L. Gordon McLester III - A Nation within a Nation: Voices of the Oneidas in Wisconsin

Throughout the Indigenous nations located within the United States, the term sovereignty is invariably used when describing the inherent authority of their nations. Usually, the term is invoked in the course of protecting some right as in, The application of the states taxes to our land will undermine our sovereignty! or as a justification for an assertion of power as in, Building this casino is an exercise of our sovereignty! It is referenced in whole and absolute terms and on occasion is tailored to suit a particular purpose, e.g., to assert the nations cultural sovereignty or its economic sovereignty. Robert Odawi Porter, Conceptions of Indigenous Sovereignty

THIS BOOK IS THE FOURTH AND CONCLUDING VOLUME in a series on the history of the Oneida Nation. In 1988, Syracuse University Press published The Oneida Indian Experience: Two Perspectives, which provided a historical overview of Oneida communities in the United States and Canada. In 1999, the University of Wisconsin Press published The Oneida Indian Journey: From New York to Wisconsin, 17841860, which described the pressures on those Indians during the time they made treaties with the federal government (1784 to 1838), the reasons for their migration out of the Empire State, and their adjustment to their new home in the Badger State. In 2006, the University of Oklahoma Press published The Oneida Indians in the Age of Allotment, 18601920, which focused on the Wisconsin communitys loss of more than sixty-five thousand acres as a result of congressional and state legislative actions in the wake of the Dawes Act of 1887. As was true in the preceding volumes in this series, the editors of A Nation Within a Nation: Voices of the Oneidas in Wisconsin do not simply view these Native Americans as victims acted upon by white outsiders; they present the Oneidas as actors in their own history.

Although not new by any means, the term sovereignty has been used more frequently in Indian country over the past four decades. Anyone spending time in a Native American community soon realizes that the word has a distinct, solemn meaning when used by Indians, and has little to do with its use in a Euro-American context. In western thought, sovereignty connotes a political-legal reality and refers to the supreme and ultimate authority that exists within any political unit or association or territory. A sovereign power is deemed free from all other authorities and possesses no rivals within its jurisdiction.

Native Americans have never accepted this definition, believing instead that they can retain elements of sovereignty even if they are not free from all other authorities. As scholars David Wilkins and K. Tsianina Loma -waima note, not even an international superpower such as the United States possesses truly unlimited sovereignty. The American federalist system reserves certain rights and powers to the states and people rather than to the federal government, for example, and treaties made with foreign nations or with Indian nations also limit Washingtons powers. In the real world, sovereignty operates within constraints. Certainly the colonial process known as frontier expansion has imposed severe restraints on Native Americans. The United States Supreme Court has added to these constraints, deeming Indian nations domestic dependent nations since 1831, and, in 1903, declaring that the Congress had plenary power allowing it to abrogate federal-Indian treaties without tribal consent. Nevertheless, Native Americans emphasize that they were sovereign nations at the time of European contact and that they remain sovereign nations now.