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I never consider myself a citizen of the United States or an American citizen. Never.
I know American people. They're great people. You know, many, many friends of the American people.
When you talk about American government, that's something else again.
I believe that we will endure any problem, and I believe that we will always be here.
Welcome to America. The other America, that is. Inhabited by the people, as they call themselves early on,
later known as American Indians, a legacy from Columbus. Isn't it ironic that at the time of the Columbus voyages,
there was no America, and there were no American Indians. Those names came later.
Even the New World, so called, is a kind of misnomer.
I'm Scott Mamadé. I'm a Kiowa, and my people have lived here for thousands and thousands of years.
The stories I will tell you, stories not only of yesterday but of today, are the stories of nations within the United States.
These nations are recognized as sovereigns by the federal government, which negotiated treaties with them, just as with nations of Europe.
I'd like to tell you three stories about the peoples of three of these nations.
One is about the Navajo. One is about the Lummi.
And the first story I'd like to tell you is about the people of the hills, the Anandaga, who live in New York State.
The Anandaga Nation, somewhat larger than Monaco, smaller than Liechtenstein, around 1200 people, six miles south of the city of Syracuse, New York.
It's the capital of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois Grand Council meets here.
The Anandaga are the keepers of the central fire.
The trappings that distinguish a foreign nation may be missing. No passing through customs, no border guards.
But this small Indian nation vigorously defends its sovereign status, its separateness from the large nation that surrounds it.
We're still here in New York, in this small piece of land, battling to maintain ourselves.
But they were unable to move us. We did not move. We were like a rock that a river went around, and we're still here.
There are 14 hereditary chiefs among the Anandaga.
There are the clan mothers who nominate them for a lifetime, but who can depose the chief who strays from his duty.
There is no police force here, no Bureau of Indian Affairs with federal grants.
The Anandaga travel on their own, not United States passports. These are now recognized by other nations of the world.
It's our stamp.
Clan mother Audrey Shenandoah issues the Anandaga passports.
Well, this is just another point in proving our sovereignty as a nation of people, a separate nation of people.
I never consider myself a citizen of the United States or an American citizen. Never.
We had three women who were going to Cairo. They had their American passports.
And I said, well, what do you want this for if you're going as an American citizen?
She said, well, you know, the Americans aren't in very good graces over there.
So she said, if we get into trouble or for a hijack or anything, we'll use our Haudenosaunee passport.
So, you know, that wasn't really any reason for using our passport.
I was going to tell them, no, I'm not going to give you one. But it's not our way to reject our people.
Chief Oren Lyons defines sovereignty in simple, direct terms.
So sovereignty can mean all kinds of things. But what it means fundamentally is the ability for a nation,
people to determine for themselves what their life and what their lifestyle is going to be.
So sovereignty is quite simple. It's the act thereof.
Ray Elm is a Christian. He calls himself progressive, not a traditional.
Sovereignty is a big word. It raises hell with some nations and it's good for other nations.
Let me put it that way. Name one nation in the world that doesn't have to go and shake Uncle Sam's hand nowadays
or go to somebody else. We can't do it all.
Christians and Traditionals live and die side by side here.
But the Haudenosaunee, the Longhouse people, direct the affairs of state.
Once the six nations were a force to be reckoned with.
The Oneida, Seneca, Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga and Tuscarora made peace among themselves.
Then they gained control of all the land from New Hampshire to Lake Michigan and the Hudson Bay to Tennessee.
Today, land diminished, they reach out to other indigenous people and carry the message of the peacemaker,
the legendary founder of the Confederacy to the world.
In 1987, in a London World Conference on Survival, charismatic tribal leader Orrin Lyons met with today's peacemakers,
such as the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa.
Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but a thread of it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
Political activism too has been ongoing in six nations' history.
The 1968 Mohawk Blockade of the International Bridge between Canada and the United States was the culmination of a long fight for free trade and passage across that border,
promised to the Iroquois by the Jay Treaty of 1794.
The battle was important to the Red Power movement of the 60s, but the protest wasn't new.
It started in 1920 when the Indian Defense League of America was formed to protest lack of recognition of treaty rights by both the United States and Canada.
Activism is an outgrowth of the peacemaker's ancient message and a hallmark of the tribe's identity.
