The Contemporary Revival and Diffusion of Indigenous Sovereignty Discourse

The concept of sovereignty currently dominates Indigenous affairs in the United States. The advancement and defense of sovereignty is quite arguably tribal nations' number one agenda, and sovereignty is a persistent focus of tribes' political, economic, legal, and social action. Sovereignty undergirds tribal gaming, natural resource management, and a wide variety of jurisdictional and political powers. Today, federal policy explicitly affirms Indian sovereignty, and support for tribal self-government is at the center of federal Indian policy. It is thus somewhat surprising that as recently as 1970 sovereignty was virtually absent from public discussion and dialogue regarding Indian affairs and tribal issues—and had been so in the decades immediately preceding the 1970s. Notably, as one small indicator, the term doesn't appear in the special issue of the Midcontinental American Studies Journal on "The Indian Today" published in 1965 (Levine and Lurie 1965). Even into the early 1980s, the term was absent from any contemporary federal public policy declarations. Neither the general public nor federal (or state) policymakers prior to the 1970s conceived of tribes through a sovereignty framework, and thereafter did so only slowly. This relative absence of tribal sovereignty in public discussion and federal policy in the decades prior to the contemporary era did not reflect the con-