If you’ve ever driven Arizona’s State Route 86 through the Tohono O’odham Reservation, you’ve seen how it starts as a nice, wide, two-lane highway with ample shoulders and ends up as a skinny little two-lane highway with no shoulders at all.

Considering how many tourists, trucks, and Border Patrol vehicles share that road with the local O’odham people, that’s a highway that needs improvement. But most roads meandering through your friendly neighborhood rez are usually maintained by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which never has enough money to do the job. The state or county that has leased a right of way doesn’t have much money either, especially these days.

Those expensive little stickers you attach to your license plates each year pay for a lot of road crew stuff, like building, paving, and maintaining roads. But obviously there haven’t been funds for fixing all the potholes on Indian Highway 15, or for a bigger road through Bylas.

Well, in Wisconsin, the tribes all got together and decided to issue their own plates to vehicles registered on their reservations. And then they and the state entered into an agreement respecting each other’s plates for registration purposes.

So now the Wisconsin tribes have another revenue stream to fix their roads, the state is happy because it doesn’t have to hear complaints from the tribes about why their roads are so lousy, and everybody’s happy not to drive on bumpy rez roads. Tribal sovereignty can really work when a tribe exercises its right to self-governance.

Other states, like Arizona, have a slightly different way of getting road money to the reservation. The system here uses fuel tax reimbursements to the tribes. Special plates issued by the state generate money to some Arizona tribes for transportation purposes. (So far, only two, Navajo and San Carlos Apache, have sprung for the deal.)

California’s tribes, though, are too small for each one to have a separate plate. Instead of generating enough funds for a half-mile or so of rez road, California plans to issue an Indian license plate next year that will be available to any car registered in the state. A portion of the $70 per plate is intended to fund a new museum and cultural center near Sacramento.

Right now, the California State Indian Museum is located in back of Sutter’s Fort. That’s a place that doesn’t exactly hold warm, fuzzy memories for those of us who are still reeling from the California Gold Rush. A gorgeous new license plate adorning visitors’ cars in front of a nice new museum would be sweet. So would the message that the extinction of California Indians has been greatly exaggerated.

And it all starts with a license plate.

Debra Utacia Krol, an enrolled member of the Xolon (or Jolon) Salinan Tribe of central California, is a freelance journalist based in Arizona.