American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Indian Country denotes a policy of legal and geographical separatism in the evolution of Indian white relations in the United States. Since the earliest establishment of lines separating the tribes from the settlers, Indian nations from colonies, territories, and states, Indian Country has also connoted the limited sovereignty that tribes hold over members and lands. In time, as policies changed-e.g., treaty negotiations ended, tribal property was individualized (allotted), reservations were opened up and thus diminished-the distinctive nature of separatism became blurred, and lines of demarcation yielded to continuous intrusion in fact and in law. Indian tribes today are neither states nor foreign nations, yet are not fully part of the constitutionally derived federal system. They do not represent a third entity in a tripartite governmental structure. To this extent, their "measured separatism," to use a phrase coined by law professor Charles Wilkinson, still flourishes within Indian Country, although it is increasingly difficult to delimit the bounds of Indian affairs in the hinterland of this nation. This symposium is an initial exploration whose premise is that considerably more study of geography than heretofore has been revealed in the literature may well unravel the convoluted nature of Indian Country today. My initial article displays many differing interpretations and definitions of Indian Country and focuses on the interface of law and geography in an effort to bridge the differences in approach, thus helping the reader to comprehend the four case studies to follow.

One will look in vain for Indian Country on most maps. Although many observers would readily identify it with tribes in the hinterland, few would recognize the unique polity of this place. As a toponym, or place name, Indian Country seems to belong to the past. Yet, it has prevailed in the literature for more than a century-not only in legal discourse and law, but also in historic reference. Associated in the past with the frontier-essentially beyond the frontier-Indian Country at one time or another was identified with tribes whose territories remained generally intact. From the perspective of territorial government, Indian Country was extraterritorial. The refinement of the concept of Indian Country, more than its better delimitation as a real place, has relied on law, not history, and essentially means lands held in trust. Although the geographical delimitation of Indian Country beyond the bounds of reservations has remained somewhat elusive, efforts to ascertain such bounds began to take on new meaning as non-Indians squatted on tribal lands or otherwise secured homesteads on land ceded by treaties. Increased encroachment by the white majority, leading to conflicts and hostile negotiations, brought Indians and non-Indians into closer contact by dint of adjacent landholding and day-to-day living. When later laws opened reservations subsequent to the distribution (allotment) of land to individual tribal members, non-Indians became permanent inhabitants of many reservations and, hence, "citizens" of Indian Country. In fact, in selected areas of the West (e.g., in California and parts of the Northwest) the number of non- Indians exceeds that of Indians as residents of many reservations.

Felix Cohen defined a tribe's taxing authority as "an inherent attribute of tribal sovereignty" essential to its political survival. This broad taxing power has emerged as one dimension of tribal sovereignty that has enabled a tribe to maintain its political separation from state and county governments. In addition, the extent of a tribe's assessment power applied to both tribal members and nontribal residents of a reservation, and that power alone, often prohibited a state from assessing property found inside a reservation. Today, this distinction has made complex conflicts out of tribal tax and state tax confrontations as both tribes and states compete for potential revenues from reservation sources. Problems inherent in federalism aggravated this conflict. Robert C. Brown, an attorney, identified this problem in 1931, writing, "Our dual system of state and nation rarely fails to confuse any governmental problem, and it has not been without its customary effect on this one." On one hand, the United States Constitution defined a state-federal union; on the other hand, treaties created a unique tribal-federal relationship. In the former, an interacting association developed between federal, state, and county authorities that resulted in tax cooperation; in the latter, an exclusive relationship evolved between the federal and tribal governments that precluded states and counties. Within these two differing political systems, each sovereign maintained its own jurisdiction, which often intersected and crossed into the domain of another.

American political history regularly has been punctuated by bitter struggles over the right to vote. Those who already have the franchise usually have been reluctant to extend it to others, especially when those others are different somehow from the dominant culture: a different race, or a different gender, or a different economic class. Moreover, voting rights claims reach to the core of the political order, often engendering conflicts whose resolution is possible only through extraordinary political actions like amending the Constitution. Indeed, since 1870, six of the twelve amendments to the federal Constitution have addressed voting issues. Why have voting rights conflicts so often been characterized by passionate rhetoric and even violence? Clearly, the stakes for both those advocating and those opposing an expansion of the suffrage have been high. For those seeking to obtain the right to vote there has been a common belief that, in the words of the Supreme Court, "the right to exercise the franchise in a free and unimpaired manner is preservative of other basic civil and political rights." Liberal democratic theory assumes that with the right to vote comes representation in government and, consequently, the ability to protect oneself and one's people against the abuses of power that majorities often evince. Conversely, any group that can attain effective control of elections and the instruments of government will have a nearly unfettered opportunity to insulate its interests and traditional privileges against the claims of newcomers. For example, many southern whites opposed Black voting rights in part because change would "unbalance local political alignments and would result in a massive redistribution of economic and political resources to the black community."

INTRODUCTION Interracial tensions have run high for more than a decade on the checkerboarded White Earth Indian Reservation of northern Minnesota. While institutional racism and mutual suspicion have long marked relations between the Anishinaabeg and their Anglo neighbors, current levels have reached unprecedented heights. The impetus lies, predictably enough, in conflicting claims to reservation lands-claims that were brought to community attention through the documentation of some thirteen hundred validated land title claims in the Minnesota Chippewa tribe's (MCT) "Section 2415 Land Research Project.'' (See fig. 1.) The project was initiated in 1978, under a Bureau of Indian Affairs contract, for the purpose of investigating land tenure status on the MCT's six member reservations. Project researchers anticipated that their findings would reveal parcels of Indian lands upon which non-Indians had engaged in long-term trespass for agricultural, right of-way, forestry, or mining purpose. Indeed a significant number of illegal land use practices were documented. The investigation also uncovered a multitude of illegal and unauthorized title conveyances dating as far back as the 1905 allotment of treaty lands and as recently as the 1960s.

Floyd Flores, an aide to the San Xavier Reservation District Council, spoke to a mute panel from the United States Bureau of Reclamation at a public hearing early in 1989. His concern, which he reiterated in the Tohono O'odham language for the elders, was with the proper disposition of human remains found on lands to be disturbed-subjugated-for the "San Xavier Development Project," a ten-thousand-acre farm. Juliann Ramon, a member of the district council, framed the issue at hand quite pointedly: If the remains of her ancestors were disturbed, her people would be "cursed with pain and disease until the seventh generation." Other Tohono O'odham addressed the same worry at the hearing on San Xavier Reservation and at a sparsely attended hearing the previous day in Sells, seat of government for the Tohono O'odham Nation. At the Sells meeting, tribal officials spoke by their absence. Members of the tribe's Water Resources Committee attended neither hearing, again making a statement of sorts. The Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) representatives, following a protocol they had constructed through scores of meetings with Indian and non-Indian beneficiaries of the Central Arizona Project (CAP) over the last decade, deferred their response until the preparation of the final environmental impact statement on the proposed farm (see fig. 1).