top of page
Image by Alec Krum
Search

What is Sovereignty?

  • Writer: MIP Author
    MIP Author
  • 4 days ago
  • 11 min read
A historical engraving originally published in Harper’s Weekly depicting the 1867 council at Medicine Lodge Creek in present day Kansas. The negotiations produced three treaties between the United States and several Southern Plains nations, reducing their traditional territories and assigning smaller reservations in Indian Territory.
Black and white 1867 engraving showing Native leaders and United States officials gathered beneath trees during the council at Medicine Lodge Creek. Illustration from Harper’s Weekly, 1867. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Sovereignty is not ceremonial recognition. It is the authority to govern, protect people, enforce laws, care for homelands, practice religion, and prepare a future for generations still to come. Indigenous nations exercised these responsibilities long before the United States existed. Their authority did not begin with a treaty, an act of Congress, a presidential proclamation, or a Supreme Court decision. It came from their people, their laws, their traditions, and their relationships with their homelands.


Yet the United States has often treated Native sovereignty as something it can recognize in one moment, restrict in another, and partially restore when political conditions change. Tribal nations are acknowledged as sovereign governments, but another government frequently retains the final authority over whether they may prosecute an offender, prevent drilling near a sacred place, protect an ancestral landscape, or stop the destruction of a place central to their cultural and spiritual survival.


That contradiction raises a direct question: Can a nation be fully sovereign if another government decides which sovereign powers it is allowed to exercise?



When a Nation Cannot Fully Protect Its Own People


In 1978, the United States Supreme Court decided Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe. The Court held that tribal courts generally could not prosecute non Native people for crimes committed on tribal lands unless Congress specifically authorized that power. The decision removed one of the most basic responsibilities of government: the authority to hold people accountable when they harm a community.


A tribal police officer may respond to a crime, and a tribal government may provide services to the victim. Tribal leaders may understand the people, history, and circumstances surrounding the case far better than an outside agency. Yet the tribal court may still be unable to prosecute the person accused of committing the crime simply because that person is not Native.


The case may instead be referred to federal or state authorities located far from the community. Those prosecutors may have limited knowledge of tribal government, tribal law, local relationships, or the cultural responsibilities involved. Cases may be delayed, transferred, reduced, or declined, leaving survivors and families without a clear path to justice.


The consequences ripple through every part of tribal life. Women seeking protection, children growing up in those communities, Elders carrying cultural responsibilities, and families trying to build stable futures all experience the effects of a justice system that cannot always act on its own. A government may be expected to protect its people while being denied the complete authority needed to do so.


Public safety is also connected to economic stability. It affects whether families remain in a community, whether businesses invest, whether children feel secure, and whether a nation can direct its resources toward housing, education, health care, cultural programs, and economic development instead of repeatedly seeking assistance from outside systems.



The Double Standard Is Difficult to Ignore


The federal government does not describe its own enforcement power as symbolic. Federal agencies investigate, detain, prosecute, regulate, and remove people under federal law. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can enter communities, separate families, and exercise federal authority because the United States considers enforcement essential to its sovereignty.


Yet Indigenous nations, whose governments and homelands existed long before the United States, are denied comparable authority over everyone who enters their lands and harms their people. A tribal nation may operate a police department, maintain courts, protect children, support survivors, and preserve public order. At the same time, it may need the FBI, a United States attorney, a state prosecutor, or an act of Congress before a criminal case can move forward.


The comparison is not about immigration policy. It is about the unequal authority granted to different governments. The federal government claims broad power to enforce its laws, while tribal nations are often required to request assistance or wait for permission to exercise authority within their own homelands.


Native people are not recent arrivals seeking recognition from the United States. Their histories are carried through oral traditions, living communities, ceremonial responsibilities, architecture, agriculture, trade networks, burial places, languages, and relationships with the land that reach back generations before this country was created. That history should not disappear simply because federal law imposed another legal system over it.



Sovereignty Includes the Land


The same imbalance appears in the protection of sacred lands. Tribal nations may have thousands of years of connection to a place, yet federal agencies and political administrations often retain the final authority over whether that place will be protected, developed, mined, drilled, or opened to industrial use.


Bears Ears in southeastern Utah is one of the clearest examples. It is not simply scenic federal land or an archaeological district. It is an interconnected cultural landscape containing ancestral villages, burial places, gathering areas, rock imagery, ceremonial locations, plants, waterways, migration histories, and places of continuing spiritual responsibility.


The Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Zuni, Ute Indian Tribe, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe have deep connections to the region. Their relationships with Bears Ears existed long before it received a federal monument designation. Tribal nations did not begin caring for the area when the United States decided to protect it. They protected, visited, understood, and maintained relationships with it for generations before the Antiquities Act existed.


