Sustainability is defined as harvesting or using a resource so that it is not depleted or permanently damaged. Environmental sustainability expands the definition to include:
“The capacity to preserve natural resources and uphold ecological balance in the ecosystem of our planet in order to promote the welfare of present and future … to provide for the requirements of the current generation without sacrificing the capacity of future generations to provide for themselves.”
A broader definition of sustainability derives from the 1987 Brundtland Report, “Our Common Future,” which defined “sustainable development” as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” (bolding added).
In a world where widespread poverty and inequality will always be susceptible to ecological and other crises, this broadened concept leads, in turn, to the United Nations’ concern for Indigenous Peoples and their rights as an element of sustainability.
Indigenous Sustainability
For Indigenous Peoples, sustainability does not originate in the modern environmental movement or international proclamations, but has been the centerpiece of traditional cultures for thousands of years, historically opposed by colonizers like those who deliberately slaughtered the Bison herds upon which plains tribes depended.
As Michigan Odawa tribal member Jordan Shananaquet of the Michigan Waganakising Odawak (Little Traverse Tribe of Odawa Indians), puts it:
“I think about spearing ooga, or walleye. That practice connects me not only to my ancestors but to the water itself. It’s a tradition that ties together identity, food sovereignty, and responsibility. But I can’t do that without clean water. I can’t pass that practice to the next generation if the lakes are polluted or the fish are unsafe to eat. For me, protecting the water is inseparable from protecting who we are as Odawa people.”
In 2022, DNA evidence proved the Blackfeet Nation’s claim to have resided in Montana for 18,000 years, retaining cultural traditions going back to the Ice Age. Blackfeet novelist James Welch’s “Fool’s Crow” (1986) provides a detailed description of what life was like for one Montana band before and during the arrival of white “seizers.”
Their traditional lifestyle as a horse-riding people whose principal sustenance was the ever-moving herds of bison and elk spread out over the western plains could not co-exist with White concepts of land ownership because tribal sustainability required free movement over unowned land.
Joseph Lee, in “Nothing More of this Land: Community Power and the Search for Indigenous Community” (2025), describes the much smaller acreage occupied by his Aquinnah Wampanoag community on Martha’s Vineyard (an island off the coast of Massachusetts) where they sustained themselves by agriculture, fishing and oystering in the same location for 9,000 years before arrival of European settlers.
During the rise of the whaling industry in the nineteenth century, followed by the popularity of the island as a tourist destination in the twentieth, access to traditional fishing and oystering grounds was increasingly limited. When their town of Aquinnah was incorporated into the State of Massachusetts in 1870, tribal members had to come up with property taxes beyond their means, a situation which worsened as the island became gentrified and taxes forced many tribal members to sell their homes for jobs off-island.
A Time-Line of Native American Governmental Status
The Doctrine of Discovery (fifteenth century, Catholic) pronounced anyone who wasn’t Christian less than human, savages who could be conquered, enslaved, or targeted for legal slaughter. It denied Indigenous Peoples sovereignty and legal ownership of ancestral lands that they had inhabited for thousands of years.
The Doctrine of Manifest Destiny arose in the nineteenth century as European settlers migrated westward to lands previously occupied by Indigenous Peoples. It insisted that Whites were morally superior to the people they replaced and had a duty to kill, convert or “civilize” them.
Native American Reservations
During settler expansion, tribes were relocated to specific areas where they were allowed to govern themselves (though their land was held in Federal Trust). As Seneca commentator Norman H. Jackson puts it, “settler colonialism” was an (apparently) milder form of ethnic cleansing developed “to deal with the Indian problem after genocide seemed too blatant,” and included land grabs which made “Native Americans the poorest population in the entire Northern Hemisphere.
Termination
In the 1950s there was a move to terminate recognition of tribes and assimilate them into American culture, completely eradicating them as governmental entities. “In 1953, Congress reversed centuries of federally recognizing tribal authority, passing a law that terminated tribal nations’ legal and political status and federal obligations under treaties and legal precedents, including requirements to provide education and health care.
According to environmental historian Alyssa Kreikemeier, this termination policy subjected tribal nations and reservation lands to state jurisdiction and relocated at least 200,000 Native people from tribal lands to urban centers.
Sovereignty
Via the Federally Recognized Indian Tribes List Act (1994), Native Americans were permitted to go through an application process to achieve a legal recognition that their tribe exists as a sovereign political entity, affirmating its right to self-government, cultural identity, and historical continuity. Jordan Shananaquet reminds us, however, that to a Native American, sovereignty means “reaffirmation”:
“Our sovereignty was never granted to us – it has always existed.”
Native American Environmental Sovereignty
Native American Sovereignty and Native American Sustainability are inseparably intertwined in the concept of Environmental Sovereignty. As Native Americans for Sovereignty and Preservation (NASP) puts it:
“Native nations have stewarded ecosytems for millennia using Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TFK) — methods like controlled burns, rotational harvesting, and sacred site protection. These practices are not just cultural, they’re successfully and ecologically regenerative.”
