporate these practices — as well as tree thinning, native seed restoration, and others — for years. The US government’s historically aggressive response to extinguishing wildfires has led to overgrown forests and debris, which has made wildfires worse. Indigenous fire practices would help both to mend and prevent such devastation. Traditionally, the role of prescribed burning has been to balance the ecosystem.

“We utilized the resources of our lands…things like fire to help produce more trees, to cut down the amount of brush, so you wouldn’t have these massive fires that you see today,” said Charles Sepulveda (Tongva/Acjachemen), assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Utah. 

All this changed with colonization. The establishment of Southern California as a Spanish colony in 1769 presaged not only discrimination toward Indigenous fire practices, Sepulveda said, but genocide and slavery. “California Indians were enslaved under the mission system,” he said, “think about it in those terms — you don’t have the independence to produce the things that were important to your culture and your society.” 

In this system, the ability of California’s Indigenous peoples to maintain traditional knowledge was also largely destroyed. “During this time, there are increased mortality rates…so the people responsible for a lot of those things within tribal communities, tribal nations were no longer able to practice their ways of life,” Sepulveda said.

While the Spanish mission system did not extend throughout the entirety of California, the realities of genocide and slavery are constant in the histories of California’s Indigenous peoples. As Cutcha Risling Baldy (Hoopa Valley/Yurok/Karuk), associate professor and department chair of Native American studies at Humboldt State University, explains, many Native nations were faced with complete devastation in the wake of the California Gold Rush in the mid-1800s. 

In particular, two laws — the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians and the California Volunteer Act — sought to effectively legalize the bounty of Native peoples and enslave those who survived, including children. Over 20,000 Indigenous peoples were enslaved during California’s first years as a state.

“People are fighting for their lives during this period of time, and then they’re also having to worry about the laws being passed to prevent them from going off the reservation, from utilizing land in certain ways,” said Risling Baldy.

Nearly 200 years later, these laws still matter deeply to Native communities in Northern California. “There’s actually a lot of people in California today that trace their land rights…back to the Gold Rush,” said Risling Baldy. “They have deeds from their families that are from 1849.”

California needs to reckon with its history

The extent to which California has reckoned with its history has so far largely been symbolic. While Gov. Gavin Newsom formally apologized in 2019, the executive action taken so far has been to establish a state-level Truth and Healing Council between tribal, state, and local leaders. For many Indigenous communities, the idea of truth and healing is complex. Many Native communities remain effectively disenfranchised from their own homelands, leaving many seeking restitution or reparations for basic access to the land and the resources on it. This lack of access also plays into structural issues that Indigenous peoples face across the country, including high rates of poverty, health care inequality, and intergenerational trauma. 

Almost all of the Indigenous experts I talked to noted that Indigenous fire practices grow out of larger ideas about a reciprocal relationship with the environment — a relationship that is innately tied to their health and wellbeing. In many ways, this philosophy is antithetical to the historical memory that is the American West. The idea that we might listen to the environs around us, and that the plants and animals might ask something of us, is conflicting at best, heretical at worst. 

So if California wants to incorporate Indigenous fire practices, then that means grappling with the history of its Indigenous people. Indigenous communities can also facilitate a conversation about how fire practices can be a part of a larger cultural shift that values Indigenous lands and peoples. 

For example, unrecognized tribes in Oakland have instituted a volunteer land tax for local residents and businesses to pay as a show of thanks for being hosted on their homelands, money that goes to replenishing the land with fruit and vegetation. Federally recognized tribes, meanwhile, can ask to have their land put into trust, which would essentially put it under tribal jurisdiction. As for California, the most actionable step the state can take is to facilitate a return of the land.

“If you want to support Indigenous knowledges, cultural burning, moving towards Indigenous sciences,” said Risling Baldy, “you also have to support land return; you also have to support our sovereignty over our lands.” 

Rory Taylor is a Ckiri/Chahta journalist covering Indigenous politics, policy, and culture. He currently lives on the territory of Ngāti Whātua Orākei in Tāmaki Makaurau, where he is pursuing a master’s degree in Indigenous studies at Te Whare Wānanga o Tāmaki Makaurau.

