"Historians are finally beginning to confront the hard fact that the U.S. Constitution rules over Native nations as a kind of imperial law. This is ironic, given the “anti-colonial” ambitions of the U.S. rebels against British rule. Arguably, however, the “constitution of American colonialism” (to borrow a phrase from the legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk) has more in common with the imperial law of ancient Rome than that of early modern Britain. Like Roman imperial law, U.S. law since the 1970s has allowed for the flourishing of multiple “sub-political groups,” each with its own national culture, under its sovereign jurisdiction. Like Rome, too, the U.S. has turned the determination of Native nationhood into a question of imperial administration. Today, the BIA, a division of the Department of the Interior within the executive branch, gets to decide which Native tribes are “sovereign” from the perspective of federal law—regardless, in many cases, of what tribes say about themselves."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Ryan O. Carr, “A Native American Declaration of Independence”, The Atlantic, (July 4th 2024)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United_States
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Native Americans in the United States
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