Indigenous peoples secured important symbolic and substantive victories during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In 1993 the United States Congress issued an Apology Resolution with regard to the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. Seven years later, Assistant Secretary of the Interior Kevin Gover (Pawnee) offered a “formal apology to Indian people for the historical conduct” of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Congress, too, formally apologized to all Native peoples in 2010, though the document, folded into a defense appropriations bill, received virtually no public attention.1 In 2009 President Barack Obama received accolades for inaugurating an annual White House Tribal Nations Conference that underscored his support for government-to-government relations. And after voting against the United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, the United States changed its position in 2010. Practical legislative gains, such as the American Indian Trust Fund Management Reform Act, Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act, Tribal Law and Order Act, and Violence Against Women Act bolstered these symbolic gestures.2
As in preceding decades, legislative pendulum swings and an unsympathetic Supreme Court curtailed the gains. Seminole Tribe v. Florida (1996) granted states sovereign immunity, strengthening their hand against tribes when negotiating Class III gaming compacts. Meanwhile, Nevada v. Hicks (2001) circumscribed the jurisdictional reach of tribal courts, and a circuit court decision in 2004 allowed scientific research on the nine-thousand-year-old remains of Kennewick Man, whom several tribes in the Pacific Northwest called the Ancient One and claimed as an ancestor through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), to continue.3 Fearful of giving the Supreme Court an opportunity to set a precedent that might undermine NAGPRA, the tribes involved in the suit chose not to appeal the decision. Two additional cases, Carcieri v. Salazar (2009) and Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (2013), made it more difficult for tribes to have the federal government take land into trust on their behalf and limited the Indian Child Welfare Act. Tribal nations seeking federal recognition, protection from state taxation, defense of natural resources, respect for sacred lands, and the honoring of treaties also faced uncertainty in Congress and in the courts.4
In these uncertain times, the global indigenous rights movement continued to evolve. Native people sent petitions and delegations to the United Nations, while individuals built activist networks and collaborative relationships. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Western Shoshone sisters Mary and Carrie Dann, for instance, elicited UN support for their nation’s claim that the United States had illegally taken more than 20 million acres of traditional territory guaranteed to their people in the Treaty of Ruby Valley.5 In November 2012, a series of teach-ins in Saskatchewan swiftly metamorphosed into a vast movement known as Idle No More. This unstructured “movement of movements” emphasized inherent sovereignty, the reinstitution of traditional laws and treaty relationships, defense of tribal lands and resources, and resistance to all forms of colonial oppression.6
Idle No More brought increased attention, clarity, and urgency to long-standing concerns over economic and resource development During the 1950s and 1960s, as we have already seen, many Native activists offered modernization and development as an alternative to termination. Since that time, organizations, such as the Alaska Federation of Natives and the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, advanced this movement by lobbying for legislation to promote the economic interests of tribes. At the same time, individual communities brought suit over inequitable long-term leases, environmental destruction, and tribal regulation and taxation of non-Native corporations.7
The costs of nation building through resource exploitation grew more salient during the 1970s. And by the 1990s and early 2000s, heightened concerns over sustainability and climate change contributed to a push for different forms of economic development, such as solar, wind, and other renewables. Through organizations such as the Indian Country Renewable Energy Consortium and the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, and with the support of federal legislation and innovative partnerships with states, tribal governments and organizations have made strides in resource management and the production of clean energy. Indigenous people have also taken to the streets, evidenced by the massive Peoples Climate March held in New York City in advance of the United Nations climate summit in September 2014.8
If Native people have pushed back against corporate exploitation of tribal resources, they have also engaged in difficult and often divisive conversations within their communities. “It’s easy to say yes to development in Indian Country, but it’s hard to say no,” Ray Cross, a son of Gros Ventre leader Martin Cross and a key player in securing compensation for the destruction wrought by the Garrison Dam, argued in a November 2014 editorial. “The past tribal administration on Fort Berthold Indian Reservation gave its unqualified yes to the largely unregulated development of its oil and gas resources” in the Bakken Formation. The hundreds of millions of dollars generated by tax revenues and oil royalties contributed to financial wealth but threatened “their most important resource: their sovereignty.” Critical conversations like this one, as documents in chapter 5 suggest, continue to take place across indigenous America.9
Like the eye of a hurricane, sovereignty advocates offered calm amid the furious storms that raged in and beyond Indian Country during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And like their forebears, they held fast to the ground on which they stood, uneven and contested though it was. Not content with the gains that had been made during a century that opened with predictions of their disappearance, tribal nations and Native individuals pressed on, intent upon testing the limits of sovereignty. As the documents in this chapter show, these challenges involved everything from the status of a kingdom that never acceded to annexation and the power to define the meaning of citizenship to environmental justice, the protection of sacred lands, the power of tribal courts, and energy sovereignty.
As in the past, indigenous peoples did not merely engage in a dialogue—the contests of the mid-1990s and after, just as the ones a century before, could not be understood solely in terms of “Native peoples” against “whites.” Each of the issues explored in the pages that follow were multivalent, simultaneously producing conversations and contestations between and within indigenous communities and individuals. Rather than being straightforward and heroic, testing the limits of sovereignty revealed ambiguity and ambivalence. To “say we are nations” proved no easier a proposition at the dawn of the twenty-first century than it had been in the waning light of the nineteenth.