An Academic Research Workshop
Co-directed by
Terry L. Anderson, Hoover Institution Senior Fellow
Dominic Parker, University of Wisconsin Associate Professor
Capital investment and property rights are generally considered Western concepts exported in the era of European empire building, but pre-colonial evidence from Africa and the Americas suggest that capital investment and property rights are part of the human experience. Europeans assumed the societies they encountered in the Americas lacked the institutions and intellect necessary to fuel economic growth. Careful examination of pre-colonial and colonial societies, however, offer a different perspective—a perspective that sheds light on how indigenous people around the world can renew their economies from the ground up, rather than answering the “siren call of federal handouts, as Alvin “A.J.” Not-Afraid, Chairman of the Crow Tribe, puts it.
In launching “new institutional economics,” Douglass North (1960, 53) emphasized that the “major role of institutions in a society is to reduce uncertainty by establishing a stable structure to human interaction.” That formula seems simple, but the fact that many countries remain poor today suggests that stimulating the necessary capital investments is not so easy.
For this reason and by North’s definition of institutions, there can be no question that American Indians had both informal and formal rules that promoted capital investment and productivity prior to European contact. At the individual level, Indians used varying degrees of private ownership or control of assets for everything from household goods, to horses, to hunting and trapping territories, to land. They marked territories with stones and trees, their horses with paint, their arrows with coloring, all designed to say this is mine and not yours.
Given the rich institutional history of Native Americans, why has capital investment lagged on reservations and what will it take to rejuvenate capital investment today? Put another way, what were the property rights structures in pre-contact American Indian societies, what happened to the rule of law that secures property rights that encouraged capital investment, and what will it take to rekindle the rule of law and property rights among Indian tribes?
AGENDA
November 18
Annenberg Conference Room
7:30 AM BREAKFAST
8:30 AM WELCOME
8:45 AM SESSION I
“Reciprocity as a Form of Hypothecation: Indigenous Capital Markets”
D. Bruce Johnsen, George Mason University
10:00 AM BREAK
10:15 AM SESSION II
"The Politics of Indian Property Rights”
Ilia Murtazashvili, University of Pittsburgh
11:30 AM SESSION III
“The Higher Price of Mortgage Financing for Native Americans”
Laura Cattaneo and Donna Feir, Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank
12:45 PM LUNCH
1:45 PM SESSION IV
“The Effect of Land Allotment on Native American Households During the Assimilation Era”
Christian Dippel, UCLA and Dustin Frye, Vassar College
“The Costs of ‘Tenancy in Common’: Evidence from Indian Land Allotment”
Christian Dippel, UCLA; Dustin Frye, Vassar College; and Bryan Leonard, Arizona State University
3:15 PM BREAK
3:30 PM SESSION V
“Bargaining for American Indian Water Rights”
Leslie Sanchez, Tufts University; Eric C. Edwards, North Carolina State University; and Bryan Leonard, Arizona State University
6:30 PM DEPART FOR DINNER
November 19
7:30 AM BREAKFAST
8:30 AM SESSION VI
”White Tape and Indian Wards: Cutting through the Federal Bureaucracy to Empower Tribal Economies”
Adam Crepelle, Southern University Law Center
9:45 AM SESSION VII
“Comparative Secured Transactions Law and Renewing Indigenous Economies’ Access to Finance”
Dwight Newman, University of Saskatchewan
“Measuring Utilization Effect of Secured Transactions on Tribal Lands”
Marc L. Roark, Southern University Law Center
11:15 AM SESSION VIII
“Tribal Culture and Economic Prosperity: Complements or Substitutes?”
Dominic Parker, University of Wisconsin
12:30 PM BOX LUNCHES & DEPARTURE
The workshop is limited to a small group of scholars to ensure meaningful discussion of the papers. For more information, please contact Wendy Purnell: wendy@indigenousecon.org