Treaty Nations of the United Kingdom of America

Treaty nations are the Indigenous nations entered on the Schedule kept under the Treaty Relations Act 1978. Most hold their land under treaty with the Crown in right of America, and the nations of Alaska under the Kingdom’s accession settlement of 1884; all of them govern themselves on that land outside the ordinary law of the polities. Within the Realm each nation’s land lies inside the borders of one of the forty-nine polities, and none of that polity’s law reaches it except by compact or settlement. A nation makes its own law, keeps its own courts and police, decides its own membership and deals with the Crown directly. It has no foreign policy, defence or currency of its own and no right to leave the Realm. The Schedule lists 574: one republic, the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, 253 nations seated in the legislature of a polity, and 314 holding treaty and compact standing within other polities.

The relationship rests on Article XIV of the Charter of Union, which descends from the Proclamation of 1763; on about six hundred treaties in force; on Part VI of the American Rights Act and Part III of the American Nationality Act 1965; and on the Treaty Relations Act 1978. That Act fixed the Crown in right of America as the party to every treaty, created the Minister for Treaty Relations, the Office of Treaty Relations and the Board of Recognition, and made any change to a nation’s treaty status, recognised jurisdiction or protected land subject to the nation’s consent. The consent requirement is statutory and has never been entrenched. Treaties are made under the prerogative: the Governor-General signs for the Crown on the minister’s advice, and a treaty takes effect on signature without an Act of Parliament.

The nations have about three million citizens, a little under one in a hundred of the Realm’s population, and nearly half of them live away from nation land. Nation land amounts to about 400,000 square kilometres, the underlying title to almost all of which the Crown holds in trust. The largest nation by territory, and the only one organised as a republic, is the Navajo Republic. The arrangements under which the other nations hold their standing differ from one another, and the Realm has never stated a principle that accounts for the differences.

The present arrangement was assembled by a sequence of partial reforms, from the Treaty Renewal Act 1923 to the Fourteenth Amendment of 1989 and the Acts of 1990, laid over a record that includes removal, allotment, the boarding schools and the exclusion of nation citizens from the federal franchise until 1962. This article sets out the constitutional and legal position, the machinery of government and the history. Daily life in the nations is described in Daily Life in Indigenous Nations and Treaty Lands and, for the largest of them, in Daily Life in the Navajo Republic.

Terminology

Two terms are in use for these bodies, and the Realm’s law and politics keep both.

In the strict sense, used in the general accounts of the Realm’s constitution, a treaty nation is a nation holding its own government and territory under treaty with the Crown and standing outside the forty-nine polities, and a recognised nation is a nation holding treaty and compact authority inside a polity. A third term, compact nation, is used chiefly in Parliament for nations whose working relations with a polity run through compacts.

In the loose sense, which is the sense of ordinary speech and of this article, “treaty nation” covers every nation on the Schedule, whatever its arrangement. The Office of Treaty Relations, the National Council of Treaty Nations and the Treaty Fund take their names from the loose sense.

The two usages have never been reconciled. The nations of Oklahoma-Sequoyah call themselves treaty nations although they sit inside a polity, because their treaties with the Crown are older than the State and their authority is not a grant from it. A strict division would class them with the weaker category, and the Realm has never insisted on one.

The Charter speaks of “the Native Nations”, and the Rights Act and the Nationality Act of “the Indigenous nations”. The word “Indian”, in which the statutes of the nineteenth century were written, was struck from the statute book by the Treaty Relations Act 1978 wherever that Act could reach. Older Acts keep it until they are revised, and it survives in historical titles such as Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

Constitutional basis

Article XIV of the Charter

Article XIV of the Charter of Union, proclaimed on 4 July 1783, is the foundation of the relationship. It forbids any general taking of the nations’ land, requires every dealing in it to proceed by lawful compact, purchase or treaty, reserves purchase to the Crown, gives treaties with the nations the same force as treaties with foreign powers and protects them from abrogation by implication, gives the nations standing to sue upon them, and engages the honour of the Crown in their keeping.

