Native American Studies

The inherent authority of Indigenous tribal nations to govern themselves within the borders of the United States. Tribal sovereignty predates the U.S. Constitution and is recognized through treaties, federal law, and Supreme Court decisions establishing tribes as 'domestic dependent nations' with powers of self-governance.

The body of United States law that governs the legal relationship between the federal government and Native American tribal nations. It encompasses treaty rights, the trust responsibility doctrine, jurisdictional questions, and legislation such as the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and the Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975.

The U.S. government policy of the 1830s that forcibly relocated tens of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands in the southeastern United States to designated 'Indian Territory' west of the Mississippi River. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized the president to negotiate removal treaties, though many removals involved coercion and military force.

The period from the 1870s through the mid-20th century during which the U.S. and Canadian governments forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families and placed them in government- or church-run boarding schools designed to eradicate Native languages, cultural practices, and identities. The motto of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 'Kill the Indian, save the man,' captured the assimilationist ideology.

Legal rights guaranteed to Native American tribal nations through formal treaties with the United States government. These treaties are the supreme law of the land under the U.S. Constitution and typically reserved specific rights including land, hunting, fishing, and gathering rights, even on ceded territories.

The complex bodies of knowledge, practices, and beliefs developed by Indigenous peoples through long-term interactions with their environments. These systems encompass ecological management, agriculture, medicine, astronomy, and governance, and are transmitted through oral traditions, ceremonies, and intergenerational teaching.

Federal policies, epitomized by the Dawes Act of 1887, that broke up communally held tribal lands into individual parcels allotted to Native families, with 'surplus' land opened to white settlement. The goal was to dissolve tribal governance and force Native people into Euro-American patterns of individual land ownership and farming.

The Indigenous civil rights and political activism movement of the 1960s and 1970s that fought for treaty rights, tribal sovereignty, self-determination, and cultural preservation. Influenced by the broader civil rights movement, Red Power activists employed direct action, legal challenges, and media strategies to draw attention to injustices faced by Native peoples.

Efforts to reverse the decline and potential extinction of Indigenous languages caused by centuries of colonial suppression, particularly through boarding school policies. Strategies include immersion schools, master-apprentice language programs, digital archives, and community-based instruction aimed at creating new fluent speakers.

A 1990 federal law that requires museums and federal agencies to return Native American cultural items, including human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony, to their respective tribes and lineal descendants. NAGPRA represents a significant legal recognition of Indigenous rights over ancestral heritage.