American Indians and Natural Resource Development: Indigenous Peoples’Land, Now Sought After, Has Produced New Indian‐White Problems

In the colonial period of U.S. history, American Indian tribes enjoyed the status of political sovereigns, and dealt as equals with the English Crown and colonial authorities. In the years following U.S. independence, legal, administrative, and military actions were used to redefine the meaning of tribal sovereignty. Conceptualizing these developments, “captive nations” refers to the limited sovereignty of tribes and their isolation and detachment from mainstream American society. Recently, natural resource development on their land and especially the discovery of energy resources has had a major impact on the structure of Federal‐Indian relations and the political status of Indian tribes in American society. Willingly or unwillingly, many tribes are in the process of renegotiating their status with the Federal Government as a consequence of the resource development. As a result, these former captive nations are now more aptly described as “internal colonies.”