Inextricably political: race, membership, and tribal sovereignty

Courts address equal protection questions about the distinct legal treatment of American Indian tribes in the following dichotomous way: classifications concerning American Indians are either racial or political. This Article challenges the dichotomy itself. The legal categories "tribe" and "tribal member" are themselves political, and reflect the ways in which tribes and tribal members have been racialized by US laws and policies. First, the Article traces the evolution of tribes from pre-contact independent sovereigns to their current status as federally recognized tribes. The Article then examines two very distinct tribal places, the Colorado River Indian Tribes' (CRIT) reservation and the former Dakota (Sioux) Nation of the Great Plains. The legal histories of CRIT and the Sioux Tribes reveal that unraveling the logic of racism in American Indian law has less to do with tinkering with current equal protection doctrine than it does with recognizing the workings of power, politics, and law in the context of the US' unique brand of settler colonialism.