American Indian Politics and the American Political System (review)

David E. Wilkins’s American Indian Politics and the American Political System, now in its second edition, is the go-to book both as an American Indian studies text and for scholars as reference material. Covering an enormous subject area, Wilkins manages to be both comprehensive and concise. There likely is no better source of accurate information about American Indian law, politics, economics, history, and even sociology on the market today.

American Indians in the American political system is a subject area of enormous depth and complexity, and the topic of American Indians in tribal political systems is even more complex. Wilkins offers a very good and useful summary of both, with critical analysis undergirding the structure of the text. Modern American Indian politics cannot be fully understood without a solid grounding in the history of American Indian law and policy, and Wilkins provides an outstanding overview. Noting a suggestion about the first edition made by Vine Deloria Jr., Wilkins writes in the preface to the second edition about expanding the coverage of law, history, communication, and economics to this political study. It is useful to analyze Wilkins’s text using these categories.

First, Wilkins captures the broad sweep of federal Indian law and policy in the first five chapters of the book, along with much of the complicated history of federal intervention in tribal affairs. This is a terribly complicated endeavor, summarizing and organizing this material that spans centuries, involving an interconnected and contradictory series of eras in federal Indian affairs. Any scholar willing to undertake this task will reach different conclusions on how to present the material, so most critiques would be nothing more than nitpicking. Wilkins, author of American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice and co-author with Vine Deloria Jr. of Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations, is well experienced in this task. He makes very good choices here, starting with who Indian people are, where they live, and under which government(s) Indian people have rights and obligations. This is basic material, but pretty much every Indian alive has to deal with these basic questions from outsiders.

At this point, however, I break ever so slightly from Wilkins. My sense as a junior scholar is that American Indian studies, including American Indian law, is changing from a federal-centric point of view to an Indian-centric point of view. Wilkins’s work goes an enormous way toward this goal, especially in the second half of the book. But the foundational material in Chapters 2 through 4, in particular, is federal-centric. The presentation of this material, which is still a delightful read, at this stage in the overall text encourages readers and students to view and analyze history, law, and policy from the point of view of the federal government and American citizens. It might be useful to recall that, at the time Publius was publishing the Federalist Papers in New York, the vast majority of Indians in what is now the United States were dealing with English, Spanish, and Russian colonial powers. Maybe it is unworkable, perhaps even myopic, but I would have preferred to see the tribal government material in Chapter 5 presented earlier, perhaps in the first two chapters. After all, Indian nations predate the United States and certainly the American Constitution. Following this line of thought, perhaps more material on Indian treaties should be front-loaded into the earlier parts of the book. Wilkins does not utterly neglect Indian nations in these chapters and, in fact, does a remarkable job in keeping the readers’ minds on Indian people during this history of federal law and policy. But, in my view, by the time readers reach material about the 1924 citizenship act and federal recognition, for example, they should have a strong handle on the irony, and even ignominy, of those laws and regulations for Indian people.

Second, moving into the political economy, where so much of modern American...