Stephen Cornell

Where’s the glue? Institutional and cultural foundations of American Indian economic development

Abstract Since the mid-1970s, the hundreds of American Indian reservations in the United States have been afforded substantial powers of self-government –from law enforcement and taxation to environmental and business regulation. The result has been a set of diverse efforts to overcome widespread poverty, with equally diverse outcomes. This study reports the results of research into the sources of development success during the “take-off” stage of self-government. Little evidence is found to support hypotheses that resource or human capital endowments hold keys to launching Indian economies. Instead, tribal constitutional forms appear to be make-or-break keys to development. Development takes hold when these forms provide for separations of powers and when their structures match indigenous norms of political legitimacy.

The variable ties that bind: Content and circumstance in ethnic processes

Abstract This article attempts to disentangle the differential effects of content (what group members share) and circumstance (the situations they encounter) on ethnic processes. In contrast to much recent work in ethnic studies that pays attention primarily to the logic and process of boundary construction, the primary focus here is on what lies within the ethnic boundary, on the variable content of ethnic identities and the role content plays in patterns of ethnic persistence and change. The article proposes a typology of group attachments, suggesting that the content of collective identity varies continuously (low to high) along three dimensions: shared interests, shared institutions, shared culture. Ethnic groups vary ‐ within and across groups and over time ‐ in the degree to which each of these constitutes a basis of group attachment and, potentially at least, collective action. Furthermore, this variation has consequences, via interaction effects with circumstance, for patterns of group persistence...

Land, labour and group formation: Blacks and Indians in the United States

Abstract Why did a comprehensive racial consciousness emerge early among African‐Americans in the United States, but only relatively recently among Native Americans? An understanding of group formation must take into account the opportunity structures ‐ not only economic and political but conceptual ‐ that foster or discourage particular bases of collective identity and action. Critical to the Indian/Black comparison is the fact that Blacks were of interest to the larger society primarily for their labour, Indians primarily for their lands. This difference set in motion two distinct trajectories of group formation which, in turn, were shaped by particular political relationships and by the classifications made by dominant‐group members. In the Black case labour‐based relations broke down indigenous group boundaries and encouraged comprehensive racial consciousness. In the Indian case land‐based relations sustained indigenous group boundaries and discouraged the rapid emergence of comprehensive group consc...

Development Planning as the Only Game in Town

Why is development planning a central activity of city government? This paper confronts this question through the study of a small city in the Boston SMSA Development planning in this city turns out to be a contentious business. Not everyone supports it, and it is difficult to do Yet despite a number of competing planning agendas and, in particular, popular demand for human services, development planning — i e., planning for business — consistently remains the central concern of city government While there are a number of ways to account for this, the centrality of development planning seems not to be simply the result of scheming special interests, funding availability, or professional imperatives. These explanations may be correct, but each alone appears to be inadequate An examination of a variety of development projects and of the competition among alternative planning agendas suggests, rather, that development planning is the logical outcome of the particular ways in which diverse constituencies and interests within the city are linked to each other Furthermore, planning for business seems to be the only way to get certain things done Consequently, for nearly everyone, development planning becomes the only game in town

Ethnizität und Rasse Ein konstruktivistischer Ansatz

Auch wenn Maturin hier nicht uber Ethnizitat oder Rasse spricht, so hatte es doch genauso gut darum gehen konnen. Ganz ahnliche Uberlegungen finden sich namlich auch bei Fredrik Barth (vgl. Barth 1969), der bereits vor langerer Zeit Selbst- und Fremdzuschreibung zu den entscheidenden Faktoren bei der Konstruktion ethnischer Gruppen und Identitaten erklarte. Demnach entstehen ethnische Gruppen und Identitaten in einer Wechselbeziehung zwischen Zuweisungen von ausen, (fur wen oder was andere uns halten) und unseren eigenen Anspruchen (wer oder was wir selbst zu sein behaupten) (vgl. Ito-Adler 1980). Diese wechselseitigen Zuschreibungsprozesse finden fortlaufend statt und stellen damit tatsachlich eine Art reziproken Kreislauf (‚reciprocal fluxion‘) dar. Aufgrund der Wechselseitigkeit dieser Zuschreibungsprozesse lassen sich praktisch auch keine feststehenden Aussagen uber das Endprodukt machen.

Justice as Position, Justice as Practice: Indigenous Governance at the Boundary

I begin with a story. The Nisga’a Nation is an Indigenous nation in the Canadian province of British Columbia. In 1999, after more than two decades of negotiations and more than a century of Nisga’a effort to prosecute their claims, the Nisga’a Nation, Canada, and British Columbia signed a treaty that restored to the Nisga’a people a portion of their traditional lands and certain Nisga’a rights of self-government, among them the rights to make law, to resolve disputes, and to control much of what happens on their lands. In 2000, after passage by the Canadian Senate and the provision of Royal Assent, the Nisga’a Final Agreement went into effect.

The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence

An incisive look at American Indian and Euro-American relations from the seventeenth century to the present, this book focuses on how such relations-and Indian responses to them-have shaped contemporary Indian political fortunes. Cornell shows how, in the early days of colonization, Indians were able to maintain their nationhood by playing off the competing European powers; and how the American Revolution and westward expansion eventually caused Native Americans to lose their land, social cohesion, and economic independence. The final part of the book recounts the slow, steady reemergence of American Indian political power and identity, evidenced by militant political activism in the 1960s and early 1970s. By paying particular attention to the evolution of Indian groups as collective actors and to changes over time in Indian political opportunities and their capacities to act on those opportunities, Cornell traces the Indian path from power to powerlessness and back to power again.