But tradition too provides a rallying point. As cultural traditions persist, so identity persists.
Lacrosse is an ancient tradition that has survived all change that has passed this way, both bad and good.
We found Chief Orrin Lyons watching his grandson play lacrosse at the box.
They learn early. Lacrosse is the sport. It's much more than a game. It's a fabric of six nations' community. Everything revolves around it.
Nice shot. No sweat. Put it right in there. It's like this all in the sixth nation. They all play. Kids running around on all the different reservations right now.
It gives them a reference point. It also allows them to be like the bigger guys.
Grandpa? Yes, sir? Do you have any water? Do I have any water? No, I don't have any at all. You guys don't have no water pail here? Why not?
For some, this tradition leads to college scholarships. In any case, the future of the nation rests with these young warriors.
In English they call them the warriors, but it's not really the right word.
What the word in our language says, he carries the burden of the bones of his people. In other words, everybody who is not a chief or one of the clan mothers or one of the faith keepers has this responsibility because that's what they are all called.
It's a grave responsibility. Survival is still challenged from within and without. It's hard. It's hard, very hard. Our children are wanting jeans, they're wanting music, they're wanting all of these things.
There's an intrusion, yes. There's an intrusion and that intrusion carries with it a philosophy and a philosophy of materialism and that's a very destructive force in our perspective.
Anandaga is a nation on wheels crossing the borders daily to the source of the modern and material, to where the jobs are.
It tests sorely the ties of nationhood. Clan mother Alice Papineau, niece Melody Lazore and her daughter Ashley.
I think like every individual would like, you know, nice things, a nice home and a new car and, you know, all that is very nice to have, but, you know, your job you have to be at when there are ceremonies going on and you're not able to attend because of your job and you can't say, well I have ceremonies I have to go.
So it just seems like it's a constant pull between, you know, two worlds, your traditional way and, you know, your job to survive so you're just constantly pulling all the time.
High steel. It's the job that's become a 20th century tradition for Iroquois men. In the crowded cities like New York or Philadelphia, men find a common ground in nationhood.
As it often goes with countrymen far away from home, the tales of Iroquois agility and the building of monuments like Rockefeller Center are passed along from father to son.
Well they make good money, you know, although it's a dangerous job and so many of them are cripples.
Rather be home. Just don't pay the bills, that's all.
There isn't enough work up there in this line to be up there.
Sometimes can't make it, got to work.
The way it goes. Something you got to do. Time for me to go to work. You got to go back.
Ironworkers life is a very lonely one. They're in major cities.
It's a lonely life away from their families. Husband was an ironworker at one time and I went with him on all his jobs in major cities. Took up light housekeeping rooms like that with my two boys.
And when they became school age and I had to stay home, much to my surprise, my husband took up tree surgery and that's what his work was.
So that he could be home. I was surprised at that.
Alice Papano says her motto is life is full of wonderful surprises and she believes in taking chances. In 1983, in her small trading post, she sheltered fugitive American Indian movement leader Dennis Banks for almost a year.
Traditionally, Amandaga women ran the villages while males hunted, traded and went to war.
Today, many of these articulate women act as ambassadors in the United States and beyond.
I go too far away. I fly. The one technology of the white man I like is flying.
Enjoy that.
We have all kinds of invitations to go to different parts of the country.
When the most majestic symbol of the Six Nations Confederacy, the Great White Pine, arrived in Washington, D.C., Alice Papano was there along with head chief Leon Shenandoah and chief Oran Lyons.
According to tradition, the weapons of war are buried in the ground of an uprooted tree, washed away and the Great White Pine is replanted. Hence we say we buried the hatchet.
In today's times, the idea of peace and world peace is in everybody's minds. I think that the original symbol, the Great White Pine, that the peacemaker brought way back there a thousand years ago, is very important today and it's something that people can grasp and young children can grasp and everybody can see.
When the peacemaker set down the laws, he said the woman is very important and so he made it to be that we would follow the woman, that it would be a matrilineal society and that it would be the woman who would determine what the nation and the clan of the children would be.
And so in our society, which is so old, he made it so that there could never be a bastard.
We have clans as our way of life and when you have children without clans, you know, you don't have anything left.
