Tribal Sovereignty Assignment

Stephanie Mott
3/21/10
NAS 332
Tribal Sovereignty Assignment
1.
2. tribal sovereignty
3. Environmental Justice is
4. nontribal members to comply with tribal water quality regulations
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6. The federal agency didn’t do their job as completely as was required to do by law and failed to provide the tribe with information about the potential environmental hazards (Krakoff 173).
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One regulatory difficulty tribes face when dealing with solid waste management issues is that they are considered municipalities which have a less powerful status than other organizations and usually have less services available to them. For example, states can get more money and assistance for solid waste disposal a great deal easier than municipalities (Indian tribes). Municipalities “can apply for federal funding, but” “only recently has the EPA been available” … “in” a “very limited way” “, to provide any assistance to tribes” for solid waste disposal issues (Krakoff 176-177).
There have been multiple court cases in recent years that have supported “legislative language that results in a regulatory void” and helped to reduce the control that Indian tribes have over their “reservation environment” (Krakoff 176-177). The courts in the case about a proposed landfill on Campo Mission Indian land established that Indian reservations are municipalities and the EPA doesn’t have the authority to approve tribal solid waste plans on those municipalities (Krakoff 176). In many court cases, including court cases described in this paper, the courts have established that “tribes retain inherent sovereignty to establish and maintain their own solid waste management plans”; however, “until tribes can be treated as a state under RCRA most tribes will be unable, financially and technically, to create solid waste disposal systems for their reservation lands without assistance from the federal government” (Krakoff 176-177).
If regulatory rules allowed “private commercial waste disposal companies” to operate “on” the “reservation”, this would not be a sustainable solution for two reasons (Krakoff 176-177). Tribes would encounter ?inherent conflicts of interest in establishing their regulatory programs? and most people in the tribe wouldn’t be able to pay for the use of the “private commercial waste disposal facilities” (Krakoff 176-177)
There are multiple possible solutions to the regulatory difficulties tribes face in terms of solid waste management; each solution “strengthens –gr? The tribes’-gr? Abilities-gr? To address their own environmental problems (Krakoff 179). Even though there are a variety of solutions, they all contain the common purpose of enabling the tribes’ to solve “struggles” or environmental problems “within Indian country communities” while retaining “the powers of their self-government. In addition, they all contain the common purpose of enabling the tribes’ to determine how important maintaining environmental health is in relation to creating “economic development” (Krakoff 179). Furthermore, they all contain the common purpose of enabling the tribes’ to determine how much they value “adapting and flourishing” over retaining their past and not sacrificing their future of their land, culture and /or something else (Krakoff 179-180). In order to do the ideas above, “federal assistance or statutory amendments may be required”; “the federal government must be prepared to defend vigorously the environmental self-determination that tribes already have” (Krakoff 179).