Indigenous people are rarely depicted as active participants in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century legal tradition, but these papers highlight understudied cases in American legal history to demonstrate the range of Native people's engagement with the law. Collectively, these cases demonstrate the intersecting federal, local, and tribal legal practices that determined justice and order from the Great Lakes to the Great Plains over the long nineteenth century. Native people entered American courts as defendants amid landscapes of colonial violence, as litigants lodging civil rights claims prior to securing American citizenship, and as sovereign holders of treaty rights securing off-reservation fishing, harvesting, and hunting rights. Though these cases are separated by decades, jurisdictions, and tribal affiliations, they represent the persistence and prevalence of Native people in American courts, calling on scholars to engage more critically with legal archives housing such stories and with Indigenous constituents of such histories. Invoking critical methodologies relevant to ethnohistorians, legal scholars, and Western historians, we aim to spark a conversation about the importance of scholarly work centering Indigenous actors in American legal tradition.