Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems - Chapter 21

Chapter 21 The Cherokee Nation and tribal uses of GIS Crystal Bond 21.1 INTRODUCTION Geographic information technology was first introduced to American Indian Tribes by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The Geographic Data Service Center (GDSC) was established by the BIA in Lakewood, Colorado in 1990. The mission of the GDSC was to bring geospatial technology to tribal people and teach them how to use it themselves. The GDSC originally offered a variety of GIS implementation services to tribes. It provided cost-free training and a wide range of technical assistance to help tribes implement their own GIS. The highly trained BIA technical staff collected, compiled, enhanced, and standardized GPS, satellite and other digital geographic information relevant to tribal concerns. The result-ing data sets became the foundation for the first tribal, geospatial database development projects in the United States. The GDSC was a springboard for tribal people in the field of GIS. It is a credit to the foresight and mission planning of the BIA, and the skill and dedication of the technical staff employed by the GDSC, that their mission to implement tribal GIS programmes was accomplished. Due to the efforts of the GDSC staff, state-of-the-art GIS programmes have been successfully implemented for many American Indian tribes. Over a 10-year period, other projects at the BIA have taken precedence over the GDSC. Services previously provided to tribes are extremely limited and steadily decreasing. As a result of the federally mandated downsizing of the GDSC and its services, there are now two distinct groups of American tribes with regard to geospatial technology; those who have it and those who don’t. The first group used the GDSC to get started in GIS. This group now has a responsibility to assist the tribes not able to utilize the GDSC before it was downsized. This sense of responsibility manifested itself in the form of the Intertribal GIS Council (IGC)1. The IGC was first established in 1993 with a seed grant from the First Nations Development Institute. It was created to educate tribal organizations and individuals about the various useful applications of © 2002 Taylor & Francis 284 C. Bond spatial data technologies to the management of all types of resources. Over the course of several years, the IGC has adjusted its goals to provide those services no longer available to tribes through the BIA’s GDSC. 21.2 GIS AT THE CHEROKEE NATION One of the tribes lucky enough to have taken advantage of the GDSC in its prime was the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. The Cherokee Nation’s head-quarters are located in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains in a small town called Tahlequah (tal-eh-kwa). Indian population is about 117,000,2 the Cherokee Nation has what is known as a ‘checkerboard’ land base; it is not a reservation with a single, perimeter-based boundary. The checkerboard of tribal land encompasses a 14-county area in Northeastern Oklahoma. This creates a series of complicated problems when dealing with tribal land and law enforcement jurisdiction questions (see Figure 21.1). 21.2.1 Cherokee Nation tribal land project One of the most urgent questions the Cherokees are dealing with is the question of jurisdiction. Is it tribal land, individually-owned land, govern-ment land held in trust, restricted land or any number of other categories? The answer to this question determines which of the local law enforcement agencies has jurisdiction. The County Sheriff’s Office cannot make an arrest on restricted tribal land. The Cherokee Marshal Service cannot enforce the law on individually owned property. The nature of this checkerboard land base is such that an Indian home on one side of the street may be within tribal jurisdiction, but the open field across the street where a crime is committed may be under the jurisdiction of the county. Law enforcement officials need to know exactly where the boundaries are. This is a serious problem for the Cherokee Nation. Inadequate tribal land information leads to a loss of convictions for known criminals. Those found guilty of crimes are often released because of jurisdictional questions and related legal technicalities. This perpetuates a crime rate that goes unchecked. When the Cherokee Nation implemented their GIS, jurisdictional boundaries were the first data sets acquired. GIS staff used an original legal description provided to the Cherokee Realty Department by the BIA as the data source. ArcInfo’s coordinate geometry module was used to input the boundary. The county and tribal voting district boundaries were taken from the 1990 US Census TIGER line files. In addition with other TIGER data and the locations of all the Indian health clinics, a map could be produced to show spatial relationships between the clinics and the county, voting district and jurisdictional boundaries. Within these © 2002 Taylor & Francis Figure 21.1 Fractionated tribal land in Adair and Sequoyah counties. © 2002 Taylor & Francis 286 C. Bond boundaries exist a checkerboard of tribal, non-tribal, restricted, non-restricted and many other categories of land ownership. This is where the real challenge begins. To create an accurate geographic data set of tribal land, an investment had to be made by the tribe. Existing tribal personnel who were AutoCad drafters were converted into GIS cartographers. Tribal