In the weeks leading up to the shutdown, tribal nations campaigned hard — though with mixed results — to ensure that the federal government continued to fulfill its treaty obligations.
This article was originally published in High Country News.
And they were able to prevent the shutdown’s worst impacts on Indigenous communities, largely due to tribal self-determination policies that have created a $47 billion gaming industry and an accompanying reserve of economic and political capital.
“We may disagree on tactics, we can find common ground on the safety of health, and economic opportunity,” said Mark Macarro, president of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), before the shutdown. “And those aren’t partisan goals; those are goals that unite us as people. We saw commitment not only from long-standing champions, but from new ones.”
