The Necessity of Native American Autonomy for Successful Partnerships

Native Americans today live within a legacy that is the result of complex historical relationships, intimately interwoven with issues of cultural identity and human development. Acquiring understanding and compassion from an examination of our common national history is a spiritual enterprise. Therefore, we must tread gently together on the Sacred Ground that is the wounded story of America and the First Peoples' struggle for life freely and wonderfully lived. World leaders from every nation are currently examining indigenous issues related to economic poverty. Recent international efforts indicate a growing commitment to promoting global development in regions with indigenous populations. Having some sense of how empowered culture frames indigenous issues globally can uncover the nature of the lens through which Native communities are viewed within the United States. Domestic national and local relationships with Native Americans could achieve greater mutual success by applying the lessons learned from the United Nations' research. However, in considering the current understanding of we must listen carefully for what constrains people and for what liberates them within the words and concepts that are used to shape us all. We must also listen for whose voice is telling the story of us; meaning and perspective shifts between tellers, as all sacred stories do. This story, as I will share it with you, begins with the new millennium. In the year 2000, the United Nations created eight international goals that the Episcopal Church knows and supports as the Millennium Development Goals. As a collaborative effort to alleviate poverty, hunger, illiteracy, and disease, the Millennium Development Goals established targets for achieving greater gender equality, environmental sustainability, and opportunities for mutually-enhancing global partnerships toward the development of a better world. The goals focus on countries within the Third World (or Developing World) including those in Eastern, Western, and Southern Asia, as well as in Sub-Saharan and North Africa. Within the goals, global partnerships are initiated by supportive efforts from First World countries, such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Despite recent global economic challenges, the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals Report 2009 indicates that there has been improvement in alleviating extreme poverty, predominantiy in Eastern and Southern Asia.1 In the development and successful execution of the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations looked to the World Bank for contextual research and economic guidance. In 1996, the World Bank articulated a vision for itself to become a knowledge bank as well as a monetary bank, mediating ideas in addition to finances. Because the highest rates of extreme poverty were associated with indigenous populations, the World Bank pursued international research and dialogue in order to learn the practices of indigenous communities in various areas of the Global South. As a result of their efforts, World Bank executives recognized the need for First World partners to approach Developing World indigenous communities not as recipients of knowledge, but as contributors and protagonists of their own development.2 World Bank researchers came to three general conclusions: (1) human development is an integrated holistic process of change, including economic and income growth; (2) essential social conditions (meeting basic needs first) are necessary for promoting human agency and autonomy; and (3) the sustainability of indigenous culture has a critical impact on the success or failure of vital economic change. In 1998, the President of the World Bank, James D. Wolfensohn, remarked: We start from the proposition that you cannot have development without a recognition of culture and of history. In a world that is becoming increasingly globalized, in a world where there are pressures for a culture homogeneity across all our countries, what is abundantly clear is that it is essential for us to nurture, to prize, to revere and to support the culture and the history of the countries in which we operate. …

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