The nation's membership is based on the clan system. To be part of the nation, one must be part of a clan. Women are the landowners and their children are of their clan.
When an Onondaga woman marries, her husband comes here and their children will be Onondaga.
When an Onondaga man marries, he will leave to join his bride on her land. In 1974, this issue created internal strife.
And we had 36 of our youth who married non-Indians and they brought them back here. Many of them brought their wives back here. No taxes, no rent.
After the city of Syracuse and reservation high schools were centralized, intermarriage with non-Indians increased.
When the new brides returned to the reservation, they were not part of a clan nor landowners and it foreshadowed a time when most people here would be without a clan.
On March 26th, 1974, the Council of Onondaga Chiefs voted to evict all non-Indian people living on nation land.
All we could see was this generations coming when most of our people out here would not have a clan. So something had to be done.
It was a difficult and serious decision. Many parents of the newlyweds protested when young Onondaga were told they could either stay without their brides or leave with them.
Some stayed, others followed their spouses.
That now they're alienating themselves from their nation.
They found out how much they lost, you know, by marrying non-Indians.
We're intermarrying with all of our Confederacy people throughout the Iroquois Six Nation Confederacy.
Our girls are marrying Western Indians and bringing them back here and they're welcome as long as they enrich the Indian blood.
In 1987, the Iroquois Confederacy welcomed a long-awaited recognition from the United States Congress when that body acknowledged the contribution of the Confederacy to the development of the United States Constitution.
But with the Onondaga, as with any nation, there is divisiveness.
There are internal problems and ongoing outside pressures and endemic within the Indian nations the threat of taxation on nation business.
The loss of language now used casually and interchangeably with English, the need to leave the reservation for school and jobs.
But there remains a vision of the future for future generations.
Our present generation of chiefs are probably not the quality of the previous generations, we don't know.
But our mandate is to take care of our generation here and then to see to the future generations and we do the best we can.
We don't do things in a hurry like our brothers, the so-called white man.
We don't move as fast, we're on a slower pace.
But I hope that in time we will have some of our dreams come true like building houses.
I've been to many places in this world but I always come back.
This is always home.
I love my hills.
Onondaga, you know, means the people of the hills.
That's what it means.
And so this capital of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy,
this small nation of people who travel routinely beyond its borders,
is within but not of the United States.
This always has been, this is today, Onondaga.
From the East, where memories of early encounters with foreign intruders have drifted through the generations,
to the Southwest, to a scenic place that visually fits the popular conception of Indian country.
The land below forms the vast expanse of the Navajo Nation.
It is a place that stretches across the states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah,
a nation whose population will soon approach 200,000, a place about the same size as the nation of Ireland.
This is a very special place.
This nation, the Navajo Nation, has its own police force, its own elected government, its own Supreme Court.
English is spoken here but very often it's spoken as a second language.
You know, the Navajo Nation, perhaps more than others, in its vastness, its complexity, its symbols,
suggests the idea of sovereignty.
The first thing you notice is the Navajo language.
It is the language of conversation and of the classroom.
These are my mothers, right? These are my fathers.
The language suggests a separate and sovereign nation,
its sovereignty, after all, protected by the Constitution and confirmed by the Supreme Court
that assures each Indian nation of the right to govern in its own unique way,
as different from each other as from the United States.
Unlike the Onondaga, for example, Navajos remain fiercely patriotic.
Here, two nations and two identities are intertwined.
Veterans Day, inside the Navajo Nation.
Ceremonies combine the symbols of two nations.
The flag of one accompanies the music of another.
Two symbols, but one message. Defending one's homeland makes nationhood possible.
Why did our soldiers make such a contribution to the freedom of this country?
Why did it happen? Why do we have so many heroes among the Navajo Nation?
The speaker is Tom Sow, Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation and decorated war veteran.
The deeds of our soldiers is consistent with the Scripture.
The deeds of our soldiers is consistent with our tradition and with our cultures.
And there is passion to defend what is theirs. Another tribal judge, Robert Yazzie.
I was born in Navajo. I will die as Navajo. I speak the Navajo language.
And I think Navajo, I want to maintain those ways.
This is what sovereignty means. This is why it's worth fighting for.
Longtime Navajo leader, Peterson Zah.