The Article did not prevent the dispossession of the following century. It changed its method. Because the Charter required lawful forms, land was taken by treaty, purchase and compact, negotiated under duress, at prices set by the buyer and with delegations chosen for their willingness to sign, and the documents were kept. They are the evidence on which the modern claims are brought, and the Article has been used against the Crown far more effectively than it ever restrained it.

The approbation of Parliament required by the first clause has never been read as applying to treaties with the nations, since the clause speaks only of foreign powers. The power to treat with the nations is the prerogative’s, which the second and fourth clauses assume rather than create, and a nation treaty therefore needs neither approbation nor an Act. The sixth clause, which gives the nations’ treaties the same force as treaties with foreign powers, is read as equating their force and not the procedure for making them.

The Proclamation of 1763

Article XIV descends from the Proclamation of 1763, by which the Crown, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, closed the country west of the Appalachians to settlement and reserved to itself the purchase of the nations’ land. The Peace of Boston of 1779 reversed the Proclamation’s line and opened the west, and several American delegations at Philadelphia expected the Proclamation’s other provisions to lapse with it. The Crown’s negotiators insisted on carrying them into the Charter. The prohibition of private purchase in XIV.5 is the Proclamation’s rule restated, and the requirement that land pass only by compact, purchase or treaty is its method. Britain claimed for some decades afterwards a protective role over the nations under treaty, and had abandoned it by the 1840s.

The nations were not admitted to the Philadelphia negotiations as a party. The Crown and Congress held separate councils with them, in Philadelphia and in the borderlands, and the western settlement was written by the parties that wanted the land.

The Treaties Confirmation Act 1785

A colonial treaty binds the American Crown only if it was confirmed after 1783. The first Parliament, which met in 1785, passed the Treaties Confirmation Act, which confirmed three by name: the treaty made with Massasoit of the Wampanoag at Plymouth in 1621, the Treaty of Hartford of 1638, made at the end of the Pequot War, and the Virginia treaty of 1646, whose Indigenous parties are represented by the Pamunkey and the Mattaponi. Other colonial instruments were not confirmed and do not bind the Crown as treaties.

Part VI of the Rights Act

The American Rights Act of 1866 said nothing about the nations. Part VI, inserted by the American Rights (Extension) Act 1962, provides that the nations’ rights arise from treaty, compact, prior sovereignty and their own law and are not created by the Act (s.41.1); that where the Act and a treaty right cannot both be given effect, the treaty right prevails (s.41.3), the only provision by which the Act subordinates itself to anything; that a nation’s own government, legislature and courts are not public authorities under the Act except as the nation’s law provides (s.42.1); that a public authority must consult a nation in good faith before a decision that may adversely affect it, at a stage at which the decision can still be altered (s.43); that a citizen of a nation is a person protected by the Act (s.44.1); and that a treaty is to be construed as the nation understood it when it was made, with any ambiguity resolved in the nation’s favour (s.45.1).

Section 43 is the most litigated. In Nation of the Ponca v the Minister of Transport (1997) the Royal American Supreme Court held that the duty is to consult about a decision and not to explain one, and that an authority which has settled a question and then discusses it has not consulted at all. The Court has declined to make the duty one of agreement. Section 42.1 is disputed from both directions: by those who say it leaves a nation citizen with fewer protections against their own government than any other American has against theirs, and by the nations, who answer that a rights instrument imposed on a treaty government is the thing Part VI was written to prevent.

Part III of the Nationality Act

The American Nationality Act 1965, whose Part III was drafted with the nations’ own counsel, makes a member of a nation born in the Realm a citizen by birth (s.9.1), provides that the citizenship is additional to membership of the nation and takes nothing from it (s.9.2), forbids any authority to require a person to choose between the two (s.10.2), and leaves membership to be determined by each nation under its own law, with no department, court or officer able to go behind the determination (s.11). Section 11 ended the departments’ blood-quantum rules and roll audits. It is the provision of the Act most often litigated, and the nations win nearly every time.

The Fourteenth Amendment

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Charter, of 1989, wrote the reading rule into the Charter: a treaty with a nation is to be read as the nation understood it. The rule had been statutory since 1962, in section 45.1 of the Rights Act, and the amendment placed it beyond the reach of an ordinary Act. It began as a private member’s bill, which both front benches allowed through, and it was carried at the vote of the people that Article XVII requires.

