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In one way, the Navajo and in another way the Southern Ute are examples of tribes who have done well.After the Long Walk the Navajo succeeded again and again in getting their land base expanded. Most tribes lost much or all of their treaty lands between 1868 and 1960. This did not happen for the Navajo. Time and again their culture, strategies and leaders found allies in the US government and out of it who applied pressure. The first reservation boundaries were in 1868. The US government had wanted to force all the Navajo to move to Oklahoma, then known as Indian Territory. The Navajo leaders said they would rather die. The large number of deaths and corruption at the interment camps that had held the 9,000 Navajo for 4 years had become a scandal. A number of Anglos were very taken with Navajo culture and argued their case. The first reservation in 1868 was a small part of their original land centered on Canyon de Chelly.The first expansion was in 1878. It was expanded about 13 or 14 times. The last major expansion was in 1930s. In recent years they have been buying land as well. Here is the map of land additions.In 1887 the Navajo lost some land in the eastern New Mexico area. Powerful New Mexico political interested opposed the land given to them in the area. Some areas were rescinded. The Dawes Act passed and land was allotted to some families there. The government said that land "left over" after all members had received allotments was to be considered "surplus". This was sold to non Navajo or given to state or BLM or other uses. Some places the subsurface and surface rights are owned by different entities. The allotment program continued until 1934. The eastern part is today called the “Checkerboard Rez”.Here is the map of today’s reservation. The area that is tan in the lower left is not Navajo land but the Hopi reservation. The Navajo Nations today is the size of Holland and Belgium combined or the states of Mass, Conn, VT, NH, and RI combined.With that expansion of land base into a portion of their original territory came some natural resources. For the time from 1868 to about 1970 they could not negotiate royalties on their own. Many disgraceful deals were made by the US Secretary of the Interior and the BIA. What money that was collected as royalties was often mismanaged or lost. The courts finally recognized this and a portion of those funds that should have been in trust have been returned under the Cobell settlement in 2009. The tribe is using some of that money to buy back land. The tribe has over time been able to strike better deals for its coal, oil and natural gas. It now has the largest contiguous irrigated farm in the US. Navajo Agricultural Products IndustryThe Navajo have also grown in population. After the Long Walk the population was about 11,000 people. Around 1908 they had grown to 29,000. Today there are 332,129 enrolled members in 2010. About 160,000 to 200,000 live on the reservation or right near it. The Navajo language is still spoken by about 60% of the population and one can hear it everywhere. Traditional religion is still practiced by at least 1/3 of the population. They now have full control of their government. The new religion (for the Navajo since the 30s) of Native American Church (NAC) is practiced by many as well. Navajo art and culture are alive and thriving. There is modern Navajo bands and music and art as well. They have a regular justice department but have also developed an alternative court system based on traditional values. They have radio and a newspaper. They run schools and have a tribal college, Dine College, which was the first tribal college in the country in 1968. They also have Navajo Technical University in 3 locations.The other tribe that has done very well are the Southern Ute. https://www.southernute-nsn.gov/ They gained control over their gas resources in the 1970s. They built their own companies in the 1990s. They created a sovereign wealth Permanent Fund and other investments. Southern Ute Indian Tribe As late as the 1950s, many Southern Ute had no running water or income. Today tribal businesses are in 14 states and range from Gulf crude to upscale San Diego real estate. The 1,400 or so tribal members are, collectively, worth billions. Up into the 1960s because of bad federal policy and poor oversight, many Southwestern tribes, got bad deals. When a company wanted to gouge a reservation's land for coal, or drill for oil and gas, it would negotiate not with the tribe, but with the Department of Interior, which leased the land to the highest bidder. The tribes had to approve the leases but were otherwise powerless, and they generally lacked the expertise and data to make good energy decisions. The federal government managed, audited and collected royalties on the leases. Much of that was not collected as it should have been and what was collected was mismanaged. This was later the subject