While Indian Country was responding to the growing number of coronavirus cases in its communities late Friday, the Trump administration was busy revoking the reservation status of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe in Massachusetts. By taking their 321 acres of land out of federal trust, the Interior Department’s order also removes the tribe’s ability to govern on its land. This process has been done only one other time since the Termination Policy in the 1950s. 

While reservation lands are often associated with Indian tribes’ unique ability to oversee casinos, maintaining trust land also allows them to provide critical services to their members. “Our land is sacred. It’s where our people receive health services. It’s where our children attend our language immersion school … Taking our land is a direct attack on our culture and our way of living,” Mashpee Wampanoag chair Cedric Cromwell said after the decision. 

The move by the Interior Department comes at a precarious time, as reservations shut down amid the Covid-19 pandemic. It could also signal what’s to come for other tribes. 

“The action by this administration in rendering such a decision is dishonorable and reprehensible on its face, but to do so when we are fighting a national pandemic is shameful,” President Kirk Francis of the nonprofit United South and Eastern Tribes’ Sovereignty Protection Fund said in a statement. “If there was any question before, it is clear that we are experiencing a crisis in Indian Country at this moment.” 

How the Mashpee Wampanoag lost their reservation status

The Interior Department’s order is based on an appeals court decision last month that said the Mashpee Wampanoag — whose land the pilgrims settled on — could not have land taken into trust in the first place. They were not under federal jurisdiction in 1934 when the Indian Reorganization Act, which created the concept of trust land, was signed. 

However, this appeals court decision was based on a controversial, and confusing, Supreme Court ruling, Carcieri v. Salazar in 2009. “[Carcieri] creates two classes of tribes in the United States, some that can have land in trust and some that cannot,” Kevin Washburn, dean of the University of Iowa College of Law, and citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, told Vox.

The Carcieri ruling left a number of big questions unanswered in Indian Country. While the Court created two classes of tribes, it did not provide an understanding of how to decide between the two. 

The Obama administration tried to end this uncertainty about which tribes can put land into trust by creating a framework to interpret the ruling. Notably, this framework is what allowed the Mashpee Wampanoag reservation to be placed into trust in 2015. 

But the Trump administration has not utilized these guidelines, reinterpreting that original decision more broadly. The Interior Department even went so far as to issue a new ruling in 2018 saying that the Bureau of Indian Affairs, under the Interior, did not consider Mashpee Wampanoag to be under federal jurisdiction in 1934, reversing the Obama-era policy. This has led the tribe to bring new litigation against the Interior in federal court, which is still pending. 

Under these new interpretations during the Trump administration, other tribes are worried about the possible ramifications for their own lands. “There are some tribes that would not meet the Carcieri requirements, if you view [them] broadly, so there are presumably some tribes that cannot have land taken into trust, except by Congress,” said Washburn. 

As Washburn acknowledges, tribes can have land taken into trust by acts of Congress. The Mashpee Wampanoag tribe has also pursued this route. Last May, the House of Representatives, in a bipartisan vote, approved two companion bills, H.R. 312, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act, and H.R. 375, amending legislation to “fix” the Carcieri decision. However, before a similar bill could be taken up in the Senate, President Trump told congressional Republicans not to vote in favor of H.R. 312. On its reservation land, Mashpee Wampanoag was developing a casino that was opposed by allies of Trump who were lobbying for nearby casinos in Rhode Island.

In all, this leaves Indian tribes in a tough position. Today, tribes struggle to maintain less than five percent of all lands in the United States before European contact. Yet, the two main ways to increase their land holdings, through Congress and the Interior Department, remain blocked by the Trump administration.

Massachusetts Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey said they will fight against the administration’s decision. “The Mashpee Wampanoag have a right to their ancestral homeland no matter what craven political games the Trump administration tries to play,” the Democratic senators said in a joint statement on Sunday. “Disestablishment of the Mashpee Wampanoag reservation would re-open a shameful and painful chapter of American history of systematically ripping apart tribal lands and breaking the federal government’s word. We will not allow the Mashpee Wampanoag to lose their homeland.”

For tribes, advocating for the return of their lands is key to their survival. “These are our lands, these are the lands of our ancestors,” Cromwell said, “and these will be the lands of our grandchildren.” 

