A few years ago I sat in on a tribal economic development forum in one of the western states. Not a tribal member, just an invited guest.
One of the issues one of the tribes had was: they don't have water rights to the water that supplies one of their towns. The water comes from their land, but they're required by a 1920s-era local ordinance to sell it to a neighboring town, that then sells it back to them. They want that local ordinance removed, so they aren't paying the neighboring town for, literally, their own water.
The neighboring town isn't filtering it, isn't processing it, it's just enjoying the largesse of some local politician nearly a hundred years ago, writing a law that rips off the tribe.
They just want the ordinance removed. They just want to have their water at extraction cost.
This was one 15-minute section in a day-long conference. This was the "rapid fire" petitions to representatives from state government.
Next section: In a city somewhere else in the state, someone's building a police station. The contract is out for public bid, but the contracting language said "Bidders must reside in our county, with zip codes xxxx, yyyy, zzzz excluded from bidding." The excluded zip codes corresponded exactly to where the reservation land lay.
The tribe was there, asking for the contracting language to be changed, so that they could merely submit a bid for one of their construction companies -- not that they wanted any special treatment, but they literally just wanted to be treated like any other zip code in the county.
That was another 15 minute section in the rapid-fire requests.
All day long like that.
"Tribes historically had little or no control over their energy resources. Royalties were set by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but the agency consistently undervalued Indian resources. A federal commission concluded in 1977 that leases negotiated on behalf of Indians were 'among the poorest agreements ever made.'
Unfortunately, it hasn’t gotten much better. A recent class action suit alleged that the government mismanaged billions of dollars in Indian assets. The case settled in 2009 for $3.4 billion—far less than what was lost by the feds."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/03/13/5-ways-the-...
https://www.npr.org/2011/10/25/141672992/native-foster-care-...
https://theintercept.com/2019/06/17/indian-child-welfare-act...
What is it that we are doing now (other than inflammatory sport team names)? I'm pretty naive on this topic, so I don't mean this as an attack, but as a legitimate question.