Title: Native American Rights legal definition of Native American Rights
Headings: Native American Rights
Native American Rights
Native American Rights
Tribal Sovereignty
Treaty Rights
Reserved Rights Doctrine
Federal Power over Native American Rights
Hunting and Fishing Rights
Water Rights
Gaming Rights
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Native American Rights
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Content: Tribal Sovereignty
Tribal sovereignty refers to the fact that each tribe has the inherent right to govern itself. Before Europeans came to North America, Native American tribes conducted their own affairs and needed no outside source to legitimate their powers or actions. When the various European powers did arrive, however, they claimed dominion over the lands that they found, thus violating the sovereignty of the tribes who already were living there. The issue of the extent and limits of tribal sovereignty came before the U.S. Supreme Court in Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543, 5 L. Ed. 681 (1823). Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Marshall described the effects of European incursion on native tribes, writing that although the Indians were " admitted to be the rightful occupants of the soil … their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished, and their power to dispose of the soil, at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased, was denied by the original fundamental principle, that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it." The European nations that had "discovered" North America, Marshall ruled, had "the sole right of acquiring the soil from the natives." Having acknowledged this limitation to tribal sovereignty in Johnson, however, Marshall's opinions in subsequent cases reinforced the principle of tribal sovereignty. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.)