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Overview: The Nation Building Approach

Stephen Cornell, Director of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy

About this course

Covers tribal assets, economic development, and why some Native nations have had success in building sustainable, self-determined economies while other similarly situated nations do not.

This module contains video and audio clips. Transcripts are available for download here.

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This course is part of a series

This course is part of the Nation Building for Native Nations: NNI EdVenture Curriculum series.

About Stephen Cornell

Stephen Cornell is director of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and Professor of Sociology and of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Arizona . He also is co-director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, a research program headquartered at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University that he co-founded in the late 1980s with Professor Joseph P. Kalt.

A specialist in political economy and cultural sociology, Cornell holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago and taught at Harvard University for nine years before moving to the University of California, San Diego, in 1989 and then to the University of Arizona in 1998. He has written widely on Indian affairs, economic development, collective identity, and ethnic and race relations.

Among his publications are The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence (Oxford University Press, 1990), What Can Tribes Do? Strategies and Institutions in American Indian Economic Development (co-edited with Joseph P. Kalt; UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 1992), and Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (co-authored with Douglas Hartmann; Pine Forge Press, 1997).

He is co-editor, with Miriam Jorgensen, of Resources for Nation Building: Governance, Development, and the Future of American Indian Nations (Arizona, 2007).

Cornell has spent much of the last 15 years working closely with Indian nations in the United States and Canada on self-governance, economic development, and tribal policy issues.