Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems - Chapter 21 docx

The Cherokee Nation and
tribal uses of GIS
Crystal Bond
Chapter 21
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
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
284 C. Bond
© 2002 Taylor & Francis
Figure 21.1 Fractionated tribal land in Adair and Sequoyah counties.
© 2002 Taylor & Francis
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.
286 C. Bond
© 2002 Taylor & Francis
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,
The Cherokee Nation and tribal uses of GIS 287
© 2002 Taylor & Francis
Figure 21.2 Malloy Hollow Road.
© 2002 Taylor & Francis
detailed attribute information linked to the road coverage was used to gen-
erate a variety of statistical reports.
With ArcInfo software, cartographers created buffers at specified dis-

tances surrounding key features, and the tribe utilized GIS technology
to analyse their own transportation needs for the very first time. The
particular roads and road segments were chosen for the 1999 inventory,
and a new set of maps was needed. This group of maps showed a
‘zoomed-in’ view of each individual road with a background of all avail-
able data layers (see Figure 21.2). Each individual road map was paired
up with its corresponding attribute information spreadsheet. By request,
the maps were printed on the same page as the BIA’s Road Needs Data
Sheet. The spreadsheets were created using Microsoft Excel software. All
the maps were generated in ArcInfo using the ArcTools module. The maps
and their spreadsheets were incorporated into a book format for day-to-
day use and to accommodate easy reproduction. Each county and all the
tribal roads within it were individually mapped also and are included in
the final product. The resulting 1999 Cherokee Nation Tribal Roads
Inventory Book contains 149 maps depicting 139 individual roads and 10
Oklahoma counties. There are approximately 100 miles of tribal roads
shown altogether.
21.2.3 Other applications in the Cherokee Nation
Within the Cherokee Nation, more departments are aiming for the capa-
city to use geospatial technology to make intelligent, highly informed deci-
sions when planning their projects. The Roads Department has made the
decision to begin learning and using ArcView routinely, as part of their regu-
lar work. The Natural Resources Department now has its own Global
Positioning System and well-trained tribal employees who know how to
use it. The Office of Environmental Services uses ArcView extensively to
help perform site assessments and analyses for potential hazardous waste
sites. The Center provides technical assistance and other mapping serv-
ices for these departments and for those without GIS capability in their
areas. In addition, the GeoData Center combines health data, crime data,
social data, population data, and other demographic information with

geospatial data to perform analyses and create maps to illustrate the
results.
These projects have set examples for other sovereign tribes responsible
for their own transportation planning and tribal land management.
5
GIS
allows tribes an accurate, dependable method of inventorying and develop-
ing their own transportation networks, tribal land datasets, environmental
baseline data, demographics, and other geographic information (see Figure
21.3).
The Cherokee Nation and tribal uses of GIS 289
© 2002 Taylor & Francis
Figure 21.3 Tribal population within Cherokee jurisdiction.
© 2002 Taylor & Francis
21.3 GIS APPLICATIONS IN OTHER TRIBES
The previous situations are specific to the Cherokee Nation, but several
other tribes have completed their tribal land data sets and have been per-
forming advanced geospatial analysis and cartographic output for several
years. The application of GIS within tribal governments can help empower
tribes, especially with regard to natural resources management and land
and water rights litigation. Some examples are listed here.
21.3.1 Change in land status
In 1987, in land litigation between Zuni Pueblo and the United States, a
GIS was used to develop an automated spatial database identifying lands
taken from the Zuni tribe. The GIS was used to develop an inventory of
Zuni land taken from them between 1846 and 1939. The display and query
abilities of the GIS allowed the attorneys to visualize and quantify how the
Zuni sovereign area had changed over time. As a result, 255,266 acres were
identified in the Zuni Aboriginal Area over what the Zuni had originally
identified. This is significant when compensation for the land taken is a

