No More Nations Within Nations: Indigenous Sovereignty after the End of Treaty-Making in 1871

3 The U.S. government would continue to recognize previously ratified treaties, the rider affirmed, but it could no longer enter into new treaties with Indigenous nations. [...]1871, as Kevin Bruyneel notes, “Treaty-making … stood as the basis upon which indigenous political agency and status in relation to the American political system was framed, recognized, and fought over.” 4 But in an instant that March, Congress halted “treaty relations [that] stood in the way of the imposition of the colonial rule that would facilitate … state and national development” during Reconstruction.5 Treaty-making was the way of conducting business between Indian peoples and the U.S. government between 1777 and 1868, and it was a primary mechanism through which the United States acquired much of its land.6 As Donald Fixico points out, “American Indians hold a unique status in having signed the most treaties of any Indigenous people in the world. In addition to WMIR, at least fifty-five executive order reservations were established after the 1871 IAA.13 The year 1871 was a “fundamental turning point” in U.S.-Indigenous policy, as Vine Deloria Jr., Raymond DeMallie, Bruyneel, and Patrick Wolfe, among others have argued, even if the treaty abolition rider’s place as “a conscious and acknowledged departure” from previous government-Indigenous interactions remains uncertain.14 “The appropriations rider … might … be regarded as only a minor and temporary conflict between the Senate and House of Representatives, because treaty language continued to be used when dealing with Indians,” Deloria and DeMallie concede. [...]Bruyneel presents a rollicking and important essay, including prescriptions, that connects it all together—from 1871 through W.E.B. Du Bois, and eventually to Rev. Dr. William Barber and his Moral Mondays.