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MONDAY, JULY 15, 2002

"To most Americans, nation building seems part of our past. Yet today, American Indian nations are rewriting constitutions, establishing their own courts, hiring their own police, running everything from sewage systems to schools, delivering health care, collecting taxes, regulating businesses, negotiating intergovernmental arrangements with city, county, state and federal counterparts and managing growing financial portfolios. They are building institutions and delivering the services expected of any successful government.

For more than a century, institutions of tribal governance were toothless and alien, as the U.S. government made the decisions in Indian Country and imposed its ideas of how tribes should be governed. Now, as Indian nations struggle for independence in the courts and Congress, genuine self-rule and economic self-sufficiency are changing that. . ."

Get the Story:
Lessons for the Middle East: Indians Take Control (Stephen Cornell and Joseph P. Kalt. Newsday 7/14)

Relevant Links:
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development - http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/hpaied