20 Dec 2019
Professor Jessica Shoemaker’s book chapter, The Challenges of American Indian Land Tenure and the Vastness of Entrepreneurial Potential, has been published in Creating Private Sector Economies in Native America.
Shoemaker’s chapter establishes a unique link between entrepreneurship and the larger project of reservation land tenure reform. Instead of focusing only on the development challenges created by the difficult aspects of American Indian land tenure, the chapter instead emphasizes that the uncertainties created by complex land tenure systems actually create unique opportunities for entrepreneurs in particular and that encouraging this kind of entrepreneurial response could actually help transform Indigenous property systems for the better.
In the introduction to the book, Miriam Jorgensen (editor) described this point like this: “But rather than reverting to the simple solution that has attracted many pundits – privatizing reservations and essentially reviving the era of tribal land allotment – Shoemaker looks with both hope and evidence at the possibilities for locally engineered, Indigenous, creative solutions to the property-related barriers to entrepreneurship.”