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Article Excerpt
From 1980 to the present, most American Indian tribes exercising the Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975 have invested federal and other funds to develop their governing institutions and economies on the assumption that traditional systems of governance are obstacles to business investment and, therefore, to development. Contrary to this pattern, the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico retained theocratic and nonelected forms of governance recognized by Spanish rulers and remained in their ancestral domain. This article considers lessons learned by the Zia Pueblo and Pueblo de Cochiti from 1980 to 2005 in their efforts to make new development support, rather than compete with, customary values and institutions. It argues that these Pueblo Indian tribes demonstrate the importance of traditional governance institutions and tribal members who can strategically engage both indigenous knowledge and outside expertise to plan development that supports cultural integrity. KEYWORDS: development, indigenous knowledge, Pueblo Indians, indigenous governance.
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For indigenous peoples, "development" can be an uneasy marriage of capitalism and culture. American Indians are indigenous peoples of the mainland United States. (1) During the past thirty years, the United States government reversed policies of extinction, termination, and assimilation to affirm the status of American Indian tribes as domestic dependent nations with internal authority to govern their people and manage their resources and land. (2) A survey of tribal economic-development initiatives found that successful tribes were those that used sovereignty to apply cultural standards to choose among development strategies, but there are few descriptions of how indigenous peoples use their political institutions to create and sustain culturally appropriate development strategies. (3)
Based on participatory research, this article describes how two small Indian Pueblo tribes in New Mexico worked through traditional and modern institutions to make and sustain development decisions between 1980 and 2005. One Pueblo Indian tribe, Pueblo de Cochiti, overcame the impact of coerced development, while the other, Zia Pueblo, comprehensively planned development to forge development strategies that would protect cultural integrity. After describing the methodology and cases, the article concludes with implications for planning and development theory and its application by indigenous communities, challenging the persistent theoretical binaries between tradition and development and between comprehensive/rational and communicative or radical planning.
Indigenous Peoples and Development Planning
Comprising approximately 4 percent of the world's population, indigenous peoples are not only ethnic minorities and aboriginal descendents of the original inhabitants of a territory, they are self-defined groups that want to maintain distinct political, economic, social, and legal systems--to maintain identities within the nation-state while also claiming rights as citizens within those states. (4) The first United Nations Decade of Indigenous Peoples (1995-2004) and the draft declaration of indigenous rights recognized that indigenous peoples are determined to continue their existence as groups, transmit and continue their cultures and political and legal institutions, and preserve their territory on which identity depends. (5) In making international claims to sovereignty, indigenous people argue for collective rights and the possibility of ethnic federalism that would relate indigenous forms of government to the state. (6) For some tribes and indigenous communities, a primary goal of indigenous development is self-determination and autonomy within the framework of a wider state. (7) This goal of maintaining difference runs up against the state interest in uniformity and control of its subjects and its resources for the larger public good. (8)
The application of planning and development theory presents a special challenge for indigenous peoples. Former modernist development planning marginalized cultural groups, fostered the idea of underdevelopment in order to justify intervention, assumed that the rational application of economics and other social sciences served a unitary public interest, and overlooked the practical value of indigenous knowledge to sustained development. (9) Scott's critique of high modernism showed how state-sponsored plans that applied uniform standards and ignored local and indigenous place-based knowledge destroyed the very institutions necessary to sustain local culture and development. (10)
In response to critiques, planning theory has largely replaced rational, comprehensive, and state-run planning with a focus on communicative/collaborative planning and radical planning. (11) Communicative/collaborative approaches seek local and culturally based knowledge and consensus through dialogue or social learning, while radical planning emphasizes social mobilization in opposition to state bureaucracies and modernist forms of knowledge. (12) Inspired by Habermas's focus on civic dialogue as the basis of knowledge for planning, communicative and collaborative planning theorists suggest that culturally based worldviews are best included in plans when the rational/comprehensive process is replaced with participatory planning that involves all stakeholders in developing a consensus. (13) The planner can facilitate dialogue that includes stories, symbols, "other ways of knowing." (14) Development theory and practice followed a similar trajectory from centrally planned development toward participatory development with proscriptions for decentralized and democratic governance involving civil society. (15)
Critics of participatory approaches argue that the focus on dialogue and process ignores power, institutions, and the limited ability of indigenous and minority peoples to stake a claim on their interests. (16) Another unstated problem is that culture is framed only as epistemology and is therefore interpreted as a set of perspectives, stories, or values that can be shared in the planning process without attention to the role of social and cultural institutions in transmitting, retaining, and applying indigenous knowledge. Although social learning approaches to planning addressed some of the cultural hubris of 1960s modernization theory, which assumed traditional societies must follow a linear and linked psychological, social, and economic process of development, Friedmann claims that only radical planning can challenge the power structures and epistemologies of rational planning. (17) Friedmann's radical planning and alternative development, however, assume a universal political solution to asserting minority knowledge and goals--civic society and democratic institutions that empower households. (18) Lane and Hibbard recently applied the radical-planning lens to indigenous cases of negotiated natural-resource management because these communities identified and implemented strategies to confront institutionalized oppression. (19) Rather than describing how these communities applied their political systems to planning, however, they assumed a participatory internal process while focusing on the importance of state-recognized rights to empowerment. Identifying this process as radical planning may obscure more than it reveals.