employees attended lengthy training workshops to learn ArcInfo. The expense of GIS training would have been prohibitive without the help of the GDSC in Lakewood. GIS staff was also sent to Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) training centres for intensive, advanced ArcInfo training. GIS equipment and software were also major expenditures approved of by the Cherokee Tribal Council. With all the hardware, software, personnel and base data intact, the Cherokee Nation’s first digital, tribal lands data development project began. An inter-departmental agreement was made between the GeoData Center and the Cherokee Realty Department to cooperate on this project. Real estate personnel provide the GeoData staff with legal descriptions of tribal land from original deeds and treaties. Slowly, GIS technicians input the legal descriptions using ArcEdit COGO and an Arc Macro Language (AML) created in-house by tribal GIS staff.3 An incomplete, in-progress tribal land data set is already being used by several departments within the Cherokee Nation for a variety of needs. For example, the Planning Department uses maps showing tribal land to illustrate grant proposals and the Natural Resources Department uses the data as a background for its GPS projects. (A disclaimer stating the incomplete nature of the tribal lands coverage and that tribal land data is in-progress is printed on each map.) One of the most serious problems concerning tribal land boundary infor-mation is that of legal jurisdiction. Local law enforcement agencies need to know exactly where their legal jurisdiction begins and where it ends. The Cherokee Marshall Service, Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, city of Tahlequah, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are all interested in Cherokee tribal land ownership status. Undisputed jurisdictional bound-aries are very important to these agencies and their ability to make arrests and follow up with convictions. In order to map and perform analysis involving legal jurisdiction, each tract of land must be categorized and attributed with land ownership infor-mation. To help offset the cost of such labour-intensive work, the tribe is seeking federal grants and cooperative agreements with other agencies to get this done as soon as possible. Even with cooperation from other agen-cies and federal funding, this job is expected to take several years to com-plete. The nature of the Cherokee’s checkerboard land base and the numerous tribal land ownership categories make it an exceptionally labour-intensive task. © 2002 Taylor & Francis The Cherokee Nation and tribal uses of GIS 287 When the information is in the GIS and ready to be used, the spatial jurisdiction information will be shared with law enforcement and other interested agencies outside the tribe. Although some tribal information is proprietary, most digital, geographic information can be shared. This will significantly reduce duplication of effort and contribute to successful part-nerships with law enforcement in the future. 21.2.2 Transportation planning Another issue being addressed by the Cherokee people is transportation planning. This is usually considered an urban problem found mostly in cities and more developed areas. The considerations for the tribe are more rural in nature. The solutions being sought are ways to accommodate the transportation of tribal elders from fairly isolated rural homes to Indian health clinics, community centres, churches, shopping areas, and other events located in the surrounding towns and cities. Good roads are also needed for school bus routes and access from Indian housing clusters and other areas of high Indian population. The 1999 tribal roads project was a joint endeavour between the Cherokee Nation Roads Department and the Cherokee Nation GeoData Center. Through a series of informative meetings and GIS demonstrations, the Roads Department became educated regarding potential applications of GIS technology to their work. In 1998, the inter-departmental partnership was formed and the Cherokee Nation’s first GIS-based tribal roads inven-tory project began. A series of maps were needed to illustrate exactly where existing tribal roads were located, where proposed roads would be built and where main-tenance and repairs were needed. Using ArcInfo software and enhanced TIGER line files,4 a set of working maps was created. A list of attributes used by the BIA to score and prioritize specific road projects was incorpo-rated into the descriptive, attribute data for the new tribal road coverage. Data layers representing the physical environment were used as a back-ground for the maps. This allowed for quick spatial analysis at a glance. A variety of factors are used in the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ method of rating proposals for new roads. Included among these factors are things like tribal population, locations of schools, vicinities of churches and other cul-tural areas, medical facilities, mutual help housing clusters, and places of employment for tribal members. The working maps were completed and used by management to plan and prioritize the work to be done. A detailed work schedule was developed and road crews began collecting attribute data from the field. This information was returned to the GeoData Center where it was input into an Access database and used to attribute the tribal road coverage. The in-depth, © 2002 Taylor & Francis ... - tailieumienphi.vn