Often, the stereotype of young Indigenous peoples is that we walk in two worlds: our Indigenous community and the America that surrounds us. But that notion implies we can somehow divorce ourselves, depending on the situation, from ourselves. 

This is especially difficult given that our families, our livelihoods, and our homes have been subject to the whims of those who settled here and built America without our consent. Our existence has, in fact, depended on toggling this duality. We are less strangers in a strange land and rather strangers on our own land. 

But in an era where questions of who is legitimate and who belongs in America are rampant, there is an opportunity to perhaps reconsider how we imagine America as a home for all of us. How do we build a future in which Indigenous peoples can be respected on all of the land that makes up this country? How do we imagine a future in which Indigenous communities are able to prosper on their own land?

Vox asked four young Indigenous people from across the country about how they think about their homes — and about the idea of home — in today’s America. Though their answers are broad, often incorporating challenges of race, geography, gender, and colonialism, they’re by no means exhaustive of the diversity of Indigenous experiences in this country. 

The question of home for many Indigenous peoples is a difficult one. To ask where is home is to tell stories of hard times, dark days, and struggles. But it is also to tell stories of beauty, of love, and of hope — to revitalize, remake, and reimagine an Indigenous future that encapsulates the complexities of healing in the face of literal and cultural genocide. And that’s a home worth building toward. 

Sam Schimmel (Kenaitze Indian/Siberian Yup’ik Eskimo)

At age 18, Sam Schimmel went directly from his family’s wooden cabin next to a marshy tundra outside Kenai, Alaska, to the manicured suburban landscapes of Stanford University in California. You could say it was a jolt to the system. “For the first couple of weeks when I woke up, I’d sit up and look outside to see if there were moose like back home,” Schimmel said. 

Schimmel, now a sophomore, no longer wakes up looking for animals outside, though he still notes the differences between his home and school life. “In the summer, I run a small ecotourism business and I took my friends [from Stanford] out fishing,” he said. “What was hard for me was seeing these people uncomfortable in the spaces where I find myself at home.”

There are also the contrasting ways in which education and work are viewed in Alaska versus at school. “Since coming [to Stanford] … it feels like there’s a trend in thinking that things like working with your hands are not good,” Schimmel says. But in Kenai, he added, there’s a saying: “When your hands are busy, your mind is learning.”

It’s not that he wasn’t used to cultural shifts. Growing up between two Alaskan villages, Kenai and Gambell, and the city of Seattle, Schimmel often felt the differences, big and small, between these markedly different places. There is the obvious — like Schimmel not being able to hunt moose in Seattle — as well as more day-to-day interactions, like how he gives directions. “[In Kenai] directions are given in stories,” he says, “rather than take a left on 35th, take a left on 65th, and go down Ravenna, which is the way it’s done in Seattle.”

These stories are emblematic of the thousands of years spent developing a culture, a way of life, in a particular place, Schimmel says. It’s also what makes the threat of climate change reverberate so deeply in the community. “You can’t just pick up and leave,” he says. “Your ancestors lived in that place and gave you the stories and the tools to live there. They’re buried there.” 

Schimmel isn’t the only young Indigenous person confronting how his home will become different with climate change. In Alaska and throughout the United States, Indigenous peoples are some of the first climate refugees. Even in places that are not yet uninhabitable, shifting weather patterns affect the migration of animals or the viability of certain crops, changing our homes forever. 

Three times in our conversation, Schimmel brings up the word solastalgia. “It’s the idea of a place that you’ve lived in, and live in, changing around you. The feeling of being out of place,” he says. It is for that reason Schimmel continues to fight on behalf of his home: “Kenai, it’s family.”

Joaquin Ray Gallegos (Jicarilla Apache Nation/Pueblo of Santa Ana)

For Joaquin Gallegos, 29, the question of where home is is relatively simple. It’s where his ancestors and his family are from — the Jicarilla Apache Nation and Pueblo of Santa Ana, in what is today northern New Mexico. This surprises me, as Gallegos was born in Denver, raised across New Mexico, Colorado, and Montana, and now lives in Minnesota. “I think there can be a chasm of belonging to a place [where] you may not have been born,” he tells me.