Competing planning and development theories do not recognize the legitimacy, diversity, and potential of traditional indigenous political institutions to transform their political economies. The development stories of two New Mexico Indian pueblos demonstrate other possibilities. Marginalized and minority/indigenous populations also contribute methods of comprehensive planning--combining modern and traditional institutions and forms of knowledge to rationally choose development strategies that support cultural goals.
I follow Escobar's recommendation for local ethnographies that document "the mechanisms by which local cultural knowledge is appropriated by larger forces and the ways in which local innovations and gains can be preserved as part of local and cultural power." (20) Although Escobar critiqued international development planning for prejudicing disciplinary and professional knowledge over cultural practices and social functions of traditional institutions, he recognized the creative ability of traditional communities to adopt innovation and apply cultural power within the global mechanisms of unequal exchange and resource extraction. He defined development as a "whole life project ... with space for broader individual and collective endeavors, culturally defined." (21) This article narrates how Pueblo de Cochiti and Zia Pueblo, two small Pueblo Indian tribes of northern New Mexico, defined, planned, and directed development toward their goals of cultural survival.
Research During Development
Participatory and Applied Research
The following case studies of Zia Pueblo and Pueblo de Cochiti development are based on participatory research and observation from 1982 through 1988, while the author was employed as social and economic development strategies director by the Five Sandoval Indian Pueblos, Inc. (FSIP) and as a consultant to Pueblo de Cochiti. FSIP is a nongovernmental consortium governed by a tribally appointed board. Observation continued while the author was subsequently employed with the New Mexico Office of Indian Affairs under the direction of one of the key informants and with the Seventh Generation Fund's economic development program. Case studies are the result of participant observation and participatory research with key informants, including Peter Pino, Richard Pecos, and Regis Pecos, who still continue to implement tribal plans in their capacities as tribal administrators and officials. (22) The author conducted follow-up interviews with tribal staff, federal agency partners, and others through 2005.
Context
As two of the 562 federally recognized Indian tribes in the United States, Pueblo de Cochiti and Zia Pueblo tribal governments have self-governing authority to manage their own natural resources under the trust protection of the United States. Due to the federal-trust obligation, state and local governments cannot encumber or control American Indian land and water. (23) As the only Native American and indigenous peoples on the continent to expel European colonizers successfully, in the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, the Pueblo Indian tribes of the Rio Grande, New Mexico, have long guarded their lifeways. (24)
In the 1980s, federal programs expressed Reagan administration policies (1981-1988) to decentralize governance and reduce local and Indian dependence on federal funds. The intent was for tribal governments to become economically self-sufficient "by creating a more favorable environment for the development of healthy reservation economies" by the private sector. (25) The 1984 Presidential Commission on Reservation Economies recommended that tribal and federal governments remove obstacles to private investment and entrepreneurship on Indian reservations--the biggest obstacles being identified as antiquated tribal government structures. (26) Federal programs supported the formation of community-development corporations (CDCs) and other strategies that would encourage and reduce the risk for entrepreneurship and private investment by separating business management from tribal-government politics. (27)
CDCs are legally incorporated institutions governed by a board that may collect resources from the private sector, foundations, government agencies, and institutions and support physical, social, and economic projects. (28) They were originally supported by the Ford Foundation to generate community development and combat poverty. Through FSIP, Zia Pueblo participated in a national demonstration program to transfer CDCs to rural communities, while Pueblo de Cochiti was required to form a CDC as a condition for regaining control of a development lease on tribal lands.
Other aspects of these cases have been initially discussed in two publications. (29) This article considers the role of indigenous political institutions in planning and development theory and practice. Although this narrative emphasizes the role of nonelected tribal councils and appointed officials, they are not final authorities on matters of greatest import. The term elders is used to refer to unspecified higher authorities. (30)
Small Pueblos with Long Traditions
According to both oral history and archaeological studies, the Pueblo of Zia has occupied the same site for more than one thousand years, since the Keresan-speaking Pueblo people migrated from Chaco Canyon, a world-renowned ancient city and abandoned center of Anasazi culture. (31) Zia Pueblo is located approximately forty miles to the northwest of Albuquerque, via Bernalillo, one of the oldest Spanish/Mexican settlements in New Mexico. After leaving the highway development of Bernalillo and adjacent Santa Ana Pueblo, one...
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