One of the reasons why there may be so many ethical violations on Indian Reservations is because most reservations do not have a separation of powers. With the court system directly under control of tribal councils, most ethical violations (and other type of violations as well) never reach the court. This leads me to often say we do not have “Law and Order” on our reservations. Now some tribal members may be of the opinion that Law and Order is “a white man’s way doing thing”. Anyone who makes this claim is ignorant in the ways of our ancestors. Our ancestors lived by certain rules and followed certain codes of conduct. It anyone broke a rule or violated a code of conduct, that person paid a price. In other words, accountability is not a white man’s idea. Accountability was part of our lives long before the “white man” appeared on the scene.
While popularly imagined in the ‘noble savage’ tradition, living in societies free of law and regulation, American Indian cultures actually created highly refined, complex codes of laws and social norms that governed people’s conduct before contact with Europeans.”
(Johansen, 2007, p. 25)
A lack of separation of powers is just one of the lacks in today's effective government and management.