Working as a legislative attorney for the Non-Removable Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe in east-central Minnesota can make it difficult for Gallegos to get back home, yet he makes the journey every few months. “Advancing Indian needs and priorities can be energy-depleting, but going home is the antidote because seeing the places and people I work to help secure is recharging,” he says.

Gallegos’s story is not unique in this regard. Today, nearly seven in 10 American Indian/Alaska Native peoples live in metropolitan areas. For many — like Gallegos’s immediate family — the decision to move around was primarily economic, in search of some level of financial security. But Gallegos mentions that historically, his family’s move away from home was a result of American Indian Urban Relocation, a federal government-sponsored program to remove Indigenous peoples from their homelands and terminate their tribal status between roughly 1950 and 1980. 

Yet Gallegos considers himself lucky. “My Indian tribes are unique because their current reservations are within their original territories,” he says. “Since both tribes were forcibly confined compared to relocated, our historical homes were not all lost.” 

At the same time, Gallegos is quick to note that this does not mean going home has always been easy. “Today’s systemic wealth depletion, substance abuse, and environmental distress are forms of violence that come from colonialism,” he says. 

For all of these challenges, home will always be home. It’s where we can be our best, in a natural environment and in a community that humanizes us. “[At home,] I realize my full potential because I see resilience and power to achieve against the odds,” Gallegos says. “It’s a religious experience to grow in the natural spaces that we have protected since time immemorial.” 

Amber Richardson (Haliwa-Saponi)

Amber Richardson, 29, is from Hollister, North Carolina — a small, rural, close-knit community of primarily Haliwa-Saponi peoples. In talking to her, it becomes clear that she loves her home. It’s also clear that its history — as well as the history of Indigenous people living in the South — are complex. “We’re a collection of Native peoples who settled in the same place, and out of survival … all figured out how to make it work,” she says.

Today, Richardson lives in Washington, DC, where she works as a communications strategist. Though she notes that her upbringing was primarily based on kinship ties, her experiences since leaving Hollister have left scars around her Indigenous identity. “Phenotypically, I’m often told that I don’t look like someone’s stereotypical idea of what a Native person looks like,” she says.

There’s also the fact that although Haliwa-Saponi have existed in what is now North Carolina since time immemorial, they lack federal recognition, a process by which certain Indigenous communities are legitimized in the eyes of the U.S. government. This weighed heavily on Richardson when she moved to DC after college, and other Indigenous people would question her about it. “I grew up with such a rich, vibrant Native community that I belong to … and then to have someone say, ‘Oh, well, are you recognized?’ … By who? By my people? Yes!” she says.

Indigenous communities in the American South are often attacked from both sides — facing questions of legitimacy from Indigenous peoples in other parts of the country, all the while pushing back against typical settler colonial infringements upon their sovereignty. “This [legacy] is a consequence of something that was never set up to support us,” she says. “It’s a consequence of something that was meant to cause infighting and cause us to crumble.” 

Even with the long tail of colonialism, Richardson ultimately tells a story of survivance — for her and for her people. “We’re trying to tell a story of what it means to establish this distinct Native identity in the midst of all of this, and grappling with not how to right a wrong, but how we move forward today,” she says. 

Kacey Qunmiġu Hopson (Utqiaġvik/Wainwright Inupiaq)

Kacey Qunmiġu Hopson, 25, says that to ask about home is to ask two different questions: Where do you live, and where are you from? “The North Slope of Alaska is my homeland, but I make my home in Anchorage,” she says. “It’s where I feel most connected to community right now.” 

For Hopson, this duality is about building a home in a current place while also reconnecting to an ancestral community. In Anchorage, where only 8% of the population is American Indian/Alaska Native, she grew up without many role models who looked like her. “That was a real absence in my life,” she says. “All I really saw was the pain and trauma in my own family.” 

Witnessing, carrying, and surviving generations of abuse is common for young Indigenous peoples across the world, and Alaska Native peoples in particular. Many Alaska Native children were not only sent to boarding schools where physical and sexual abuse was rampant, but Alaska Native communities also bore the brunt of the Catholic Church’s neglect in sending serial sexual abusers to be priests in Alaska. 