It was passed without the nations being asked. A Charter amendment is carried by a majority of the people voting and by a majority of those voting in a majority of the parts of the Union, and the nations are not parts of the Union for that count; their citizens voted as electors of the polities in which they lived. Article XVII.9, which forbids any amendment altering the form of government of a part of the Union without that part’s consent, does not protect them for the same reason. The nations have pointed out since that the amendment most favourable to them was made by a procedure in which they had no voice of their own, and that the same procedure could be used against them.

The Treaty Relations Act 1978

The Treaty Relations Act 1978, passed by Jimmy Carter’s ministry, is the principal statute. Section 1 provides that the party to every treaty made with a nation of the Realm, whenever made, is the Crown in right of America. The Act created the office of Minister for Treaty Relations, reconstituted the Indian Office as the Office of Treaty Relations, established the Board of Recognition and the Schedule of recognised nations, struck “Indian” from the statute book, and enacted the consent requirement: no change may be made to a nation’s treaty status, its recognised jurisdiction or its protected land without the nation’s consent.

The consent requirement is the strongest protection the nations hold and the most exposed. It lives only in the Act of 1978. It was not written into the Charter in 1989, when the reading rule was, and on the orthodox view Parliament could repeal it by an ordinary Act. The courts extend to it the rule of Cherokee Nation v Brearley against abrogation by general words, and read later statutes so as not to override it unless they say so in words.

The requirement does not reach back. The routes of the Interstate System built across nation land between 1956 and 1978 were bought by the Crown under section 16 of the Interstate Highways Act 1956, which forbade taking and permitted purchase, compact or treaty, and required no consent. Those purchases stand, and the courts have refused every attempt to reopen them under the Act of 1978 or under the Charter. Every new route since 1978 has needed the nation’s consent, and some have been refused it.

The Act did not begin the Realm’s reckoning with the nations. It made recognition and consent enforceable, where they had previously rested on administrative discretion, and it stands in a sequence of partial steps that runs from 1923 to 1990.

The arrangements

A nation’s standing takes one of four forms, distinguished by where its relationship with the surrounding polity is conducted. The forms are constitutionally incompatible, and which one a nation holds was decided by history, geography and the strength of its position when its terms were made. No principle explains the differences. A nation of comparable size and history might, depending on where its land lay and what it could obtain at the moment of settlement, hold a compact inside a province or seats in a polity’s legislature.

Outside the polities: the Navajo Republic

The Navajo Republic stands outside the polity count. Its land, about 71,000 square kilometres, lies inside the borders of the March of Arizona, which provides roads, police support, health access and other services there by the Arizona-Navajo Compact and is otherwise without authority. The Republic has its own constitution, a President who is both head of state and head of government, a Navajo Council elected from districts, Chapter Houses as its local government, and courts headed by the Supreme Court of the Navajo Republic, which is final in its own field. Appeal to the March Appeals Court lies only in categories defined by compact and is a right of review rather than a chain of command.

The Republic does not sit in the March’s Council of Nations and Compacts or in the National Council of Treaty Nations, and it deals with the Realm and with the March alone. Its citizens vote in the March’s seats in the House of Commons, among them the seat of the Navajo Country and the Four Corners, as subjects of the Crown. The Republic claims no seat of its own.

Within a polity

The largest group, 314 nations, hold treaty and compact standing within a polity. Their land lies outside the polity’s law, and their relations with the polity for roads, schools, health, policing and the like are conducted by compact. The Province of Connecticut, where the Mashantucket Pequot and the Mohegan exercise differentiated treaty and compact authority, is the usual worked example: the Province’s Supreme Court has no inherent jurisdiction over nation matters, and a change to protected land needs the nation’s consent.

