Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Who's In Charge Of U.S. Indian Policy?: Congress And The Supreme Court At Loggerheads Over American Indian Religious Freedom, David E. Wilkins

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The federal government's three branches—executive, legislative, judicial, and that unwieldy mass known simply as "the bureaucracy" have, during the last half-decade—1987-1991—produced a dizzying crop of laws, policies, proclamations, regulations, and court decisions which have served simultaneously to 1) reaffirm tribal sovereignty; 2) permit and encourage greater state interference within Indian Country; 3) enhance federal legislative authority over tribes; and 4) deny constitutional free-exercise protections both to individual Indians and to tribes.

On the legislative side, Congress has established the experimental Tribal Self-Governance Demonstration Project which is a major step towards restoring the tribal right of self-determination, and is discussing the …

Internal Tribal Fragmentation: An Examination Of A Normative Model Of Democratic Decision-Making, David E. Wilkins

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

A recent commentary by Gerald A. Alfred in the spring 1991 edition of the Northeast Indian Quarterly dealt with a subject matter which is either ignored or radically exaggerated when it is broached in Indian Country: political fragmentation (or segments or cleavages) and ideological conflict within North American Indian tribes and the ramifications of such internal conflict on tribal identity.

This paper, after restating Alfred's major points about Mohawk segmentation at Kahnawake, describes and then analyzes a viable alternative democratic decision-making model which has been specifically designed to address the problems of how not only to restore, but also to …

The Limits Of Natural Law: Thomas Rutherforth And The American Legal Tradition, Gary L. Mcdowell

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The history of American constitutional jurisprudence has been marked by a persistent fascination with the idea of natural law. This springs first and foremost from the fact that we understand as our constitutional foundation those “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” to which Thomas Jefferson made such eloquent appeal in the Declaration of Independence. Further, American politics since the founding of the republic has been characterized by a commitment, with more or less success, to the simple truth James Madison posited in The Federalist. “Justice,” Madison declared, “is the end of government. It is the end of civil …