“[Safety], with regards to home, is definitely a challenge,” Qunmiġu Hopson says.

When we talk about missing and murdered Indigenous women in Alaska, she points to a part of the conversation that’s often overlooked: “The roots of a lot of this violence against Indigenous women and communities, the discourse doesn’t seem to acknowledge that this is the legacy of colonization.”

Hopson is hopeful she can provide a better future for Indigenous generations to come through her current work as an Indigenous knowledge advocate at First Alaskans Institute in Anchorage. There, she advocates for Alaska Native ways of life and self-determination by hosting dialogues on racial equity throughout the state, as well as educating government institutions on Indigenous sovereignty. “I want our people to know who they are and love who they are,” she says. “And that entails our systems reckoning with the history of colonization.” 

Rory Taylor is a Ckiri/Chahta journalist covering Indigenous politics, policy, and the intersection of race, culture, and society in America. Originally from the Los Angeles area, he currently lives on the territory of Ngāti Whātua Orākei in Tāmaki Makaurau and is pursuing a master’s degree in Indigenous studies at Te Whare Wānanga o Tāmaki Makaurau.

“‘We the people’ has never meant ‘all the people.’”

These were words of independent presidential candidate and Navajo Nation member Mark Charles as he spoke, to great excitement, at the first presidential forum dedicated to Native American issues in over a decade.

In August, hundreds of Indigenous peoples gathered in Sioux City, Iowa, for the two-day Frank LaMere Presidential Forum. People had traveled from as far as Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico to Wampanoag communities in Massachusetts, eager for a chance to be heard. Aside from Charles, eight Democrats, including frontrunners Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, were in attendance. The forum marked the rare presidential cycle where candidates are simply acknowledging that Native people exist. 

Questions covered a lot of ground: climate change, the 2020 census, the consultation of Indigenous nations on federal decisions, and the Indian Child Welfare Act, a 1978 law meant to reverse the disproportionately high number of Indigenous children removed from their homes by government agencies. Candidates’ plans were discussed as well: Warren’s includes massive increases in spending to help bolster Indian Country; Julián Castro’s notes the need to develop cultural competency in federal relationships, while also giving tribes enhanced self-determination.

But for all these current issues, historical grievances were aired, too. So one has to ask: What long-unfulfilled promises to Indigenous peoples can presidential candidates actually make good on? Where do we go from here?

There is no easy answer as to how to improve the over-400-year relationship between Indigenous peoples and the United States. In part, because Indian Country is so diverse. There are more than 5.2 million American Indian and Alaska Native people who live in America and 573 federally recognized Indian nations across the country, each with distinctive histories of colonization since European contact. Then there are state-recognized nations, unrecognized nations, and Indigenous communities living in the diaspora, too. 

While people in a single community will provide a range of perspectives — much less in all 573 federally recognized tribes — more often than not, a version of one answer always comes up about what the US needs to do: honor the treaties.

The US government signed 370 treaties with numerous Indigenous nations from 1778 to 1871. While the language in the treaties is diverse, there are often certain common features of the pacts: a guarantee of peace, a definition of land boundaries, preservation of hunting and fishing rights, and provisions for protection against domestic and foreign enemies. 

But these pacts were signed across significantly different periods of history, with incredibly divergent views of what Indigenous nations were. That’s why listening to what Native peoples are actually asking for is so important.

So while just about every candidate at the LaMere Forum said they would honor the treaties or the “Supreme Law” of the United States, what does that actually mean as far as tangible results?

We asked six Indigenous academics, community leaders, and activists what would it look like if the US were to fulfill their trust and treaty responsibilities.

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy, Hoopa Valley Tribe/Yurok/Karuk, assistant professor and department chair of Native American studies at Humboldt State University: 

Here in California, we actually do not have treaties. Well, we do have treaties, but those treaties were not ratified. There were 18 in total that were made with California Indians in the 1800s, but at the time, Congress decided not to ratify them and then put them under an injunction of secrecy. 