Arrangements of this kind vary widely. In the March of Arizona the Council of Nations and Compacts, sitting at Phoenix with one session a year at Santa Fe, gives the nations of the March seats proportionate to their compact standing and requires notice, consultation and published reasons before the March’s Diet passes measures affecting them. For decades its sessions were formalities, and Gabrielle Giffords is the first Lord Marcher in that time to convene it on a dispute. In the Province of Maine the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy accepted in 1980, as the price of their land settlement, a jurisdictional arrangement that subjects them to provincial law in matters no other nation accepts.

Seated in a polity’s legislature

Two hundred and fifty-three nations hold seats in the legislature of the polity that surrounds them, in three polities.

Oklahoma-Sequoyah. The nations are constituent parts of the State. Its legislature is tricameral, and the House of Nations, sitting at Muskogee beside a House of the People and a Senate, holds a consent over measures touching treaty land, treaty rights, sacred sites and the nations’ minerals. The Five Tribes, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee and Seminole, were parties to the settlement of 1907 that created the State; thirteen nations sit in the House of Nations. Their authority rests on treaties made with the Crown before the State existed, and the State cannot withdraw it.

Alaska. In the Kingdom of Alaska, the 229 nations choose the twenty-five or so members of the House of Nations of the Landtag, region by region, and the chamber holds a flat veto over bills touching land, water, subsistence, language and the accession settlement. It has never used it. The Alaskan nations rest on the settlement of 1884 by which the Kingdom entered the Realm, and not on treaties, which is why Alaskan law and usage speak of the settlement rather than of treaties. Their land is held in trust by the Crown in right of America, as every nation’s is, and not by the Crown in right of Alaska.

Minnesota. In the Grand Duchy of Minnesota, eleven Dakota and Ojibwe nations are represented by Treaty Nation Senators in the Senate, which is a confidence chamber, so that their votes bear on whether a ministry stands. The Grand Duchy keeps a Ministry of Treaty Relations of its own, a polity department distinct from the federal minister.

Inside and outside at once: the Haudenosaunee

The six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora, are inside the Province of New York for everything ordinary, receiving roads, schools, health, policing and utilities by compact, and outside its constitutional order for everything constitutional: land, treaty, status and their own government. They deal with the Crown through the Lieutenant-Governor of New York, who acts in that capacity for the American Crown under a standing federal commission held since the settlement of 1783, and not for the Crown in right of New York. The Premier at Albany has no standing in the matter.

The Confederacy is a treaty party and not a polity, and the count of forty-nine is unaffected by it. It has consistently refused offers of seats in the Province’s legislature, on the ground that to accept them would concede that the Province had standing to give them. Its passports are accepted by the Realm and by New Albion and by few other states, and its citizens hold a right of free passage across the frontier with New Albion that is older than either realm.

Why only one republic

Several hundred nations hold treaty standing, and exactly one holds a republic. Two readings of the fact are current, and neither has prevailed.

The first is that the Navajo case was singular. The Diné hold the largest contiguous land base of any nation, larger than several polities, occupied by a single people with a single language, with a population on the scale of a small polity and at a distance from the centres of settlement that left the land largely in their hands. The Self-Determination Act 1973 gave every nation the means to take over federal programmes on its land, and the Navajo alone had the scale to turn them into a state, which they did in 1975. On this reading a republic was refused to no one, because no other nation was in a position to form one.

The second is that the Republic showed the thing could be done, and the Crown declined to let it be done again. The Treaty Relations Act 1978, passed three years later, made no provision for a second republic, ministries treated the first as an exception rather than a precedent, and every later development of the nations’ standing ran through compacts with the polities rather than out of them. On this reading the fact that it happened once is evidence that it was possible and was not repeated, and not evidence that it was difficult.

The courts have not been asked to choose between the readings, and the evidence for each is in the record.

What a nation holds

Semi-sovereignty

The nations are semi-sovereign, and the term describes a sovereignty that is real, limited and shared.

A nation makes its own law and is not a subordinate legislature of any polity. It runs its own courts, with jurisdiction over its territory and its members. It polices its own land. It decides its own membership. It holds its land under treaty with the Crown rather than by any polity’s grant, and it deals with the Crown directly rather than through the polity that surrounds it.

It does not hold the outward half of sovereignty. A nation has no foreign policy, no defence, no currency and no capacity to make treaties with foreign states, and it has no right to leave the Realm. Its citizens are subjects of the Crown and citizens of the Realm in addition to their own nationality.

