El. knyga: Claiming Turtle Mountain's Constitution: The History, Legacy, and Future of a Tribal Nation's Founding Documents

"In this work, Keith Richotte explores Native American tribal constitutional history in order to, as he argues, decenter the U.S. federal actors, laws, and policies from the study of tribal constitutionalism and instead refocus attention back onto tribalmembers, underlining their agency and importance. Richotte uses the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians as a case study and follows the tribe's history in forming its own 1932 constitution, detailing every step and decision taken, good and bad, in its creation. He shows that the tribe's dominant political goal was pursuing a claim against the federal government for the damages it suffered during the establishment of its reservation and the negotiations for a treaty. However, political forces in and outside the tribe pushed the decision to a compromise, and the tribe adopted a constitution that limited their own authority while keeping open the possibility of later claims against the U.S. Federal government. Importantly, all of this took place beforethe Indian Reorganization Act - the piece of federal legislation most associated with modern tribal constitutionalism - became law, making Turtle Mountain's path to its own constitution a story of tribal agency, one that disrupts the commonly held idea that IRA lies at the epicenter of tribal constitutionalism"--

In an auditorium in Belcourt, North Dakota, on a chilly October day in 1932, Robert Bruce and his fellow tribal citizens held the political fate of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in their hands. Bruce, and the others, had been asked to adopt a tribal constitution, but he was unhappy with the document, as it limited tribal governmental authority. However, white authorities told the tribal nation that the proposed constitution was a necessary step in bringing a lawsuit against the federal government over a long-standing land dispute. Bruce's choice, and the choice of his fellow citizens, has shaped tribal governance on the reservation ever since that fateful day.

In this book, Keith Richotte Jr. offers a critical examination of one tribal nation's decision to adopt a constitution. By asking why the citizens of Turtle Mountain voted to adopt the document despite perceived flaws, he confronts assumptions about how tribal constitutions came to be, reexamines the status of tribal governments in the present, and offers a fresh set of questions as we look to the future of governance in Native America and beyond.