Under the federal system, however, monument protections may change when presidential administrations change. One administration may establish or restore protections, while another may attempt to reduce them. Tribal nations are then required to return to court, organize public campaigns, submit comments, and spend years defending the same landscape again.


Protection that can disappear whenever political leadership changes is not secure protection. It forces tribal nations into a continuing defensive position, even when the places at risk are central to their history, religion, and responsibilities to future generations.



Chaco Canyon Is a Living Cultural Landscape


A similar conflict surrounds Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico. Chaco cannot be understood by drawing a boundary around the most visible stone structures inside the park. Its importance extends across a much larger landscape of roads, settlements, shrines, waterways, viewsheds, sacred features, astronomical relationships, migration histories, and living connections held by Pueblo and other Indigenous communities.


Protecting the central buildings while allowing industrial development across the surrounding landscape divides a cultural system that was never meant to be separated. A drilling site does not need to sit directly on top of a Great House to cause harm. Roads, noise, artificial light, pipelines, industrial traffic, air pollution, extraction, and disruption of the surrounding land can alter the integrity of the entire place.


For the communities connected to Chaco, the landscape is not an abandoned remnant of a vanished people. It remains part of living history, cultural memory, ceremony, migration, and identity. The structures may be ancient, but the relationships are current.


Once again, tribal nations may be invited to participate in a federal process concerning lands connected to their ancestors. They may submit testimony, identify sacred areas, explain cultural responsibilities, and describe the damage a project could cause. Participation, however, does not necessarily give them the final decision.



Consultation Is Not Consent


Federal agencies frequently point to tribal consultation as evidence that Indigenous concerns have been addressed. Consultation can provide an opportunity for tribal governments to explain why a place matters, identify cultural resources, describe religious responsibilities, and object to a proposed action. It may require an agency to listen, hold meetings, and document what it heard.


But consultation does not always require the government to obtain tribal agreement. A tribal nation may state clearly that a project will damage a sacred place. Federal officials may acknowledge that position, record it in an environmental or historical review, and still approve the project.


Consultation allows a nation to speak. Consent gives that nation the authority to say no.

That distinction is central to understanding the limits of sovereignty under the present system. A process can appear respectful while leaving the final decision exactly where it was before consultation began. Tribal leaders may be heard without being given the authority to prevent permanent harm.



Sacred Places Do Not Fit Neatly Into Federal Categories


Federal law divides land into administrative categories. One agency manages minerals. Another evaluates historic properties. Another protects wildlife. Religious freedom, archaeology, burial protection, water, environmental review, and land ownership may each fall under different laws and government offices.


Indigenous relationships with place do not always follow those divisions. A mountain may be a place of prayer, a source of medicines, a place of emergence, a water source, an ancestor, a migration landmark, and part of a larger ceremonial landscape at the same time. A canyon may hold architecture, burial places, roads, oral histories, plants, astronomical knowledge, and the memory of communities that continue through living descendants.


Federal law may protect a structure while failing to protect the view from it. It may safeguard an archaeological object while allowing damage to the surrounding landscape. It may permit access to a religious site while approving development that changes the conditions needed for ceremony, prayer, gathering, or cultural teaching.


The American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Antiquities Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act each provide certain protections. Executive Order 13007 also directs federal agencies to accommodate access to and ceremonial use of Native sacred sites on federal lands when possible.


These protections matter, but they are divided, conditional, and often procedural. They may require review, consultation, documentation, or accommodation without giving tribal nations complete authority over a sacred landscape. A legal process may recognize that a place is important while still allowing the government to approve actions that permanently alter it.



Ancient Places Are Connected to Living People


Chaco Canyon, Bears Ears, Mesa Verde, Casa Grande, Paquimé, Cahokia, Poverty Point, the Hopewell earthworks, Hohokam irrigation systems, Mesoamerican cities, and thousands of other places demonstrate the depth and complexity of Indigenous civilizations across Turtle Island and the Americas.


These places include cities, roads, observatories, trade networks, agricultural systems, ballcourts, earthworks, canals, ceremonial centers, and architecture created long before European arrival. They should not be presented as mysterious remains left behind by people who disappeared.


Their builders have descendants. The nations connected to these places continue through families, languages, oral histories, ceremonies, migration accounts, agricultural knowledge, artistic traditions, and spiritual responsibilities. A community may have moved, divided, reorganized, or been forced from a homeland without losing its relationship to that place.

Separating ancient sites from contemporary Native people makes it easier to treat them as abandoned resources rather than parts of living histories. It also allows museums, developers, government agencies, and visitors to admire Indigenous architecture while ignoring the authority and responsibilities of the living nations connected to it.