Tribal sovereignty to me means everything.
Tribal sovereignty is tribal government.
Tribal sovereignty is the Navajo language.
Tribal sovereignty is our water, it's the land.
So therefore to me it means everything that we have as people.
And therefore we need to protect it as much as possible.
In the stillness of the midnight, precious sacred scenes unfold.
And at the Navajo veteran's cemetery lie the graves of those who gave their lives to defend the sovereignty of two nations.
In fact, during World War II, the Navajo language itself played a patriotic role.
The famous Navajo code-talkers used the language to transmit secret messages in the Pacific, confounding the Japanese.
When America won the Battle of the Pacific in 1945, it was with the help of an ancient American language.
Yet during this same era, speaking Navajo was discouraged at home.
Children sent off to boarding schools were often not allowed to speak Navajo, their native language not acceptable in their native land.
Peterson Zah.
I remember when I was a little boy, I was sent to a BIA boarding school where everything that I saw as a positive, being a Navajo and being an Indian,
was being looked at in a negative way by the instructors and by the dormitory attendants.
World War II epitomized the contradictions inherent in Navajo life.
Indian soldiers returned home as war heroes, but returned as well to federal policies designed to terminate reservation life.
Men who could fight a war, Washington reasoned, no longer needed a reservation.
Yet against this backdrop of federal antagonism, tribal institutions managed to survive and eventually prosper.
A modern Navajo nation began to emerge. The highest court in this land became the Navajo Supreme Court, Chief Justice Tom Sowell.
My philosophy has always been that we should remain distinct, meaning that we should be allowed to maintain our own ideas,
our own philosophy, which we found works for us through many years.
What's evolved since World War II is a nation of institutions. Patriotism may preserve nations, but institutions make them work.
Here there is a distinct judicial system, elected government, schools and police force.
All must function from the ground up, and there's a lot of ground to cover. This is a land larger than the state of West Virginia,
where sovereignty depends on how well tribal police, for example, can handle cases like this.
Six miles north of Keighley Chief Varding School, a complainant is Lucy Wilson, and 42 is Emanuel Wilson, has a.22 rifle.
An elderly woman threatened by her husband walks six miles to a boarding school in order to call the police.
Eighty percent of reservation households don't have telephones.
When we drop back to 154, complaining party will be 1023 at the boarding school in Kingsley Chief.
Sergeant George Toth responds to the call.
Out here on our reservation, there's no such thing as address, so the only direction they'll give us is, let's say, a school.
Three miles north of the school, they'll say one or three houses down.
When you get down to the scene, there'll be about four or five hookups.
In the end, Sergeant Toth winds up using an old skill to find his way. He follows the tracks.
Most cases, you know, are majority of these families, elderly, older people, they have, they can't speak English.
So you have to understand their tradition. If you don't, you're going to have a hard time being, you know, communicate with people.
Today, tribal police are taking communication one step further.
They're trying to link this land together through one simple, yet enormous task.
They are trying to give everyone in an entire nation an address.
A traditional Hogan receives a number for the first time, a number, but not an owner, for land here is never owned by a single individual.
All land is tribal land. The land is what it has always been, Indian country.
The traditional land of the Navajo was first populated by the Anasazi people.
They built spectacular cliff dwellings around the year 1000, then mysteriously disappeared.
The Navajo came about 500 years ago. Dine, or the people, as they call themselves, have endured ever since.
In the 1600s, the Spaniards brought livestock and Catholicism, and the Navajo economy became more sedentary until the arrival of the Anglo Americans.
In the 1860s, military pressure to take over Navajo land increased.
A man that Dine called Redshirt, Kit Carson, spearheaded the drive.
Colonel Carson and the cavalry combed the back canyons of Navajo country to begin the forced removal of the Navajo.
They were sent on what is still known today as the Long Walk, a trek of some 350 miles to imprisonment at Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
The Treaty of 1868 allowed the Navajos to return to their homeland and establish the first federally recognized boundaries of the Navajo nation.
In the years that followed, federal policy towards the Navajo often violated a traditional sense of justice.
When soil erosion due to overgrazing became a problem, Navajo livestock were ordered slaughtered, an incomprehensible act to the tribe.