monetary value paid for each acre.
6
21.3.2 Water rights litigation
In previous Indian water rights adjudication cases, aerial photos were used
to identify and inventory lands where irrigation was practical and prac-
ticed. Often, hundreds of aerial photos have to be photointerpreted. This
can become overwhelming. The Wind River Reservation v. the State of
Wyoming water rights adjudication case lasted for 12 years.
7
Such projects
will be significantly more manageable if the irrigated fields were mapped
and entered into a GIS. The addition of a land ownership parcel layer is an
important component of GIS water rights adjudication.
8
21.3.3 Natural resources management
Many tribes are using geospatial technology to manage their natural and
cultural resources. The Yakima Tribe in Washington State, the White
Mountain Apache in Arizona and the Salish Kootenai in Montana utilize
GIS technology to inventory, analyse, map and make decisions regarding
tribal resources. Examples of such resources include timber production,
grazing and farm land, water rights, wildlife, native plants, cultural sites,
environmental data and hazardous site monitoring, historical preservation,
health and human resources.
The Cherokee Nation and tribal uses of GIS 291
© 2002 Taylor & Francis
21.3.4 Planning & development
Some tribes utilize GIS technology for urban applications. The Agua Caliente
Band of Cahuilla Indians in Palm Springs, California and the Cherokee
Nation in Tahlequah, Oklahoma have developed urban projects specific to
tribal needs. The decisions made using geospatial analysis can apply to a wide

range of programmes and projects and include such things as: health clinic
locations, school bus routes, housing, smoke shop and casino locations, tribal
demographic analysis, transportation planning, tourism and others.
21.4 CONCLUSION
Now that the BIA has withdrawn from the tribal GIS implementation fore-
front, the IGC has stepped up to take its place. New developments in coop-
erative agreements with the ESRI, NASA, the US Dept of Commerce, the
US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other significant partners
have made it possible for the IGC to offer quality assistance to tribes in
need. In cooperation with the IGC, ESRI provides GIS software grants for
tribes and registration fee waivers for tribal GIS professionals to attend the
annual ESRI conference. NASA, in conjunction with the University of New
Mexico and the EPA, works with the IGC to collect and develop baseline
tribal environmental data for a long-term global warming project. Typical
IGC services include: GIS education and training, tribal data acquisition
and development, tribal economic impact/development studies and plan-
ning assistance, data management and maintenance of proprietary files
and protection of sensitive data for tribal organizations and GIS work
for tribes and organizations having no GIS capabilities. Experienced IGC
personnel and board members act as liaisons to encourage technology
transfer and cooperative agreements between tribal and non-tribal entities.
The annual IGC conference plays an integral part in the dissemination of
GIS knowledge in Indian Country. Each year the IGC facilitates a week-
long national conference geared toward the advancement of tribal GIS
technology. Software training, GIS application seminars and workshops,
project-oriented presentations, funding resources and networking with
tribal GIS professionals are some of the benefits available to conference
attendees. IGC membership and conference attendance is steadily increas-
ing each year. Conference and IGC membership information is available on
the website at www.itgisc.org. As tribes become increasingly aware of the

capacities of GIS technology as a decision-making tool for tribal resource
management, the IGC is expected to grow and expand its capacity to serve
and assist all tribes.
With the passing of time, natural resources management and conservation
will become more important to everyone. Tribes are the stewards of many
292 C. Bond
© 2002 Taylor & Francis
natural resources that still remain in this country. It is to the advantage of our
country’s population as a whole that tribes are using state-of-the-art techno-
logy to manage, nurture, conserve and maintain their natural resources.
NOTES
1. Intertribal GIS Council, PO Box 1937, Pendleton, OR 97801, www.itgisc.org.
(541) 966–9097.
2. Census of Population, 2000, US Bureau of Census, Washington, DC.
3. Tony Glass, GIS Analyst, Cherokee Nation GeoData Center developed the
Cherokee Nation Land Information System. AML. (CNLIS.AML) 1998.
4. US Bureau of Census, TIGER files 1992, enhanced by Wessex Company.
5. Public Law 102–240 provides for tribal determination of its own needs and
priorities for the allocation of federal highway funds.
6. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 15(3): 81, 1991.
7. Teno Roncalio, Report Concerning Reserved Water Right Claims By and On
Behalf of the Tribes of the Wind River Indian Reservation Wyoming, District
Court of the Fifth Judicial District State of Wyoming, Civil No. 4993, 15
December 1982.
8. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 15(3): 84, 1991.
The Cherokee Nation and tribal uses of GIS 293
© 2002 Taylor & Francis