Federal Indian Policy: A Framework for Evaluation

Unlike many agencies of the United States government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has not developed a coherent set of standards for evaluating the impacts of specific actions on reservation-based Native Americans. Nor, many would claim, have the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of government offered clear policy directives to the implementing agency. It is argued here, however, that three dominant policy objectives can be abstracted from the corpus of federal laws, regulations, and court decisions. These objectives are: tribal sovereignty, economic self-sufficiency, and cultural self-determination. After definining these objectives, I suggest operational measures which may serve as guides for evaluating specific programs. I then illustrate the framework with a review of residential leasing programs on reservations, and examine the effects of exogenous factors on the implementation of these three objectives of federal Indian policy.