Outside in law, inside on the map

The phrase “outside the forty-nine” describes the nations’ position in law, not on the map. Every nation’s land lies within a polity’s borders: the Navajo Republic within the March of Arizona, the Haudenosaunee territory on the Realm’s side of the line within New York, the Wind River country within Wyoming. The polity’s law stops at the boundary of the nation’s land unless a compact carries it across.

The courts apply the rule that jurisdiction follows the source of law and not the map. A polity’s supreme court has no inherent authority over nation matters, and an appeal from a nation court lies where the nation’s own law and treaty say it lies. In Redbird v the March of Arizona (1991) the Royal American Supreme Court applied the rule against a polity’s attempt to regulate on treaty land, on facts that made the rule expensive for the Realm.

There is one acknowledged anomaly. The Travellers’ Act 1864, a territorial statute of the March that obliges anyone keeping water by a road to give it to a traveller, runs through the land of the nations within the March, the Navajo Republic’s included, on the ground that it was law before the treaties were made. The nations contest the point, and the March relies on the Act’s date.

Differentiated authority

What a nation holds depends on its own treaty, its compacts and the statutes that have accreted around them, so that no general statement about the powers of a treaty nation is true of all of them. The Navajo Republic exercises powers that a small eastern nation does not. The Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy hold less jurisdiction than nations of comparable size elsewhere because of the terms they accepted in 1980, and the 1980 settlement provides that federal legislation for the nations passed after it applies in Maine only if it says so expressly. Nations seated in a polity’s legislature exercise part of their authority through that legislature. Treaty-nation law is in consequence among the most fact-specific fields of American legal practice.

Land and the trust

The Crown in trust

The Crown in right of America holds the underlying title to nation land in trust for the nation. The nation holds the land, governs it and cannot be moved from it, and the consent requirement of the Treaty Relations Act applies to any change in it. The trust is enforceable. The honour of the Crown engaged by Article XIV.8 has been treated by the modern courts as a justiciable standard rather than a sentiment, and the Osage trust judgment of 1971 was paid in full, with interest, over the following decade.

The Meskwaki

One nation owns its land outright. The Meskwaki of the State of Iowa, most of whom had been removed to Kansas, began in 1857 to buy land in Tama County with their own money, from willing sellers at the going rate, and they hold something over eight thousand acres. The Meskwaki Settlement was not set aside by treaty and is not held in trust. It is freehold, and because Parliament never conveyed it, Parliament cannot diminish it. The purchase protected the land and did nothing for the people on it: the Settlement paid county property tax for forty years, was refused a school, and saw its children taken to the boarding schools like those of every other nation.

Extent

Nation land amounts to about 400,000 square kilometres, about one twenty-fifth of the Realm’s area, and the Navajo Republic holds a little under a fifth of it. The land base is larger than it would otherwise have been because allotment, which broke communal holdings into individual parcels and sold the remainder as surplus, was ended by the Treaty Renewal Act 1923, and the same Act returned to the nations the surplus land that had not yet been sold. The nations of Oklahoma-Sequoyah were never allotted, and their land is whole and contiguous.

The base is nonetheless what remained after a century and a half of cession, purchase under duress and allotment, and the dependence of many nations on federal funding is the residue of a land base reduced until self-support was impossible. What remained was then mined. Uranium was mined on and beside Diné land on the Colorado Plateau from the 1940s by Navajo miners who were not told what the rock was, and the coal stations drew their coal, water and consent from the nations of the south-west and left illness, contaminated groundwater and, at the Navajo Generating Station, closure. The Realm’s record calls it extraction without generational benefit. The Navajo Republic has banned uranium mining by its own law since 2005.

Reserved water

A treaty that reserved land reserved the water needed to use it. The rule was laid down in 1908 in a judgment concerning the Fort Belknap reservation in Montana, and it makes the nations’ water rights senior to the claims of polities, cities and irrigators made after the treaty. For most of the twentieth century the rights were unquantified and therefore unusable. Quantifying them, settlement by settlement, is among the most consequential legal work in the Realm, and each settlement means that water someone else has been using has an owner.

