Shifting Sovereignty, Shifting Identities: Controlling Reservation Resources at the End of the Twentieth Century

The story of American Indians regaining control over their natural resources at the end of the twentieth century has not been told.  Sadly, there seems little interest in hearing it.  Mainstream historians continue to leave Native Americans in the nineteenth century, where the general public is happy to view them as romantic relics, while policy-makers can ignore their roles within the current American polity.  But as a group, tribal governments are the nation’s single largest controller of energy resources – possessing upwards of 30% of the country’s low-sulfur coal, 40% of its uranium, and 4% of oil and natural gas deposits – and manage millions of acres of valuable range, farm, and timber land.  If for no other than purely economic reasons, understanding how American Indians reversed 450 years of diminishing control over these resources is a story worth hearing.  But there is so much more.

This project examines the late twentieth-century indigenous revolt that ultimately expanded tribal sovereignty over reservation resources and fundamentally reshaped the relationship between federal and tribal governments.  Locating the origins of this remarkable tale in southeastern Montana, where a small indigenous community resisted mining ventures they believed threatened their existence as Northern Cheyenne and Indians, the investigation emanates out to track the growth of a national movement that equipped tribal governments with the expertise and authority for managing their own resources.  This process, of course, was not void of difficulties, as fierce internal debates raged within energy tribes over the impacts of development on customs and norms tied to tribal identities.  By examining both these local struggles and the national movement they spurred, this project explains the curious, expansive place of tribal governments within our federalist system and sheds light on the intimate connections between reservation development and the constantly shifting boundaries of indigenous identities.