Children were taken from their parents, adopted by Anglos or shipped off to boarding schools.
But like other Indian nations who faced injustice, Navajos accommodated change, but never lost their tribal identity.
I was home for a Catholic baptismal ceremony in the morning and for a Navajo man's prayers in the afternoon at my sister's home, so it does not ever leave you.
Today, Navajo attorney Donna Chavez lives in Albuquerque, but her home will always be the land where she was born.
I'm tied to the land. As I was taught, the practice that my family did was to bury our umbilical cords, my mother buried our umbilical cords underneath the doorstep,
so that we would always come home, and I did the same with my children, and that's the symbolic tie to the land and to the home and to the heart.
Ties to the home and to the heart, this is a traditional ceremony on a mountaintop inside the Navajo nation.
A ceremony and a mountaintop both belong to the larger community to preserve and to defend.
A long time ago, the man proved himself by going after war, you know, being a warrior.
Like the warriors of the past, Earl Milford proved himself in combat, winning a Purple Heart in Vietnam.
Today, he serves as the unofficial caretaker at the Navajo Veteran Cemetery.
I don't feel so lonely when I'm up here.
Just a lot of these guys I was, I knew.
This is Michael Byer down here, Herman Holsoy down here, Lenny Hickson's up here too.
I'm not ashamed to shed tears for these guys.
What's a few tears for them?
At least I care for them.
After many things we went through, combat dies over here.
I can still picture the prior fights we've been through.
It hurts.
You hear it?
They are latter-day warriors.
Many survived combat abroad, but couldn't survive at home.
Victims of alcohol, poverty, and changing times.
It is that battle that now poses the greatest threat to tribal sovereignty.
Tribal Judge Robert Yazzie.
Right now we are losing our language.
Right now more and more tribal members are becoming semi-traditional.
And at the rate we're going somewhere in the future, we're not going to have our language anymore.
We're not going to have our customs or ceremonies anymore.
And that's what I'm worried about.
That's the reason why I say I'm afraid of the future.
The young Navajo people should be taught something about their history, something about themselves,
something about their culture, something about their language, and something about their heritage
and how their grandmothers and their grandfathers looked at a certain situation,
because from that you get strengths.
It's a challenge facing all Navajo institutions,
and so the courts are attempting to blend the contemporary with the traditional.
Peacemaker Court.
Peacemaking dates back many centuries.
Here there are no rules of evidence, no legal terminology, no dispassionate judge.
It is a tradition fundamentally different than the Anglo-Saxon idea of blind justice.
Chief Justice Tom Sow.
Traditionally the Navajos were just sort of on the opposite,
and they felt that within the clan system there has got to be somebody that is wise.
And the fairest way to deal with a dispute is to have somebody as a mediator and arbitrator
who were familiar with the faults, the reputation of the character, of the parties in a case.
In this case, a mother seeks help in resolving a dispute with a troubled young member of the family.
The discussion goes on for hours.
Peacemaker Justice Frankie Paul.
An Indian person just doesn't come out and say, all right, I heard your story and I heard your story,
and the way I see it is you're right and you're wrong.
The Indian people like to give everybody time.
Finally, the tribal elders and the family agree on a course of action.
For now, other judicial processes will be avoided.
The purpose of Navajo institutions is to help maintain a distinct way of life.
In 1989, those institutions were sorely tested by a bitter controversy involving Chairman Peter McDonald.
A committee of the United States Senate had leveled serious charges against the chairman
and a struggle for power between the tribal council and the chairman ensued.
As in all nations, internal politics can divide a people.
It was a chaotic and troubled time, but in the interest of preserving sovereignty,
the Navajo resisted an outside solution to internal strife, Judge Robert Yazzie.
It's our problem. We don't need other people.
We don't need outside intervention to come in to tell us how we should run our system.
That's sovereignty. That's the exact meaning of sovereignty.
External pressures and internal threats will no doubt continue to challenge the unique sovereign status of this nation
as it strives to direct its own destiny as it persists in the defense of its homeland.
When a nation is rich in natural resources, that's the Pittsburgh Midway coal mine back there,
the question of taxation, the question of who imposes taxes, the state or the Indian nation,
becomes a matter of dollars, millions of dollars.
