The War on Poverty, Lawyers, and the Tribal Sovereignty Movement, 1964-1974
‘The Sovereignty that Seemed Lost Forever’: The War on Poverty, Lawyers, and the Tribal Sovereignty Movement, 1964-1974 Aurélie A. Roy Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Aurélie A. Roy All rights reserved ‘The Sovereignty that Seemed Lost Forever’1: The War on Poverty, Lawyers, and the Tribal Sovereignty Movement, 1964-1974 Aurélie A. Roy ABSTRACT Relying on interviews of Indian rights lawyers as well as archival research, this collective history excavates a missing page in the history of the modern tribal sovereignty movement. At a time when vocal Native American political protests were raging from Washington State, to Alcatraz Island, to Washington, D.C., a small group of newly graduated lawyers started quietly resurrecting Indian rights through the law. Between 1964 and 1974, these non-Indian and Native American lawyers litigated on behalf of Indians, established legal assistance programs as part of the War on Poverty efforts to provide American citizens with equal access to a better life, and founded institutions to support the protection of tribal rights. In the process, they would also inadvertently create both a profession and an academic field—Indian law as we know it today— which has since attracted an increasing number of lawyers, including Native Americans. This story is an attempt at reconstituting a major dimension of the rise of tribal sovereignty in the postwar era, one that has until now remained in the shadows of history: how Indian rights, considered obsolete until the 1960s, gained legitimacy by seizing a series of opportunities made available in part through ‘accidents’ of history.
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