Due to access to largely unchecked power and millions of dollars in federal aid, corruption among tribal governments is almost inevitable — most charges never develop into a fully fledged prosecution against the guilty party. A muffling effect is commonplace among communities, where judges daring enough to rule against prominent tribal council members are fired from their post shortly after. This fundamental lack of transparency and accountability has left Indian people without a means to regain their individual autonomy; at its core, native government structures have been erected by outsiders looking to settle the federal government's general concerns and needs.
Representations of native populations must always be a prior question since discussions always implicate the positions from where we speak, where the one who speaks and the subject are never on level ground. This kind of discourse reproduces the same power structures we seek to critique, which begs the question of why we permit control over marginalized groups by allowing for their exclusion from the discussion table. The initial discussion about sovereign powers was not dictated by natives themselves, but instead by foreign governments. What is generally considered a period of self-actualization ironically forms the basis of the exclusion of tribal governments from political processes; positioning them so that they are poised to take the fall for whatever issues fall onto the federal government's plate.
Natives are continually exploited to ensure a steady stream of domestic uranium supply, especially since a wide gap already exists between wealthy, non-minority communities and minorities concerning issues of environmental degradation. In this context of this skewed dynamic, it becomes evident that policies that target Indian reservations as nuclear dump sites is an intentional, justifiable choice made by federal legislature, since they are understood already as the "other." When a permit is authorized for a hazardous waste site, the government is making a choice to select certain communities to be designated as the victims for any potential adverse effects. There may even be a larger lack of trust in corporations and their risk assessments, since opposition requires media coverage, capital, and political power, none of which are readily apparent in native communities.
Representations of native populations must always be a prior question since discussions always implicate the positions from where we speak, where the one who speaks and the subject are never on level ground. This kind of discourse reproduces the same power structures we seek to critique, which begs the question of why we permit control over marginalized groups by allowing for their exclusion from the discussion table. The initial discussion about sovereign powers was not dictated by natives themselves, but instead by foreign governments. What is generally considered a period of self-actualization ironically forms the basis of the exclusion of tribal governments from political processes; positioning them so that they are poised to take the fall for whatever issues fall onto the federal government's plate.
Natives are continually exploited to ensure a steady stream of domestic uranium supply, especially since a wide gap already exists between wealthy, non-minority communities and minorities concerning issues of environmental degradation. In this context of this skewed dynamic, it becomes evident that policies that target Indian reservations as nuclear dump sites is an intentional, justifiable choice made by federal legislature, since they are understood already as the "other." When a permit is authorized for a hazardous waste site, the government is making a choice to select certain communities to be designated as the victims for any potential adverse effects. There may even be a larger lack of trust in corporations and their risk assessments, since opposition requires media coverage, capital, and political power, none of which are readily apparent in native communities.