Indigenous Sustainability
Obviously, Native American tribes, however sovereign, have had their domains drastically curtailed by White occupation. Let’s consider the status of the Lee’s Wampanoag and Welch’s Blackfeet. A community of the Massachusetts Wampanoag tribe have lived on Martha’s Vineyard for 9,000 years. Their numbers have been reduced from 3,000 at contact to 901 today, though 300 community members live off-island. They own 477 acres of land. Their Tribal Council consists of four elected officers, seven at-large members, and the (non-voting presence of) the tribal chief and medicine man.
Today, the Blackfeet Reservation spans 1.5 million acres in northwestern Montana, with over 7,000 residents, about 15,560 enrolled tribal members; they are governed as a sovereign nation by the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council. With their Water Compact and Settlement Act of 2016, they confirmed the tribe’s water rights and provided funding to develop a sustainable economy through viable irrigation systems and water management.
Although their achievements suggest that things are going well for the Blackfeet, statistics betray another story. While the State of Montana had an 11.7% poverty rate in 2023, on the Blackfeet reservation it was 35.7%. For Plains tribes, alcoholism and suicide remain extremely high. It is not surprising that a people whose cultural history involves freely traveling over wide distances would have trouble fitting into today’s America.
Things are slightly better for Lee’s Wampanoag: in Massachusetts, the Native American poverty rate for all tribes is 19.13% (compared to state-wide 10% levels), perhaps because tribes are less isolated and have more adaptable traditions like agriculture and fishing.
In “Nothing More of This Land,” Joseph Lee recounts how the Aqinnah Wampanoag applied for Federal Recognition in 1985 and received it in 1987, after satisfying objections that the tribe was too dispersed off-island to be in sufficient social contact with each other. As Lee remarks:
“It is strange being blamed for things that were done to you because you were Indian and then being told that because these things happened, you’re not an Indian anymore.”
Lee raises the question of whether you really have tribal sovereignty if you are dependent on Federal Money. His cousin NaDaiza Aguir-Bolling concurs:
“We are not sovereign. We couldn’t house all of our people if we wanted to right now. We couldn’t feed all of our people if we wanted to right now. And until we have the ability to do so we’re not sovereign, you know, we can’t take care of ourselves.”
Lee finds his tribal culture stronger than its legal status:
“It was almost like the tribal government was weaker than the culture and community that it was in theory trying to protect.”
In the course of covering Indigenous Peoples as the Senior Indigenous Affairs Fellow for Grist, Lee realized that, even when hampered by national government, a tribe’s traditional culture of land stewardship can be exercised for the benefit of both tribal and non-indigenous people. In Peru, for example, he found the Wampis and Achnar nations not only advocating “for the right to be recognized by the Peruvian government,” but, even when denied that status, acting like “autonomous nations, both domestically and internationally, protesting against land grabs by Peru’s national Petroperu petroleum company by lobbying foreign banks against financing it and by arguing that Petroperu’s project violates international law. Instead of waiting for Peru to recognize their sovereignty of their (1.3 million hectare) territory,” concludes Lee, “the Wampis simply did it for themselves.”
Lee discovers tribal people around the world are successfully stewarding their lands, applying long-standing cultural traditions of fire and forestry management, river ecosystem maintenance, irrigation systems, wetland restoration, etc. His participation in the annual United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues provides him examples of how tribes around the world bring their traditional environmental sovereignty — the ecological wisdom that is the essence of their cultures — to the solution of world problems.
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Native Americans in the Age of Trump
How can Native American tribes continue to act effectively when the Trump’s ICE squads (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) are savagely rounding up them up, when he defunds their federal food and health programs and cuts back monies for maintaining the bison herds that plains tribes have restored?
Paradoxically, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill (H.R. 1) improves tribal finances by expanding their control over timber and mineral resources while it grabs back funding for solar and wind projects, hampering tribal pursuit of Energy Sovereignty through domestic energy development, and cuts $2 billion in federal forestry support.
No strangers to depredations by untrustworthy Whites, groups like the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and the National Indian Health Board (NIHB) have mobilized to protect treaty obligations. Meanwhile Native American projects in environmental sustainability have achieved success: For but two examples, in 2015 the Salish and Kootenai Tribes took over a federal dam in Montana, producing ”enough hydropower to supply 100,000 homes, bringing millions of dollars to tribal coffers rather than enriching a corporation in Pennsylvania.”
And now, in 2025, the Yurok California tribe has reclaimed 50,000 acres of Klamath River land, which was seized from them 120 years ago, in a move that restores their culture, traditions, the river’s health and its fish stock.
Thus, though targeted by Trump’s racism and climate ignorance, Native American tribes are experiencing a renewal of pride in their enduring history and culture, not only reviving their language and traditions but also applying their traditional environmental techniques to the restoration of the planet.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of Impakter.com — Cover Photo Credit: PickPic.
