America’s War on Tribal Economies: Federal Attacks on Native Contracting in the SBA 8(A) Business Development Program

Published in Washburn Law Journal

By: Helaman S. Hancock

History has taught us that once something is identified as being valuable to Native Americans, the federal government tries to take it away. Congress and the executive branch have enacted laws, adopted policies, and declared war on America’s Native Peoples to accomplish such deprivations. The United States broke numerous treaties and diplomatic agreements with Native Nations and engaged in various acts of war to achieve the forced taking of land and other natural resources. During this effort, U.S. military campaigns massacred thousands of Native men, women, and children, displacing the survivors of their homelands and confining them to predetermined, federally controlled areas deemed otherwise worthless to the rest of Americans. ¹

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1 – Indian Removal Act of 1830, ch. 148, 4 Stat. 411 (1830) (codified at 25 U.S.C. § 174 (2006)); see also S.J. Res. 14, 111th Cong. (2009) (noting that the “Federal Government condemned the traditions, beliefs, and customs of Native Peoples and endeavored to assimilate them by such policies as the redistribution of land . . . and the forcible removal of Native children . . . to faraway boarding schools where their Native practices and languages were degraded and forbidden”).