Panel 4: Federalism, Sovereignty, and Status

Noela Arista
This paper will focus on the first “overthrow” of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1843 by British Admiral Lord George Paulet, a scant two and a half years after the promulgation of the first Hawaiian Constitution of 1840. The “overthrow” impaired the sovereignty of the Aliʻi for a period of five months, even as a pair of Hawaiian envoys were traveling in secret to the U.S., U.K., France and Belgium to secure Hawaiian sovereignty and nationhood. By detailing important features of the British “occupation” of the islands and the correspondence among Aliʻi in Hawaiʻi and the envoys abroad, this paper provides a long overdue glimpse into the history of this event while contributing a robust argument about the centrality of aloha ʻāina as essential to Lāhui (peoplehood) and chiefly rule. While there were four Hawaiian constitutions composed during the period of the Hawaiian Kingdom from 1795 to 1893, very little commentary or history has been published on any of the Aliʻi or the Constitutions or Laws themselves. In this paper I draw to the fore ethical questions about how legal scholars, experts and historians write about Hawaiian legality and nation, while highlighting important features about Hawaiian authority and politics that cannot be understood without reading the correspondence, news reports, laws and constitution ma ka ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi.

Doug Kiel
Since the Dawes Act of 1887 facilitated the allotment of tribal lands, municipalities in the Western Great Lakes region have functioned as pivotal arenas in the struggles for Indigenous sovereignty and citizenship. Initially, local authorities used zoning and annexation to dismantle communal territories and undermine tribal self-governance, compounding federal policy losses. Yet Indigenous nations harnessed municipal frameworks assertively. In 1968, the Minneapolis-based American Indian Movement
(AIM) reshaped urban politics by protesting police brutality and demanding treaty-based rights. In the 1980s and 1990s, Ojibwe tribes faced intense local resistance to their court-affirmed fishing rights, revealing how municipal jurisdictions became flashpoints over tribal self-determination. More recently, the Oneida Nation’s disputes with the Village of Hobart, Wisconsin, showed how litigation and economic ventures could overcome restrictive ordinances, allowing the Nation to reacquire lost lands. Through evolving legal, economic, direct-action, and community strategies, Indigenous nations navigate complex tribal-municipal relations, transforming environments and underscoring ongoing struggles. Since 2018, the “Wall of Forgotten Natives” and “Camp Nenookaasi” homeless encampments in Minneapolis highlighted challenges placing Indigenous rights at the forefront of municipal affairs. Nations like the Menominee crafted relationships with municipalities to protect sacred sites and bolster reservation infrastructure, reminding governments of their broader treaty obligations. Taken together, these experiences illustrate that municipalities have alternately acted as engines of dispossession and sites of Indigenous resurgence, making local governance a critical battlefield where tribal sovereignty continues to be tested—and reimagined.

Alexandra E. Stern
Facing the dissolution of their tribal governments on March 4, 1906, delegates from the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, & Seminole nations met in Muscogee, Creek Nation, in 1905 to draft a constitution and begin the path to statehood. Seeking to secure Indian Territory’s independence from Oklahoma Territory, they named their proposed state Sequoyah.

Until recently, the history of the Sequoyah statehood movement (1905-1907) has been interpreted either as a historical curiosity or yet another failure in the Five Tribes’ long history to preserve their political distinctiveness and autonomy in the face of American expansion. While the proposed State of Sequoyah never came to pass, to dismiss the venture as a political failure, this paper argues, is to mistake the project’s aims. The leaders of the Sequoyah movement understood well that achieving separate statehood for Indian Territory was unlikely. Still, they produced a nearly seventy-page-long constitution, publicly enacting their sovereignty and right to self-government as provided by treaties going back to 1803. By preempting white Oklahomans in drafting a state constitution, one grounded in their constituents’ concerns and priorities, the Sequoyah delegates hoped to set the terms of debate in the event they were forced to join Oklahoma as a single state.

In this, they were quite successful, and Sequoyah became the rough draft of the Oklahoma state constitution, which confirmed the preservation of tribal nations’ rights and U.S. preemption. Reasserting the significance of the Sequoyah constitution and statehood movement, with an emphasis on its Reconstruction era context, this paper contributes to the emerging scholarship on Indigenous constitution writing and uses of the statehood process to assert and preserve tribal sovereignty.

David E. Wilkins
If federalism is defined as a system of governance in which a national, overarching government shares power with subnational or state governments, are Indigenous nations, the original sovereigns of North America, included in this framework? The short answer is “it depends.” The present-day 574 Native nations within the US have formally established political relations with the federal government based on treaties, the trust doctrine, and the Commerce Clause of the federal constitution; yet their relations with surrounding states are surprisingly ambivalent and ill-defined. These nations stand as pre-constitutional and extra-constitutional polities situated alongside, but not constitutionally subject to, federal and state constitutional strictures. However, individual Native citizens have over time acquired both federal and state citizenship and possess many of the same rights, benefits, and responsibilities of non-Native Americans. The unique bifurcated status whereby Indigenous nations are extra-constitutional entities while individual Indigenous citizens are constitutionally-recognized citizens, leaves Native peoples on an uncomfortable political, constitutional, and legal perch. The ambiguity of their collective/individual statuses deeply complicates tri-governmental relations. I will explore two structural arrangements that could bring some clarity to the status of Indigenous peoples within the US: 1) a US constitutional amendment enshrining Native sovereignty and treaty rights; and 2) national statehood for eligible Native nations.

Chair: Tanner Allread, Stanford University Department of History