Our people had agreed to these treaties in the hopes of finding reprieve from the genocide that was being perpetrated against us by the California government and citizens. Some of my own family members signed these treaties, and later they would tell stories about how hard-fought these negotiations were and how they struggled to reconcile what they had to compromise in order to protect future generations and to protect our lands and more-than-human relatives. When tribes would come to the table to negotiate treaties, they weren’t thinking only about the present, they were thinking about many generations into the future. Their negotiations were about relationship, responsibility, respect, and reciprocity.

Not every tribe in California was able to renegotiate or become recognized after the treaties were rejected. Some tribes who have signed treaties are now “unrecognized” tribes. In 2014, the National Museum of the American Indian featured one of the unratified California Treaties in their exhibits. A colleague visited this exhibit when it opened so she could view this treaty which was signed by some of her relatives. She told me that as she stood before the document, she cried silently to herself. To this day, the federal government does not recognize her people as living California Indians. 

Treaties are foundational agreements the United States made with Native nations. Nobody fooled the US into entering into treaties, nobody tricked Benjamin Franklin (or whatever founding father) into building a nation that also had many other nations within it. This is the nation they built; these are the agreements they made. If we honor the Constitution, we have to honor the treaties. If we are truly going to honor the treaties, we have to center Indigenous histories, support self-determination, and build decolonized futures by giving back stolen land. This has happened all over the world, and it has even happened here in California. The return of stolen land is how we truly honor the trust responsibility. 

Matthew Fletcher, Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians/Potawatomi descendant, director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University College of Law: 

Our understanding of the federal government’s duties to Indians and Indian tribes could be on the verge of changing dramatically. But right now, the federal government fails horrifically at the fulfillment of its duties — just look at Indian country’s poverty, crime rates, suicide rates, and poor health indicators.

The original understanding of the federal-tribal relationship was that the United States agreed to undertake a duty of protection to Indians and tribes. This means that the tribes gave up much of their exterior sovereignty, but they were to retain all the internal governmental powers they possess, like the power to make laws and enforce them within the tribe’s territory. 

In many treaties, the federal government agreed to guarantee education, health care, housing, and other services to Indian tribes. The United States also agreed to manage and protect Indian tribes’ resources, such as lands and timber. 

However, the duty of protection mutated politically into a guardian-ward relationship after a Supreme Court decision in 1831. It would also be the premise for the federal government to label Indian people legally incompetent. This way of thinking reached an apex in the 1880s when Congress federalized jurisdiction in Indian Country, broke up reservations into individual allotments, and made boarding school education mandatory. In the latter half of the 20th century, Congress restored and implemented a modern understanding of the duty of protection, which we call self-determination. 

What remains are two kinds of trust duties. The first kind is an actual trust, in which the United States holds and manages Indian and tribes’ assets in a trust. The second kind is referred to by the Supreme Court, inaccurately, as the general trust relationship, a kind of moral obligation to assist tribal interests. Labeling the duty as a moral obligation effectively renders the federal government’s obligations voluntary and unenforceable.

The general trust relationship does have teeth, however. If Congress decides to provide services to Indians or tribes, this modern version of the duty of protection is a source of legal authority for Congress to do so.

But what if Congress chooses not to act? Or the president acts in opposition to tribal interests, seemingly contrary to the duty of protection? Indian nations gave up a lot in exchange for the duty of protection — lands, resources, sovereign powers — and to label the federal government’s duties merely voluntary is atrocious.

This could change dramatically, as I mentioned above. Justice Gorsuch stated in a recent Supreme Court case that he takes very seriously the exchange between sovereigns memorialized in Indian treaties. To paraphrase, he wrote that tribes didn’t give up that much for nothing: Tribes are entitled to something.

Also, and this is not intended to be an endorsement of Elizabeth Warren, if her Indian affairs legislative platform comes to fruition and federal services to Indian country becomes fully funded, that would be a massive step toward the fulfillment of the trust responsibility. 

Karen Diver, Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, director of Business Development of Native American Initiatives at the University of Arizona:        

First and foremost, fulfilling the treaties means recognizing that tribal nations are political entities and respecting the right to self-govern. To support that, the federal government needs to fully fund its obligations that were pre-paid by tribes with land.

For example, while there are many issues that contribute to negative health indicators in Indian Country, the chronic lack of funding for the Indian Health Service only makes matters worse. It is time for mandatory, full funding of the Indian Health Service, which is responsible for providing federal health services to Native peoples in the US, as a start toward improving health care in Indian Country.

