What’s more, she said, the lack of services on Indian reservations is a by-product of a system that has made it more convenient and less expensive to simply bypass Indian lands when building out the infrastructure. It did not take a conscious effort to accomplish this, but a series of unfortunate bureaucratic events.
“There were issues with rights-of-way, and nobody wants to deal with leases. And it was too much money, which was true, because time is money, and there were so many hoops to jump through,” she said. “The current administration has been working on clearing the red-tape and streamlining the process.”
One development that has some people excited about possibly attracting new business to Indian Country is the recent decriminalization of cannabis in Washington state. Indian tribes are recognized as sovereign nations, governed by federal laws, but largely parallel to the states in which they are located. Cannabis entrepreneurs see working on the reservations as having potential advantages, including less bureaucracy in licensing, lower tax rates, access to land for growing operations, reasonable regulation and even tribal sovereignty as a tool to access financial services they are largely frozen out of elsewhere.
“We’re seeing a flood of people — tribal members — interested in this industry,” Echo-Hawk said. “Whereas before, there was this perception that commercial industry doesn’t want to work in Indian Country because, ‘Oh, you have kangaroo courts,’ or ‘Oh, we don’t know what your laws are,’ or ‘You have sovereign immunity.’ All of a sudden, in the last seven months, there is the ‘green rush’ out in Indian Country, with businesses saying, ‘Oh, we do want to work with you! We’ll help you develop regulatory infrastructure and legal infrastructure.’”
Marijuana-based commerce is a gray area of unsettled law, as the crop is still considered an illegal substance by the federal government. Echo-Hawk said she has been getting more involved with looking at the cannabis industry from a legal perspective. “I’ve been diving into cannabis industry space, for a lot of reasons. For one, it’s a legally interesting space; there are a lot of unknowns, and it’s interesting to make law.”
Manny Frishberg is our ground reporter in Seattle.