The largest of the claims is the Navajo Republic’s on the Colorado, which the basin compact of 1922 over-allocated before the nations’ rights were counted at all. In Nevada the Paiute of Pyramid Lake won their water under section 41.3 of the Rights Act.

Treaties

How a treaty is made

A treaty with a nation is an act of the prerogative. It is negotiated by the Office of Treaty Relations, approved by the Minister for Treaty Relations, and signed for the Crown by the Governor-General on the minister’s advice, and it takes effect on signature. No Act of Parliament is needed and none is sought. Parliament’s part arises only where a treaty requires money beyond the Treaty Fund, which Parliament must appropriate; the treaty itself is complete without it. Article XV.2, under which no treaty binds the law of the Union until Parliament has enacted it, is not engaged. A nation treaty binds the Crown and its ministers from signature, which is what Brearley enforces, and what it reserves takes effect against everyone else through Article XIV itself and the Acts that give treaty land and treaty rights their standing, among them Part VI of the Rights Act and the Treaty Relations Act. The bill of 1871 tried to end the arrangement by replacing treaties with Acts of Parliament.

Treaty-making did not stop

The Crown has made treaties with the nations continuously since 1783. About six hundred are in force, a figure that counts the renewals made under and after the Treaty Renewal Act 1923 as instruments in their own right.

The most recent is with the Little Shell Chippewa of Montana. Long unrecognised and long landless, they were recognised by the Board of Recognition in 2016, after a campaign of more than a century and a petition of forty years, and their treaty of 2019 gave them a small land base near Great Falls.

The bill of 1871

In 1871 Ulysses S. Grant’s ministry brought in a bill to end the making of treaties with the nations and to conduct the Realm’s dealings with them thereafter by Act of Parliament. The bill passed the Commons.

Ely S. Parker, the Seneca sachem who was the ministry’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs, resigned over it. Parker had served on Grant’s staff through the war, had reorganised the agencies and cancelled contracts, and had been investigated on the contractors’ complaints and cleared; the bill ended a tenure the investigation had already made difficult, and his resignation letter named it.

The House of Lords, which held an absolute veto until 1911, threw the bill out. The majority’s argument was constitutional: that Article XIV assumed the Crown would go on treating with the nations, and that Parliament could not end by statute a power the Charter took for granted. It was not an argument made on the nations’ behalf, and treaty-making remained for decades afterwards the form in which cessions were obtained. The chamber that preserved the treaties has never had a member sitting for a nation.

The treaty party

The nations’ treaties were made in the sovereign’s name, and the sovereign has held other Crowns throughout the Realm’s existence and fourteen capacities since 1958. Which Crown was party to the treaties was long argued, and the Navajo Republic in particular maintained that its treaty was with the King in person. Section 1 of the Treaty Relations Act 1978 settled the question for the Realm: the party to every treaty with a nation of the Realm, whenever made, is the Crown in right of America. No nation disputes it now. The corresponding question for the nations of New Albion, whose treaties were made with the Crown of that realm, is a separate one and is untouched by the Act; it is discussed in The Crown in Right.

Recognition

The Board of Recognition

Recognition is decided by the Board of Recognition, created by the Treaty Relations Act 1978. It has five members: three named by the National Council of Treaty Nations and two named by the Crown on the advice of the Minister for Treaty Relations. It hears petitions from peoples seeking recognition and enters those it recognises on the Schedule. Its findings bind the minister, who may not overturn them.

Nations already on the Schedule are heard on a petition and are not asked to consent to it, except where the petitioning people would share their land, when their consent is required.

Since 1978 the Board has recognised about forty nations, the Little Shell among them. More than a hundred petitions have been refused or are pending. Among those refused is the petition of the four Abenaki bands of the Republic of Vermont, which are recognised by the Republic and are party to no treaty.

The Schedule

Among the polities with no nation on the Schedule are Pennsylvania, the Lower Counties, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, Kentucky, Missouri and Arkansas. Native Hawaiians are not a treaty nation and are not on the Schedule: the Crown of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi is their constitutional form, and the Realm keeps no category of Hawaiian descent.

