Title: Tribal Sovereignty: History and the Law - Native American Caucus of the California Democratic Party
Headings: 
Constitutional Law and Legal Precedent
Sovereignty as a Retained Right
Tribes and the Federal Government
The Cornerstones of Tribal Self-Government

Content: You can see that tradition is still alive today if you watch British government on C-SPAN.) By watching tribal councils, early Americans observed that each representative spoke individually and everyone listened first without interruption. Jefferson and his colleagues adopted this process as a more civilized way to conduct government. Europeans were used to feudal government systems and government based on authoritarian control. They had little experience in making decisions by consensus. Newcomers to America sat down with tribes like the Algonquian and learned the concept of group meetings which the Algonquians called “caucuses.” The U.S. Constitution recognized tribal governments and, starting with Thomas Jefferson, America’s founding fathers pledged that their sovereignty was to be protected. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized tribal sovereignty in court decisions for more than 150 years. In 1831, the Supreme Court agreed, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, that Indian nations had the full legal right to manage their own affairs, govern themselves internally, and engage in legal and political relationships with the federal government and its subdivisions. In 1942 Supreme Court Justice Felix Cohen wrote, “Indian sovereignty is the principle that those powers which are lawfully vested in an Indian tribe, are notÉdelegated powers granted by express acts of Congress, but rather inherent powers of a limited sovereignty which can never be extinguished.”