The focus is far more narrow than the title suggests. My real focus is the Colorado Cases of the 1970's, leading up to the Arizona v. Apache case in 1983. I've done plenty of background research and I've gone as far back as the original landings of the English and Spanish in the New World. My personal feelings at the moment are that the Cherokee Cases of the 1830's, the Winters case in 1908, the change in perception of sovereign immunity in the 1950's, and the McCarran amendment of 1952, all lead up to the decisions made in 1971. So here are the real questions: By the time 1983 rolls around, can Native American's be considered Sovereigns? Were they even Sovereigns to begin with? Is there anything unusual about the developments in the decades of the 1950's-80's? (and by unusual, I mean when examining the timeline of U.S. and Tribal relations, are these moves unexpected? or are they just another move in a never ending give and take of rights between the U.S. and Native Tribes?)
Feel free to ask me more pointed questions, thanks ladies and gents
These are very good questions. I don't know that I can address them directly, but I will include a few sources on the nature of indigenous sovereignty in the United States below. Sovereignty is an enduring topic of debate within indigenous studies, and there are many different perspectives on this. I take the position that indigenous nations are absolutely sovereign, and that exterior attacks on that sovereignty don't negate it. And strategically, I tend to think that Native nations have invested so much in the notion of sovereignty that it would be unwise to take a different tack now.
But others disagree. Certainly there are assimilationists that insist that indigenous sovereignty never existed -- and perhaps their prominence in the 1950s is something distinctive about that era. That was the time of termination, after all, and thus a moment of very heightened danger to the continuation of indigenous nationhood. There are critics that make that argument still, although very few of them are indigenous.
But there are a number of indigenous thinkers like Taiaiake Alfred and Joanne Barker who have been calling for a reevaluation of sovereignty as a goal of indigenous nationhood. They point out that sovereignty is a Western idea with a history deeply entangled within Western concepts of rule, and thus not a term that indigenous people should accept blindly -- you can look at Laura Benton's Search for Sovereignty for more on the history of the term. Those critics have proposed various alternatives, many of which don't have much to do with one another.
But there is a robust debate on this within indigenous studies, and my own back and forth on the term mirrors the debate within the field fairly well. The term sovereignty has baggage, but I'm not willing to abandon it. And what would the alternative be?
Alfred, Taiaiake. Peace, Power, Righteousness : An Indigenous Manifesto. Second. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Barker, Joanne. Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Bruyneel, Kevin. “The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of US-Indigenous Relations.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cobb, Daniel M. Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2008.
Kauanui, J. Kehaulani. Hawaiian Blood : Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Sovereign Subjects : Indigenous Sovereignty Matters. Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2007.