The State of Indian Nations is bound in red tape.

Jefferson Keel, president of the D.C.-based National Congress of American Indian, delivered the organization’s ninth annual address on Thursday. He urged the federal government to clear the way and allow tribes to participate fully in economic life by invoking rights to natural resource mining on Indian lands.

“Our largest assets – tribal lands – remain fragmented and caught in a web of stifling BIA regulations and bureaucracy,” Keel said, pointing out that tribes possess nearly $1 trillion worth of largely untapped energy resources. “Realizing the potential of energy resources offers immense promise for tribal communities, and the United States as a whole.”

He recounted the story of the oil-rich Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota, which he said had a ring of oilrigs forming outside its borders as the tribe tried to complete the 49 bureaucratic steps necessary for energy development on reservation land.

That red tape blocks more than energy development on reservations. Keel lamented that while 95 percent of Americans have access to broadband, only 10 percent of people on tribal lands can access it.

“Broadband is the pipeline to progress, and we need investment,” he said, “but first we need an end to barriers that stand in the way.”

U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, delivered the official congressional response to the address. She has been a member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs throughout her eight years in Congress, and said that in a time of deficit and budget slashing, she is prepared to fight to ensure tribes get their slice of the federal fiscal pie.

Murkowski, who lost the Republican primary in 2010 but managed to hold onto her seat by virtue of write-in votes, said many of the new legislators who challenged incumbents ran last year on the idea that the federal government should only spend money on issues outlined as federal responsibilities in the Constitution.

It appears she plans on holding the new guys to their word.

“The wellbeing of Native people is a uniquely federal responsibility, and only a federal responsibility … not a state responsibility,” she said. “The federal Indian programs that we fight hardest to fund were created to fulfill the trust responsibility between its nation and its first people.”

Jacqueline Johnson Pata, NCAI’s executive director, echoed those sentiments after the event. “The trust responsibility to tribal nations is not a budget line item, it is a solemn promise,” she said.

The address was live-streamed through the NCAI’s website, where about 500 people tuned in. Viewers commented throughout the speeches on both Facebook and Twitter.