AMERICAN INDIAN STUDIESRegulations, and a multiplicity of other rules exist
for dealing with American Indians.
The political status of American Indian tribes
is difficult to characterize. In 1831, Chief Justice
John Marshall described tribes as ‘‘domestic, de-
pendent nations,’’ setting forth the principle that
tribes are autonomous political entities that enjoy
a quasi-sovereignty yet are subject to the authority
of the federal government (Pommersheim 1995;
Boldt 1993). The limits on tribal political autono-
my have fluctuated as a result of court decisions
and federal legislation curtailing or extending trib-
al powers. Since the early 1900s, tribal govern-
ments have greatly increased their autonomy
(Pommersheim 1995).
One of the most significant political develop-
ments in this century for American Indians was the
passage of the Wheeler-Howard Indian Reorgani-
zation Act (IRA) of 1934. This legislation made it
possible for tribes legally to reconstitute them-
selves for the purpose of limited self-government
(Prucha 1984, ch. 37). Subject to the democratic
precepts imposed by the federal government, tribes
were allowed to have representative governments
with judicial, executive, and legislative branches.
Other forms of tribal governance—based on the
inheritance of authority, for example—were not
permitted by the IRA legislation. Today, virtually
every reservation has a form of representative
government (O’Brien 1989).
Tribal sovereignty is a complex legal doctrine
affecting the political autonomy of tribal govern-
ments. It is distinct from a closely aligned political
principle known as self-determination. The princi-
ple of self-determination, unlike tribal sovereign-
ty, is relatively recent in origin and was first posed
as a claim for administrative control of reservation
affairs. As a political ideology, self-determination
developed in response to the unilateral actions of
the federal government in implementing policies
such as the Termination legislation of the 1950s.
In the 1960s, it was a rallying theme for promoting
greater tribal involvement in federal policies af-
fecting American Indians. The principle was for-
mally enacted into public law with the passage of
the Indian Self-Determination and Educational
Assistance Act of 1975, P.L 97–638. Since its pas-
sage, federal agencies have gradually divested con-
trol over programs and services such as those once
administered by the BIA. For example, many tribal
governments have contracts to provide social serv-
ices similar to the arrangements made with state
and local governments.In recent years, ideas about self-determination
have developed to the point where self-determina-
tion is nearly indistinguishable from tribal sover-
eignty (O’Brien 1989). The most influential state-
ment merging the two is a report presented to the
U.S. Senate by the American Indian Policy Review
Commission (AIPRC) in 1976. The AIPRC report
was a comprehensive, though highly controversial
evaluation of federal Indian policy. Every presi-
dential administration since Richard Nixon’s has
endorsed the principle of tribal sovereignty. Short-
ly after taking office, the Clinton Administration
endorsed this principle and there is no indication
of a reversal in the foreseeable future.The political revitalization of American Indi-
ans accelerated with the civil rights movement.
Some observers have suggested that Indian politi-
cal activism in the 1960s was a response to postwar
termination policies (Cornell 1988), which tried to
dissolve the federal reservation system and liqui-
date the special status of the tribes. Relocation
programs in the 1950s accelerated the urbaniza-
tion of American Indians and, at the very least,
may have contributed to the political mobilization
of urban Indians, as well as their reservation coun-
terparts (Fixico 1986). Though often complemen-
tary, the political agendas of urban and reserva-
tion Indians are not always in strict accord.The diverse tribal composition of urban Indi-
an populations has meant that it is virtually impos-
sible to organize them around issues affecting only
one or a few tribes. In the face of this constraint,
the ideology of ‘‘pan-Indianism’’ is particularly
appealing to urban Indian groups (Hertzberg 1971;
Nagel 1996). Pan-Indianism is a supratribal ideolo-
gy committed to broad issues such as economic
opportunity and social justice and to cultural events
such as intertribal pow-wows.The roots of modern pan-Indian organiza-
tions can be traced first to the Ottawa leader
Pontiac and later to the Shawnee leader Tecumseh
and Joseph Brant, a Mohawk. These men led pan-
Indian movements opposing Euro-American fron-
tier settlement in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries (e.g., Pontiac’s Revolt 1763).
In the late nineteenth century, pan-Indian messianic