Power over the Land: Indigenous Land Recovery and the Limits to Decolonization

The growth of Native American casino gaming in the 1990s dramatically transformed the relationship between Native American tribes and the United States. In the wake of tremendous amounts of new revenue flowing into Indian Country, tribal communities suddenly had a greater opportunity to buy back former reservation lands that had been lost through the policy of allotment during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) formally halted allotment, it empowered the Secretary of the Interior to facilitate the placing of former reservation lands back into tax-free federal trust once again. For decades, the acreage that tribes bought back amounted to a trickle, but casino revenues opened the door to much more rapid land reacquisition. The Oneida Nation of Wisconsin aggressively pursued land recovery on their reservation and it indeed transformed their relationship with their non-Indian neighbors who had become the majority of the reservation’s residents in the decades that followed allotment. The residents of Hobart—a predominantly white village located within the Oneida Reservation—saw themselves as defending a shrinking plot of land, literally losing ground as Oneidas took what Hobart residents felt was rightfully their own. By 2008, tensions between the Oneida Nation and the Village of Hobart had erupted into a heated legal battle about who had sovereign authority over their shared territory. This paper highlights the litigation between the Oneida Nation and the Village of Hobart, which primarily centered on the village’s attempts to tax a sovereign nation. This paper will emphasize how enacting decolonial ambitions transforms relationships between Indigenous nations and the United States on local and national scales, addressing the structural barriers to Indigenous community rebuilding along with the limitations of exclusively territorial notions of Indigenous nationhood.