After the Election: Work continues for Indigenous nations

The incoming Trump administration will mean changes ahead for tribal leaders

Since the creation of the U.S. government and the signing of treaties with Indigenous nations, tribal leaders have gone to Washington, D.C., to advocate for their people regardless of who was at the helm.

The coming year will be no different.

“We’ve been fighting for our rights for as long as we’ve been standing on this land,” said Margo Gray, executive director of United Indian Nations of Oklahoma. “We will surpass this administration as well.”

Tribal nations have already experienced a Donald Trump administration and the reaction to doing so again has been mixed. Oklahoma U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin, Cherokee, and Oklahoma U.S. Rep. Josh Brecheen, Choctaw, both Republicans, celebrated the win on social media. Former Oklahoma state representative and Trump ally T.W. Shannon, Chickasaw, also celebrated the win.

Many others mourned the loss by Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, in the Nov. 5 election, as Trump won a second term in office.

“I’m disappointed because Donald Trump is not an ally to Indigenous peoples in this country, and we saw that under his presidency,” Allie Young, founder of Protect the Sacred, told ICT.

It took the Trump administration years to appoint a tribal liaison for the White House. Trump didn’t host the annual Tribal Nations Summit, and opened sacred sites up to energy development. A key message while campaigning was “drill, baby, drill.”

The Trump administration also challenged tribal sovereignty, saying that tribes are a race not sovereign governments, when tribes lobbied for exemptions to Medicaid work rules. The administration tried to cut funding and essential programs for the Indian Health Service in its 2018 budget recommendations.

“We’re going to have to fight even harder against a president who doesn’t believe in climate change and the fact that many of these (energy) projects will happen on indigenous lands and tribal communities,” Young, Diné, said. “Fracking and all of that, it will impact our communities.”

Trump, however, appointed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, the only justice who is an expert in federal Indian law. Gorsuch has continuously affirmed tribal sovereignty in landmark cases. Trump has repeatedly stated his support for the Lumbee Tribe’s recognition act, even saying he would sign the bill into law. The CARES Act signed by Trump brought $8 billion into tribal nations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The transition team has indicated it would likely be slow again, as it was in 2016, in appointing people to key positions, said Michael Stopp, an ICT political contributor who was part of the Trump transition team in 2016 and who helped get Native Americans into the Trump administration.

“They (the transition team) have also been in discussions about putting Natives in not necessarily traditionally Native roles, but in regular roles,” Stopp told ICT. “We want to put more Natives throughout the government, so they can bring their unique perspective and advocate for Indian Country – not just from traditional roles like DOI [Department of the Interior] and the Native Affairs offices in certain departments, but in traditional other roles as well.”

Stopp, Cherokee Nation, predicted that many of the same Native folks who served in the first administration will likely serve again.

“Quite frankly, there aren’t that many conservative Natives that want to serve,” he said. “It’s an issue I’m struggling with myself. I’ve been out of Washington for four years now. I’m not in a hurry to go back, but it’s one of those things, once you’re asked to serve, you need to think about it.”

Chris James, president and chief executive for the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development, believes that Trump and likely his cabinet secretaries will need to be educated on tribal sovereignty.

“I definitely don’t think they have an understanding of tribal sovereignty, but that’s not just the Trump administration,” James, Eastern Band of Cherokee, said. “I think any time there’s a leader change, it’s a lot of education. So that could be at a congressional level, at a Senate level. I mean, folks just don’t understand tribal communities. They definitely don’t understand tribal sovereignty, and they don’t understand the trust relationship between the federal government and the tribes.”

Speculation is swirling about what could happen for tribal nations under another Trump presidency, but James doesn’t want to get caught on the what ifs.

“I don’t want us to jump ahead and say, ‘They’re going to go in and make all these sweeping changes,’” James said. “We don’t know yet. So I think until we start seeing day one priorities, and when this administration is in power, that’s when we can be a little more proactive.”

Gray hopes that the Trump administration will continue to host an annual gathering of tribal leaders, whether he chooses to call it the Tribal Nations Summit or something different.

“This door opens both ways, because tribal nations have to offer job opportunities, economic growth, energy, and these are things that are important to all of America,” Gray said. “And job creation. We have some highly successful tribes — that knowledge is there. How can we be a part of making improvements to our country?”

Collectively, the 39 federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma, for example, are the second largest employer in the state. The Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas is the second-largest employer in Polk County, a remote, rural area north of Houston.

Tribal gaming generated $42 billion in revenue in 2023, but this doesn’t account for the spillover of profit to other areas, according to an analysis by the Center for Indian Country Development.

For example, the Alabama-Coushatta tribe’s gaming facility brings not only direct jobs but has attracted fast-food chains, restaurants, hotels and more to the area. It has created more than 800 permanent jobs, according to the report. About 400 are direct employment by the tribe, and the rest are dependent on the gaming enterprise.

A study showed that Naskila Casino, an enterprise of Alabama-Coushatta, injected $212 million into the local economy, according to a 2023 updated report by TXP commissioned by the Texas Forest Country Partnership.

In a year when the state of the U.S. economy was one of the biggest issues in the November election, tribal nations and their enterprises are often economic drivers in rural America.