"Tribal Enterprise and the Fate of Public Investment in the Late Twentieth Century United States"

This paper draws on Cherokee Nation tribal archives and oral histories with tribal members to analyze debates over the meaning of tribal enterprises in the United States during the 1980s. US historians have analyzed how federal, state, and local governments increasingly delegated responsibility for economic development to private firms during the late twentieth century. In contrast, since the early 1970s, tribal governments have taken a different approach, bringing once-private economic activity into public purview. Tribal enterprises, a distinct form of state-owned enterprise (SOE), have become one of the distinguishing features of tribal governments. During the early 1980s, a Reagan Presidential Commission recommended the overhaul of reservation economic development strategies, including the privatization of tribal enterprises. In response, tribal leaders insisted that businesses needed to be accountable to tribal governments. From their perspective, tribal ownership ensured that businesses met broader social development goals. Meanwhile, tribal employees found new sources of employment in these firms, although their conditions of work were not always perfect. The dual citizen-employee relationship shaped the way in which Native workers in tribal enterprises addressed common shop floor concerns. While their perspectives sometimes differed, tribal officials and workers in tribal enterprises largely agreed that economic matters could not be neatly separated from politics. As capital flight ravaged communities across the United States, public ownership allowed tribal enterprises to put social development goals above profit maximization and secure capital investment in place.