What is Native Nation Building?

Nation building refers to efforts Native nations make to increase their capacities for self-rule and for self-determined, sustainable community and economic development.

Nation building involves building institutions of self-government that are culturally appropriate to the nation and that are effective in addressing the nation’s challenges. It involves developing the nation's capacity to make timely, strategically informed decisions about its affairs and to implement those decisions. It involves a comprehensive effort to rebuild societies that work.

In other words, a nation-building approach understands that tribes are not merely interest groups, but governing nations confronting classic problems of human societies.

Native nations are governing:

• with sound financial management when administering programs on behalf of other governments,while achieving their own objectives in interaction with those governments;
• with environmental and natural resource management while fulfilling their unique responsibilities as stewards of ancestral lands and waters;
• with the preservation of language and traditions while balancing change with cultural continuity;
• with inventing programs to address particular social, economic, and environmental problems while becoming consistent and effective problem-solvers;
• by finding and training leaders anddeciding how to govern and how to implement sovereign, capable, and culturally appropriate systems of governance;
• by developing vigorous reservation economies and raising living standards while building successful societies; and
• by improving community life and preserving their distinctive nationhood.

These challenges are foundational, and they require a foundational response. As Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga says, the task is “to rebuild our nations.”

Five Core Principles of Native Nation Rebuilding

The Native Nations Institute’s understanding of Indigenous nation building emerges from 30 years of research by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development (founded in 1986) and NNI (founded in 2001). Our research efforts have sought to understand the conditions under which sustained development can be successful in Indigenous nations. The results indicate that five elements are particularly important:

• Sovereignty. Native nations that have been willing and able to assert self-governing power have significantly increased their chances of sustainable economic development.
• Capable governing institutions. The chances of sustainable development rise as Indigenous nations put in place effective, non-politicized dispute-resolution mechanisms and build capable bureaucracies.
• Cultural match. Institutions that build and innovate upon Indigenous conceptions of authority fare better than those whose form departs from such conceptions.
• A strategic orientation. Successful Native nations tend to approach development not as a quick fix for poverty but as a means of building a society that works.
• Leadership. In successful Indian nations, there is typically a group of individuals who recognize the need for fundamental change in the way things are done and can bring the community along with them in building that future.

Indigenous nations are engaging in Native nation building as they work to embrace and apply these principles.