Last week, a second Native American-owned corporation announced it was severing a multi-million dollar contract with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), after community pressure.
A subsidiary of Oneida ESC Group, a corporation owned by the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, cancelled a US $3.8 million contract with ICE for engineering and inspection of federal facilities after the Oneida government became aware of and condemned the contract. The Oneida government also replaced the subsidiary’s board of managers.
Oneida Nation of Wisconsin’s Chairman Tahassi Hill, in an email to CBC Indigenous, wrote that every nation should have the power to determine its own vision and values.
“When issues arise that conflict with our laws, policies and core values, we must remain steadfast in acting immediately,” the statement said.
Last month, Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation in Kansas announced it had cancelled a US $29.9 million contract for planning, research and concept designs for secure structures that its corporation had with ICE, and had fired senior members of the corporation’s leadership.
“We know our Indian reservations were the government’s first attempts at detention centres. We were placed here because we were treated as prisoners of war,” said Prairie Band Tribal Chairman Joseph “Zeke” Rupnick, in a statement on YouTube.
“We must ask ourselves why we would ever participate in something that mirrors the harm and trauma once done to our people.”
Becky Webster, an enrolled citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and former senior staff attorney for the tribe, said tribal corporations operate independently from nations, so they can more nimbly expand into different economic ventures. It also protects the nation from certain legal liabilities.
Becky Webster, an enrolled citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and its former senior staff attorney, said she was ‘shocked’ to learn her nation had a contract with ICE. (Submitted by Becky Webster)
Corporate boards provide oversight of daily operations rather than the nation, though there is regular reporting.
Webster said she was shocked when she learned her nation held a contract with ICE.
“The nature of the contracts runs counter to who I thought we were as a people and the values that we hold,” she said.
Matthew L. M. Fletcher, a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and a professor of law and American culture at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich., said the contracts are examples of affirmative action programs dating back to the 1960s and 1970s that favoured historically disadvantaged, minority-owned businesses.
Tribally owned corporations, Alaska Native corporations (created by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971), Native Hawaiian organizations and businesses that are 51 per cent tribally owned are eligible for preferences in contracting under the federal section 8(a) program.
Matthew L.M. Fletcher, a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, is a law professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich. (Submitted by Matthew L.M. Fletcher)
8(a) is a contracting and business development program for small business owners who are socially and economically disadvantaged.
“Congress created what they called set asides to make sure that at least a portion of defence contracting and other federal government contracting went to minority-owned businesses,” Fletcher said.
He said around the 2000s provisions were expanded, removing a cap for Indigenous-owned businesses, eliminating some paperwork still required by other minorities and authorizing no-bid awards to tribally owned or Alaska Native corporations.
While other affirmative action programs have been ended by the current administration, 8(a) was not affected.
“The weird thing is that the Trump people would never go in with Indigenous peoples as a matter of principle given their political stance against what they call DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion],” Fletcher said in an email.
“But the legal position these tribes are in makes this kind of contracting very attractive to them.”
Fletcher said tribes are not publicly traded corporations, so they don’t have to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and “generally don’t have to share information in terms of public accountability to anybody.”
And for matters of national security, public requests for information can be ignored, he said.
Pass-through entities
Akima, a business portfolio of NANA Regional Corporation, which is owned by 11 Iñupiaq villages in Northwest Alaska, holds multi-million dollar contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, including in relation to detention services at the Guantanamo Bay naval base.
NANA and Akima did not respond to requests for comment by time of publishing.
An April 10, 2025 statement on NANA’s website said “Since 2013, NANA and our affiliated companies have secured federal contracts in support of U.S. government-owned detention facilities. We have robust internal policies and compliance programs in place to ensure operations align with legal and ethical expectations.”
In the statement, board chair Piquk Linda Lee was quoted, “NANA does not deviate from our Iñupiat Iḷitqusiat values in the pursuit of contracts. Our values are fundamental to who we are as people and as professionals. They guide everything we do at NANA – upholding the dignity and wellbeing of every person.
“While we are limited in what we can share publicly about specific customers and contracts, we remain committed to transparency for our shareholders and accountability in all that we do.”
Fletcher said other Alaska Native corporations, the Mississippi Choctaw, Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, Cherokee Nation, Chickasaw and some tribes in Oklahoma also do logistics work for the federal government, Fletcher said.
He said often these tribal corporations operate as pass-through or “strawman” entities.
“They will never do any of the work. They just happen to have that legal advantage of being eligible for no-bid contracting with no monetary cap on it,” Fletcher said.
Writer and environmentalist Winona LaDuke from White Earth Reservation in Minnesota said the situation today reminds her of the early ’80s.
“They were trying to peddle nuclear waste and like 16 of the 20 recipients of the initial grants were Indian tribes,” she said.
“That was because there was a lot of money involved — no-strings money — and poor people with a lot of pressure on them.”
Winona LaDuke is from White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. (Submitted by Winona LaDuke )
She said turning Indigenous people into corporations is a colonization process.
“Then you make them dependent upon the destruction of the world that they value,” she said.
LaDuke said she thinks some of the contracts taken by some Alaska Native corporations are “morally reprehensible.”
She said tribes like the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation and Oneida Nation of Wisconsin should pay more attention to their business operations in the future because if their citizens had not “sparked an outrage,” they might still have the ICE contracts.