of the Cobell suit and other cases against the US.In the 1960s the tribe received less than $500,000 per year in royalties. This was a small fraction of what the oil companies were making and far less than it was owed. In the late 1960 through the 70s laws changed. The Southern Utes joined 24 other tribal leaders to form the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, or CERT, modeled after the international OPEC cartel, to consolidate their political power. In 1982, in an effort to improve oversight, Congress created the Minerals Management Service and passed the Indian Mineral Development Act, which gave tribes the power to negotiate mineral leases. That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court made a favorable ruling in a case involving the Apaches, saying that tribes could levy a severance tax on oil and gas produced on their lands. The Southern Ute started auditing their own gas. Even today the oil companies try to cheat. In 2010,based on information from Southern Ute auditors, the feds fined BP America $5.2 million for underreporting the amount of gas it had been producing on Southern Ute lands.“The Tribe’s business portfolio originated with the formation of Red Willow Production Company in 1992 and the purchase of Red Cedar Gathering Company in 1994. Red Willow was originally formed to buy back natural gas leases and to upgrade the performance of gas wells on the Reservation. However, Red Willow could not convince local gathering companies to increase their capacity to transport the Tribe’s new volumes of gas to the interstate pipelines. To solve this problem, the Tribe partnered with the Stephens Group in 1994, and purchased Red Cedar to gather, process and transport natural gas from the Reservation”When Red Willow took over 54 gas wells in 1995, it quadrupled their production within nine months.….The Growth Fund’s business portfolio initially contained only Red Willow, Red Cedar and a few small Tribal Organizations: Department of Energy, Utilities Division and the Sky Ute Fairgrounds….Tribal Council instructed the Growth Fund to diversify operations off of the Reservation and into other ventures and investments. Since 2001, Red Willow has expanded its operations into nine states and the Gulf of Mexico, and Aka Energy was created to gather and treat natural gas off of the Reservation…..the Tribe established the Tierra Group to manage the Tribe’s real estate portfolio. Later, GF Properties Group was formed and Tierra folded under GF Properties which now manages the Tribe’s commercial/office, apartment, industrial, hotel, mixed-use and master planned communities. GF Private Equity Group was formed to invest in private equity funds and businesses.The Permanent Fund and the Growth Fund: The Permanent Fund invests energy royalties and casino profits in securities, which generate a steady revenue to pay for government and social services.Other revenue goes into the Growth Fund, which in turn invests in what is now a myriad of companies in energy, real estate and private equity. That fund then distributes dividends to tribal members between the ages of 26 and 59 and retirement benefits to those over 60. The numbers vary year by year. Most yeas is is about $70,000. The tribe's net worth now stands at somewhere between $3.5 billion and $14 billion.How Colorado’s Southern Utes Took Control of Their Economic Destiny - IndianCountryToday.comBusiness Empire Transforms Life for Colorado Ute TribeNB: It has been noted by L. Dale Richesin that there should be a mention of the 13 Alaska Native Regional Corporations. I agree. They are enormous economic players in Alaska and the NW and are diversifying in investments across the country. Here is his list of the top three. Which Native American tribe ended up the best off?The ANCSA Corps were created in the Alaska Settlement Act in 1971. The regional Native corporations and several village corporations employ 58,000 people worldwide, with about 16,000 of those jobs in Alaska. Native corporations are the largest private landowners in Alaska, with title to a total of 44 million acres. The Act gave even more land to the state of Alaska. Most of the land had been considered federal before that. In Alaska, tribal members are shareholders in the Regional Corps. There are also about 198 or so Alaska Village corporations that people are shareholders in as well. Alaska Native Village Corporation Association There is only one small reservation in SE Alaska. The political structure of tribal life for the 229 tribes in Alaska is therefore slightly different. List of Alaska Native tribal entities - WikipediaAlaskan Tribes: By Regional OrganizationsAny tribe that is dong well now however, should be very careful and beware. Two of the most wealthy tribes in the past 100 years lost most of what they had when Anglo Americans decided to change the game and take it from them. In the 1950s the Klamath Tribes of Oregon was the most wealthy in the US. In 1870 they