Protecting these places means protecting the rights of present and future generations to know them, visit them, learn from them, pray there, gather medicines, and continue their responsibilities to the land.



Sovereignty Also Shapes Economic Development


Restrictions on tribal authority are often discussed as legal or political issues, but they also carry economic consequences. Governments need predictable authority to attract investment, develop infrastructure, operate businesses, protect workers, provide services, and plan for the future.


A tribal nation cannot build confidently when jurisdiction over crimes, land, natural resources, taxation, environmental protection, and business activity is divided among multiple governments. Uncertainty can discourage investment and force tribes to spend time and money navigating overlapping legal systems.


Resources used to pursue federal action, defend sacred places, or compensate for gaps in law enforcement are resources that cannot be invested elsewhere. Housing, education, language revitalization, health care, small business development, cultural preservation, tourism, agriculture, and youth programs all compete for limited funding.


The effects are not confined to reservation boundaries. Tribal economies support employees, contractors, regional businesses, schools, hospitals, cultural institutions, and surrounding communities. When tribal governments are able to exercise meaningful authority, the benefits extend well beyond tribal citizens.



Religious Freedom Requires More Than Access


Religious freedom is often described as the right to hold a belief or attend a place of worship. For many Indigenous traditions, religion cannot be separated from a specific mountain, river, canyon, plant, burial place, or cultural landscape.


A ceremony may depend on access to a certain place at a certain time. It may require plants, water, silence, darkness, privacy, or an unobstructed relationship with the surrounding landscape. Moving the ceremony elsewhere may not be possible because the place itself is part of the religious responsibility.


This creates a serious gap in federal protections. An agency may claim that religious freedom remains intact because tribal members are technically allowed to enter a site. Yet mining, drilling, construction, noise, pollution, restricted access, or damage to the surrounding landscape may make the ceremony impossible or fundamentally alter its meaning.


Religious freedom cannot be separated from the survival of the places where that religion is practiced. Protecting access while allowing destruction is not meaningful protection.



What Is Compromised When Sovereignty Is Restricted?


The effects do not stop with one criminal case, one drilling permit, or one land management decision. When tribal authority is restricted, systems throughout the community are weakened.


Survivors may have fewer paths to justice. Young people may grow up seeing that outside institutions hold greater authority than their own nation. Families may be required to explain their experiences repeatedly to officials who do not understand the community, while tribal governments spend money seeking federal action instead of investing those resources in services and development.


Sacred places may remain vulnerable to mining, drilling, looting, development, or administrative reversal. Religious practices may depend on access controlled by another government. Traditional knowledge may become harder to carry forward when the land connected to that knowledge is damaged, divided, or made inaccessible.


Community wealth is affected. Industry is affected. Small businesses are affected. Tourism, agriculture, energy development, housing, environmental programs, and long term planning are affected. Cultural continuity is affected because land, language, religion, governance, and family responsibilities are deeply connected.


A nation cannot build freely while continually being required to defend the foundations of its existence.



The Power to Protect a Future


Native sovereignty is not a request to participate more politely in an imposed system. It is the inherent authority of Indigenous nations to govern their people, enforce their laws, care for their lands, practice their religions, preserve their cultures, and determine their futures according to their own responsibilities and traditions.


That authority existed before the United States. It did not originate with federal recognition, congressional legislation, or a Supreme Court decision. Those institutions may acknowledge, restrict, or attempt to define tribal powers, but they did not create the nations themselves.


The central issue is not whether federal agencies provide opportunities for tribal comment. It is not whether a presidential proclamation includes respectful language. It is not whether Congress restores selected powers after decades of harm. The question is who has the final say.


Who decides whether a violent offender can be prosecuted? Who decides whether a sexual assault case moves forward? Who decides whether a sacred landscape can be drilled, mined, divided, or developed? Who decides whether a place of prayer remains accessible and protected? Who decides whether ancient villages, burial places, ceremonial features, and cultural landscapes will remain intact for the next generation?


When another government continues to hold the final authority over those decisions, Native sovereignty remains limited. A nation cannot be fully sovereign only when the United States finds its sovereignty convenient.


Sovereignty must include the power to protect people from violence, defend sacred places from destruction, govern ancestral lands, practice religion without interference, and carry cultural responsibilities into the future. Indigenous nations were not created by the United States. Their governments, laws, homelands, spiritual traditions, and relationships with place reach back generations before this country existed.


Recognizing those nations while withholding the authority needed for their safety, survival, and future is not full sovereignty. It is federal control presented through the language of recognition.



Sources

bottom of page