As Indian nations change and develop, any decision that affects the tax status of one Indian nation
will reverberate through all of Indian country.
After all, the power to tax involves the power to destroy.
Justice John Marshall said it in 1819.
Take, for example, the Lummi Nation, a small tribe in Washington state
that's been fending off the IRS in its attempts to tax its harvest of fish.
This threat to its treaty rights and its economy strikes at the very existence of the Lummi
as an indigenous nation.
One thing we do have is dreams, and our dream is that if there's going to be a tax,
it'll be paid to our own government.
We are a nation, we're an indigenous nation.
They are an island people, a canoe people, who once owned by virtue of use the beautiful San Juan Islands.
There are waterways and much of the coastal lands from the Fraser River in British Columbia
to the southern part of Seattle.
In 1855, the Lummi, along with 20 other Northwest tribes,
signed treaties of peace and friendship with the United States.
These treaties guaranteed them the right to hunt and fish in all customary and usual places
in common with citizens.
The Lummi tribal chairman and fisherman, Larry Kinley.
The fishing was very, very important.
It's very specifically mentioned in our treaty with the United States,
and we've been building on that.
As hard as they tried to make us farmers, they never could make our people farmers.
They worked hard at the farming.
As soon as the fish showed up, the people left and went fishing, and that's who we are.
We're human people, and I think we always will be.
The Lummi have had ample opportunity to hone their legal skills.
In the late 60s and early 70s, there were confrontations between the treaty tribes
and the state of Washington over treaty fishing rights.
The Lummi have been to the Supreme Court seven times this century to defend their treaties,
unable to help prepare the legal briefs that resulted in the landmark decision
handed down by Judge George Bolt in the U.S. versus Washington case in 1975.
Phase one of that decision upheld the in common with citizens language of the treaties
and guaranteed that Indians had the right to up to half of the harvestable fish.
This opened the door for the Lummi to develop a fishing industry.
In Puget Sound, the salmon population had sharply declined.
This created a crisis in the area and a responsibility to replenish the fish.
We have two hatcheries.
The operations raise more fish than the whole fleet ever takes out on an annual basis.
We're quite proud of the hatcheries.
This was a business the Lummi knew, unlike farming,
and because of that and the cooperative spirit that defines this people,
the industry grew.
Lummi Protection Task Force Coordinator, Jewel James.
The Lummi fishermen operate different types of gears.
We have reef netters, purse saying fishermen, gill net fishermen,
and as I said, skip operators, which are another form of gill net fishing.
One thing that they all have in common right now is that they're the target
of the United States government's Department of Treasury and its internal revenue service.
Although the Lummi are given credit for conservation and management
and for their part in bringing in the recent record breaking salmon run,
their high visibility caught the eye of the IRS.
Although tribes are tax exempt, the IRS maintained that individual income
earned by the Lummi was not.
To test this, in 1982, the U.S. Department of Justice and the IRS
brought lawsuits against 77 individual Lummi fishermen,
claiming they owed back taxes, fines, and interest.
Fisherman Steve Solomon.
Letters were sent by the IRS to individuals that made X amount of dollars,
how they come about, these names to numbers I have no idea of.
Went through the audit procedure.
They said, I owed this much, and I contested it.
Lummi Vice Chairman G.I. James.
They contended that we were citizens so that we owed taxes.
Sam Kage calls it part of the ongoing struggle for sovereignty.
And every day we're having problems of water rights, land rights, fishing rights, hunting rights,
where the states are trying to get in tax land or control water,
flying in the face of Indian sovereignty.
And I think whenever Indian America wakes up, we're going to have to unite and really mean it.
And it's not a large income.
We did a study in 1982 and 83, studying the commercial situation of our fleet.
And it's shocking.
But it's a way of life.
We've always been fishermen, fisherwomen.
We've always been a culture dependent on the salmon.
And we'll always go on fishing.
We're not going to back up.
We don't retire.
We say we die fishing.
Kenneth Cooper looks to the salmon as a symbol of persistence and strength.
We come up here and we swim where the salmon spawn.
The salmon come up here and spawn in these swimming holes.
We come up here and we swim hoping that we'll get something,
like those little salmon have when they come out of their eggs.
And they have the strength to go out into the ocean and fight the environment.
They've got to fight.