had started n to the lumber business with a sawmill. By 1896 the sale to parties outside of the reservation was estimated at a quarter of a million board feet. In 1911 the rail came and they increased more. They were the only tribe in the United States that paid for all the federal, state and private services used by our members.In 1954, the Klamath Tribes were terminated from federal recognition as a tribe by an act of congress. A report from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) which concluded that the Klamath Tribes were NOT ready for termination and recommended against it. Despite this consistent official opposition from the Tribes and the BIA, congress adopted the Klamath Termination Act. Powerful politicians did not like Native people doing well. Oregon Senator Richard L. Neuberger, (Democrat) and Oregon Representative Albert Ullman, (Democrat) worked together to try to delay implementation of the Klamath termination law. They failed because of Senator Arthur V. Watkins, a Republican from Utah. He had the belief that Native people should be assimilated and all special status lifted. He worked with William H. Harrison (Wyoming), Orme Lewis of Arizona, EY Berry of SD, Patrick McCarran of Nevada, Karl Mundt of SD, William Langer of ND, and Henry Jackson of Washington. They lost their land base of approximately 1.8 million acres was taken by condemnation and the Klamaths were terminated as a Tribe. They became impoverished. It was not until 1986 that they were successful in restoring of Federal Recognition for the Klamath Tribes.The other large example is the Osage who gained wealth by controlling their oil mineral rights. This was because they owned the land. Oil was discovered in 1897. In 1923 alone the tribe took in more than thirty million dollars, the equivalent today of more than four hundred million dollars. 1921 the United States Congress passed a law requiring that courts appoint guardians for each Osage. Supposedly to “prevent swindles” on the Osage people, the government appointed guardians to the Osage who were deemed “incompetent” to handle their finances. Stories in papers claimed outrage the Native people had wealth and were “wasting it” on fancy cars and nice clothes and trips to Europe. 93 percent of tribal funds held in government trust went toward the costs of administering the guardianship system. A government study estimated that by 1924 nearly 600 guardians had swindled some $8 million in Osage oil funds.If they had been able to invest $8 million even after the Depression they would be very wealthy today. During this time tens of people were murdered for their money. The FBI came in but they did little. The tribe was even charged by the FBI $21,509.19 for the bureau’s investigation (about 300,000 today). In 2000 the Osage Nation filed a suit against the Department of the Interior, alleging that it had not adequately managed the assets and paid people the royalties they were due. The suit was settled in 2011 for $380 million and commitments to improve program management. This was pennies on the dollar. Did You Know?The Osage Murders: Oil Wealth, Betrayal and the FBI’s First Big Case

Great detail follows. This is a lengthy description of a toxic work environment.This deals directly with the “reformed rocket scientist” part of my bio. In 2012, I got a job as a telemetry and power systems engineer working on sounding rockets, and that job was the most toxic environment I’ve ever encountered. I dreaded the hour long drive to work every day, I loathed most (not all! a few remain friends to this day) of the people I had to deal with, and had supervisors so mean and evil that sometimes I questioned my professional competence. I was berated, yelled at, and demeaned on a regular basis.Training, or Lack Thereof, With a Heaping Helping of IncompetenceI was told when I hired on that a more senior engineer would show me the ins and outs of working on rockets. That could not have been further from the truth. The most senior engineer in my department (we’ll call him Mike, which is not his name) had over 30 years of experience, but his attitude was, in his words, “I am not here to be a teacher. I am here to work on rockets. Either you help me with that, you figure out how to help me with that, or go find something else to do.” What a narrowminded, toxic mindset! Even if Mike had been willing to train me, his domain knowledge of rockets was second-to-none but his practical engineering skills were often sorely lacking. Our missions would generate data files that were gigabytes in size, but he insisted on analyzing them in Microsoft Excel! His approach was to spread each mission over many Excel files. For one mission, Mike had over 40 different Excel files! I tried showing Mike how more suitable tools could make his life easier. The company even gave us all MATLAB licenses. I demonstrated how, with a few lines of code, I could make a plot in less than 5 minutes that had taken him