Reclaiming the Reservation: Histories of Indian Sovereignty Suppressed and Renewed

In June 2021, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that tribal police have “the authority to detain temporarily and to search a non–Native American traveling on a public right-of-way running through a reservation for potential violations of state and federal law.”¹ A win for advocates of Native nations’ sovereignty, the decision's unanimity elided a deeply contested history of tribal governmental power exercised over non-Indians. Readers of Alexandra Harmon's Reclaiming the Reservation: Histories of Indian Sovereignty Suppressed and Renewed know how significant the Court's decision in United States v. Cooley is, though. Her monograph masterfully documents the revitalization of tribal governments that began asserting their power with more force and fervor in the 1960s and ’70s. Specifically, Harmon charts the history of tribal policing of non-Indians on reservation land, a power never ceded to the United States but previously limitedly practiced by many nations. Pressures—such destructive behavior by non-Indians on and/or...