Tribal Nations and Indigenous Governance

by bam

The course that develops the one correction most civics teaching gets wrong: a tribal nation is not a rung on the federal, state, and local ladder at all. It is a separate sovereign, and its authority is pre-existing and inherent, older than the United States, not delegated down a stack the way a city's power is delegated from a state. Course 1 of this path, Who Has the Power to Do This?, introduced that idea in a single section; this course earns it in full, and with the care such content requires. You will learn where tribal sovereignty comes from and why the Marshall Court called the nations domestic dependent nations; why treaties rank as supreme law under the Supremacy Clause and how courts read them; how nations govern today, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and its model constitutions set against traditional and customary governance, with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as a named living case; and the hard legal edges, Public Law 280, McGirt v. Oklahoma, and Alaska Native corporations, which are corporations rather than reservations and are the sharpest crossover between this path and the business-forms path. This course leads with nations' own words and Indigenous scholarship, treats the 574 federally recognized tribes as 574 distinct governments, and stops deliberately short of any nation's ceremonies or restricted internal detail, because that is not the course's to give. It teaches how to read authority. It is not legal advice.