several weeks to produce with his madness of Excel files. Mike said, “That’s nice, but I don’t want to write code to analyze data.”Okay, so apprenticeship-type training wasn’t going to work. But I’m not scared of a little reading, so I asked for some training materials. Only to be told, “We don’t have any. Maybe you should make some!” So I tried, only to have my efforts destroyed by Mike, who was the final approver needed for any official procedures for the department. Mike kept my procedures in review hell for so long it became clear that they would never actually be released. No changes I made were enough to please him.Unethical BehaviorOnce I sat in a meeting with several other payload engineers and the associate site director. The AD was upset that we had not begun work on the mission. One poor launch vehicles engineer raised his hand and said, “Sir, we haven’t been given a charge number (an official account to charge our time worked against).” The AD became angry, pounded the table, and said “NEVER LET A CHARGE NUMBER STAND IN THE WAY OF DOING YOUR JOB. YOU CHARGE THAT WORK TO ANOTHER MISSION AND GET ON WITH IT.” I pointed out that working on one thing while charging to another on a US government contract was a federal crime, and was told to keep my mouth shut. I continued to charge in a legal way and reported the AD’s comments to the company’s ethics hotline. Nothing changed, as even months later I was in other meetings where the same AD urged employees to mischarge.My direct supervisor was also unethical. He developed an “unofficial-official procedure” for handling revisions of engineering drawings. The procedure was on a PowerPoint slide that we were only allowed to look at for 5 minutes. We were not given a hard or soft copy of this slide, but we were expected to follow it to the letter. Should an auditor ask about this procedure, though, we were expected to lie and say that we were actually following the procedure officially released in our internal Configuration Management system. I protested vigorously, because this is the sort of thing that gets you in trouble fast. I will never, ever lie to any auditor.The Technical Review From HellAs part of the mission cycle, us poor engineers had to put together big thick design packages for presentation to the customer. Because there were no official standards for these things (but lots of unwritten rules), my workflow went like this:Find an old design review package for the previous mission this science payload was flown on.Tweak it, incorporating the technical changes you made.Make updated plots as appropriateSubmit it to Mike and brace for impactMike, again, was the lead technical reviewer and was always assigned to my payloads so as to “babysit” (my manager’s words) me. He had final approval over my design review package. I needed his approval before going to the formal Design Review (which was an official, contract deliverable presentation to the customer, NASA). On the very first mission I put together, Mike had a huge document of proposed changes for me, over 100 items in all. I struggled to incorporate all the changes in time, but I did it. Knowing I had done what he wanted, I went to the Review, where Mike was also my “panel member”, or person responsible for helping me out in case I needed backup.But instead, Mike made it his mission in the Review to completely destroy my plots and presentation. It was so bad that the customer representatives actually protested to my senior management that Mike had treated me unfairly!Out of the Design Review came even more “action items” — things I had to act on and change in order to have an officially approved design. Mike was responsible for passing these on to me and certifying that I did them correctly.I could not make Mike happy. Over the course of six months, I submitted the design package to him no less than 7 times. Each time he would find new things to complain about. I was diligent in doing what he wanted at first, but when he started objecting to minor, inconsequential things (“You used the wrong shade of blue here, I don’t like that shade”), I grew frustrated and protested to my manager. My manager berated me for being so stupid.I never finished that Review Package. I quit my job with the company 3 days after Mike asked me to revise the package for the 8th time, but not before I told Mike to finish the report himself.Outdated Technology and ‘Colors of Money’This story takes place from 2012 to 2014. I had come from the aircraft flight test world, where we used telemetry hardware programmable with an ordinary Windows laptop.The telemetry hardware in use in the sounding rocket world dated from the early 1990s and was only programmable by burning a .HEX file to an EEPROM. So if your stack had a programming error, you would have to mechanically disassemble it, pull the EEPROM, reprogram it, reassemble the stack, test every single measurement on it, and continue testing. A single error could cost over a