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This article examines tribal governance and its relationship with the U.S. government through the lens of laws and treaties. There are more than 550 American Indian and Alaska Native tribes in the United States. Tribes are sovereigns having their own governance structures, with rich cultures that are intertwined with the founding of our nation. This calls for a renewed awareness of tribes by the field of public administration, requiring careful consideration and respect of tribal cultural, historic, and social values, which are an integral part of tribal governance.
Although American Indian and Alaska Native tribes make up approximately 2.5 million inhabitants of the total population, they constitute a completely different level of governance within the United States (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2001). Tribes possess inherent powers of self-- governance that predate the founding of our nation and the Constitution (U.S. Department of the Interior, 1999). Although the Constitution provides for a delineation of responsibilities between the federal and state governments, the more than 550 American Indian and Alaska Native tribes have their own governance structures and are dealt with on a government-- to-government relationship by the United States (Bureau of Indian Affairs, 2001).
This article examines tribal governance and its relationship with the U.S. government through the lens of laws and treaties. Furthermore, it calls for an awareness of a population that the majority of the field of public administration does not know-the more than 550 American Indian and Alaska Native tribes within the United States. As pointed out by Aufrecht (1999), "The public administration literature almost completely ignores the topic of Native American governance." Furthermore, tribal cultures are guided by their values and beliefs, and it is important to examine their governance structures along with the federal and state governments (Poupart, Martinez, Red Horse, & Scharnberg, 2000).
TRIBES, THE CONSTITUTION, TREATIES, AND THE SUPREME COURT
The Constitution refers to Indians in two clauses. Article 1, section 9 (commerce clause) grants to Congress the sole authority to regulate commerce "with Indian tribes." According to Monette (1994), some have proposed this language to mean that tribes possess sovereignty more similar to that of the Union than that of states. The reference to "Indians not taxed" in article 1, section 2 (apportionment clause) applied to...