Another prime example comes from housing services. The Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act, which simplified the housing assistance process for Indian nations, expired in 2013. While small amounts continue to be funded, the act, as a step toward recognizing the homelessness crisis in Indian Country, needs to be reauthorized. 

These obligations also extend not just to the amount of funding authorized but also respecting the self-governance that tribal nations have in relation to that funding. In plain terms, this means not just funding programs in Indian Country but allowing tribal nations to manage those funds in a manner they see fit.

This respect for self-governance also needs to extend to criminal jurisdiction in Indian Country. At the current moment, the Violence Against Women Act and its provisions to allow for prosecution of non-Indians who commit domestic violence on tribal members, expired last year.

The previous examples are just a few small steps toward honoring the treaty obligations of the US, but they are meaningful. They are symbols and recognition that there were fully autonomous self-governing peoples here long before the creation of this country. 

DeLesslin George-Warren, citizen of Catawba Nation, consultant for Catawba Nation: 

For me, honoring the treaties means truly honoring the fishing, hunting, and harvesting rights guaranteed in most treaties. As many tribes entered into agreements with the Crown and later the US, we were specific in reserving our right to fish, hunt, and harvest as we always have on our lands. And yet tribal members are regularly fined for exercising these rights, and the US and corporations continue to build infrastructure that disrupts our ability to practice our traditional food systems. 

For the most part, the federal government and corporations replaced a truly treaty-based negotiation process with a weak and unenforceable “consultation” practice, which doesn’t require much more than asking Indigenous peoples what they think on a particular project. In many cases, as it relates to our sacred sites and treaty rights, even if there is staunch opposition, projects move forward, rendering consultation nothing more than a notification process. Our treaties don’t guarantee consultations that will be ignored. 

Treaties guarantee our right to traditional plants, animals, lands, air, and waterways. Projects that inhibit those rights are a violation of our treaties and by extension the Constitution of the United States. 

Tara Houska, Couchiching First Nation, tribal attorney

To begin a chapter of US history that does not find its foundation in annually broken treaties, Congress must do its duty to uphold the law.

Realizing the trust responsibility is another matter. To me, it means recognizing and honoring sovereign Native nations as such: independent nations with full authority over criminal, civil, and self-governance matters. We must be able to protect our own people, enforce tribal laws, develop economically, and ensure healthy lands and waters to sustain our communities. 

The world is in flux, our shared survival is on the line. Native peoples hold 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity. We are the holders of the sacred. We are the canary in the mine of humanity. 

Liz Medicine Crow, Haida/Tlingit, president and CEO of First Alaskans Institute: 

It is critical to understand that the basic binding relationship between tribes and the US, and its state and territorial governments, is a political one, as between tribal nations. In essence, what it also means is that instead of trying to undo it, get out of it, or change it in a way that breaks it down, the US government must actually embrace it and do the most it can to uphold these obligations in a respectful government-to-government relationship — working with the tribes, not against them.  

And on a personal level, to be a patriot and a citizen of the US means to back up the commitments of this country by upholding and honoring these in-perpetuity obligations to the Indigenous peoples of these lands. Teach it in pre-K-12th grade schools, universities, technical, and trade programs. Make it a basic tenet of your community engagement and best business practices to establish good relationships with local and nearby tribes and tribal citizens. Perform meaningful land acknowledgments at your gatherings and conferences. Educate yourself, your families, and your faith and community organizations about these American responsibilities.

These relationships are a primary obligation of the United States’ nationhood. As a country founded on theft of Indigenous lands and lives and on the theft of black labor and lives through slavery, it means that this country must live up to its own ideals of itself and its legally binding promises, obligations, and commitments to the fullest extent. It means the US has to be honorable; and where it has not been, it must work to rectify this.   

Rory Taylor is a Ckiri/Chahta journalist covering Indigenous politics, policy, and the intersection of race, culture, and society in America. Originally from the Los Angeles area, he currently lives on the territory of Ngāti Whātua Orākei in Tāmaki Makaurau and is pursuing a Masters of Indigenous Studies at Te Whare Wānanga o Tāmaki Makaurau.