day of work. In the aircraft world I was used to, such a mistake would have cost me, at most, 30 minutes.The real-time monitoring software we used to observe test data was written in 1989 in a blend of x86 assembly and Borland Turbo C, and ran exclusively on DOS. Every 30 seconds during a test or launch I had to hit the PRINT SCREEN key, which would cause a tractor-feed, dot matrix printer to print the current contents of the screen.So in the year 2013 I was launching things into outer space using Microsoft DOS.The telemetry hardware was very poor — very unstable (analog channels tended to drift) and difficult to configure properly. Replacement hardware had to be purchased from New Mexico State University (the developer and vendor). They were taking 3 to 5 YEARS to deliver hardware after ordering.NO PROMOTIONS FOR YOUMy boss, Dave, once told me that, and this is a direct quote from my log book for the day, “You need to work 15 to 20 hours of unpaid overtime each week to even be considered for a promotion.”Work, InterruptedDave was a supremely annoying micromanager. He was always wandering by for status checks. I understand the theory of “management by walking around” but Dave took it to an extreme. One day I got fed up and decided to keep track of how many times Dave interrupted me. That day, it was 17 times. I kept the tracking up for a few weeks. He never came by less than 7 times and sometimes it was as frequent as 25 times per day. How can I do serious design work if I am constantly interrupted?The meeting schedule also started to get out of hand. Management realized that my department was poorly trained, so in addition to our team weekly status meetings every Friday morning, we had to have weekly meetings every Thursday morning with the Chief Engineer. The CE was not a particularly nice man and loved to meet every problem with a “Just go and fix it” recommendation. Soon we were ALSO having weekly “training” sessions every Tuesday morning. Between these meetings and the meetings I had to have in the normal course of working on payload teams, over half of the work week was devoted to meetings. If I were a senior manager, I would expect this, but I was a low level grunt design engineer. I should be pushing dots on a computer screen, or testing something out in a lab, NOT having my time wasted in meetings.The Last StrawsMy last straws came over the months of December 2013 and January 2014. In December, I found out that I was not getting a bonus that most other people received. And on January 3rd, the first day back from our Holiday break, it snowed just before dawn. Our area had no snow removal equipment. My normally-1-hour drive to work took over 2. I called ahead to let my boss know I would be late. When I made it to the office after almost wrecking my car 3 separate times, the boss immediately berated me for being late. I decided right then to find another job. Within 3 months I found alternative employment, allowing me to quit being a rocket scientist.The Exit InterviewI told HR that if things didn’t drastically change, they would soon lose half my department. They actually laughed at me and said I was delusional.They were right, I was wrong. Within a year, more than half of the department had quit.

In many states some executive branch officials are elected. Each state is different. In my state of New Mexico, the following officers are elected: Governor, Lieutenant Governor (similar to Vice President), Attorney General, Treasurer, Auditor, and Commissioner of Public Lands. Many other states have similar systems.Is this a good idea? You can certainly make a case that the attorney general should be elected and answerable to the people, not the governor. Many of us wish that US Attorney General William Barr were answerable to the people.You could also make a case that the state’s secretary of state should be non-partisan and answerable to the people since at the state level this official handles elections. It is weird to have a partisan official elected to oversee non-partisan elections. Of course the national Secretary of State has a completely different role.But should people of a state elect their treasurer or auditor? Very few voters have the expertise to knowledge to determine whether a candidate for these offices is competent to do their job. Similarly few people have the knowledge to vote for a national secretary of the treasury or secretary of housing and urban development.Most cabinet officials at the state and national level should be appointed to carry out the policy of the governor or the president. Confirmation provides the role of indirectly getting approval of the people. Also, many cabinet officers are actually elected senators, representatives, or governors who resigned to take a cabinet position.Most answers here point to separation of powers, and this is indeed our constitutional system. But it doesn’t mean that reform (such as electing the attorney general) shouldn’t be considered.