No matter what they've done to us, we've managed to survive.
The traditional ways have managed to survive clean up into the 1980s.
We're an ongoing living culture.
We change with the times, but we also have a lot of traditions.
We have a lot of ceremonies.
We have elders that still hand down the stories of the past,
stories about things of importance,
things of importance such as the story of Salmon Woman and her children
and how the salmon came to the Indian people of the Pacific Northwest,
the Lummi people, how the salmon got into the rivers.
And these stories not only taught us about the importance of living here
at the mouth of the rivers, but also living in harmony with nature.
In the spirit of living in harmony with nature,
phase two of the bolt decision guarantees the Indians the right
to not only dip their nets into the water, but the right to not come up empty.
Thus, a right to have the salmon habitat protected to the point
that the salmon runs are preserved.
But the Lummi have moved beyond the courts to communicate their attachment
to this place and as a people and a nation the right to determine their future.
It's a traditional talking circle.
After two years of planning and negotiation,
the Lummi and the State Department of Natural Resources are meeting this way
for the first time.
They will try to bring together the needs of both the bureaucracy and the tribe
and consider both in plans for long-term use of land and resources.
Here they have moved from the formal meetings into a more evocative arena.
So that future generations can work together more closely in harmony.
It's difficult for our people from the reservation to come
and be in a situation like this.
It's hard for our people to share what we hold sacred.
Please don't mistake us, the messengers, for the message.
Sometimes there are things that we cannot do,
there are things that are just beyond our power.
And even though we don't have the history or the culture to feel like you do
about some of the resources, it doesn't mean that we are unfeeling.
I feel intimidated to sit among you.
It's because you're you or because you're you or because you're you.
It's because you're all you.
The bureaucratic system that I don't understand, I fear it.
I don't want to have to sneak to go to the mountains to bathe.
I don't want to have to hide behind a log to go get my bark or my berries
or my ferns or the things that I use for my body to keep it green and healed.
I don't want to have to disobey the law.
Because of the bureaucratic system, I don't understand it.
I don't know how it works.
Fear of the bureaucratic system can disrupt a nation.
Here in 1987, word that the U.S. Congress was dealing
with the question of taxation of the fishing industry
brought about a reenactment of an old event.
They're upset and they burned a couple boats.
It's just like the Boston Tea Party.
We will burn our boats before we give them up.
We're a small community. All we have is fishing.
Now you want to take our sole source of income?
Now you want to take our livelihood away?
If we were small, we wouldn't be able to defend ourselves
and they would get a precedent through that could affect all other treaties.
Many people in the United States say there's a problem with Indians
because Indians don't pay taxes.
One Indian leaves the reservation in almost all situations
and takes a job just like anybody else in the United States.
Whether they're a foreign citizen from another country
or a citizen of the United States, they pay taxes on that income.
Their employer takes taxes out.
When they buy something, they pay sales tax.
We pay taxes just like anybody else.
But not, said Jewell James, on individual income
from treaty-reserved rights such as hunting or fishing.
The IRS read it another way, and so the Lummi went to Washington, D.C.
to convince the Congress.
The Lummi saw the fight as a threat to the sovereignty of all Indian nations.
They saw it finally as a matter of promises.
Keep your promises.
Most of all, keep your promises to your own citizens
that you'll honor your own Constitution,
that you'll represent them with honor and fairness in all dealings,
not with just foreign nations but with domestic nations.
On Veterans Day 1988, Ronald Reagan signed the bill
that gave the Lummi a victory in this battle for sovereignty.
The bill recognizes the intent of the treaties,
and it exempts Indians and Indian nations
from federal taxation on any income derived from fishing
in those places that are secured by treaty.
Legal scholar Charles Wilkinson concludes that
the old laws emanate a kind of morality
profoundly rare in our jurisprudence.
As he points out, real promises were made,
and the Senate of the United States approved them,
making them real laws.
My sense is that most judges cannot shake that.
Now, of course, Indian nations depend on more than just the courts
and the validity of old promises.
The future of Indian sovereignty will also be determined from within
by the Indian nations themselves.
The future follows on the heels of history,
and 500 years of change.
Battles have been won and lost,
but within the United States, against all odds,
hundreds of Indian nations still exist.
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