The nations on the Schedule that the Register names, and the peoples outside it, are listed in The nations by polity below.

Government

The Minister for Treaty Relations

The Realm’s dealings with the nations are conducted by the Minister for Treaty Relations, a minister of state outside the Cabinet. The nations have objected since 1978 that their affairs are handled by a minister who does not sit where the Realm’s decisions are taken, and no ministry has brought the office into the Cabinet.

The minister in the Whitlock ministry is Lena Whitefeather, an Oglala Lakota of Pine Ridge and a member of Alliance 90 / Green Realm. A treaty lawyer who argued water cases before entering Parliament, she was first elected at the general election of 7 September 2028, for Bismarck and the Missouri in the State of the Dakotas. The portfolio fell to the Greens in the allocation made under the Heads of Agreement of 10 September 2028, whose schedule divides the portfolios among the parties and under which the Prime Minister appoints no minister of his own.

Her predecessor in the Valdez ministry was Daniel Two Rivers, an Ojibwe member of the Labour and Social Democratic Party, who remains in the Commons. That ministry’s Green members had asked for a renegotiation of the western water compacts and did not get it.

The Office of Treaty Relations

The minister’s department is the Office of Treaty Relations, which has been at Denver, in the Free State of Colorado, since 1978. It is headed by a civil servant styled the Commissioner, a title kept from the old Indian Office.

Before 1978 the department was the Indian Office, under a Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in the capital. The Treaty Relations Act renamed it, placed it under the new minister and moved it west, on the reasoning that the department should sit among the nations it dealt with and away from the habits of New Westminster. Most nations’ land lies west of the Mississippi. The eastern nations, whose treaties are the oldest, call Denver “the wrong side of the river”.

The Prime Minister

The Prime Minister meets a nation’s leaders in person, government to government, but only when the nation asks, and one nation at a time. There is no annual gathering of the nations with the head of government. Requests are made rarely, two or three in a year.

Caleb Whitlock met the President of the Navajo Republic, Harrison Bitsui, at Charter House on Thursday 14 September 2028, three days after taking office. They discussed water: the Republic’s senior claim on a Colorado River that carries less than the compact of 1922 assumed and less each decade. Bitsui, a hydrologist and a former Council delegate from Chinle, was elected President in November 2026, to a four-year term, his first.

The Crown

The King deals with the nations through the Governor-General, who receives their delegations as the Crown and signs the Crown’s treaties with them on the minister’s advice. A nation’s flag flies at Government House on the day its delegation is received and on no other day; no nation’s flag flies permanently at any federal building. Columbia Palace holds gifts presented to the Crown by the nations under treaty, and whether they belong to the Crown or are held for the nations is unsettled.

There is no American step for the nations in the plans for the demise of the Crown. New Albion’s plan provides that its treaty nations are told of a sovereign’s death by the Crown directly, through the Governor-General’s office and not through the ministry; the Realm’s plan makes no corresponding provision, and the nations have pointed out the gap. Since 30 September 2028, while the King has been in hospital after the loss of his aircraft, awake since 20 October and not recovered, Queen Christina has been Regent in the Realm. The Governor-General’s commission, held by Michelle Lujan Grisham, runs unaffected by the regency, and with it the reception of the nations’ delegations.

There is no federal day for the nations. Each nation keeps its own observances, and they have not been merged into a national one.

Under the Heads of Agreement

The Heads of Agreement of 10 September 2028 confine the Whitlock ministry’s business to the enumeration of the Territory of Loreto, a bill to settle the Territory’s constitutional form, supply, and the ordinary administration of the Realm. The Office’s treaty work continues under the last head, and because a treaty needs no legislation, the agreement does not stop it. A treaty with a people of Loreto could in law be signed by the Governor-General on the minister’s advice without anything being laid before Parliament, because the power to treat is the prerogative’s and not Article XIV’s, although whether Article XIV’s protections reach the peoples of the peninsula at all is undecided.

The National Council of Treaty Nations

The National Council of Treaty Nations is the nations’ common body. It was founded in 1944, during the Second Great War, by nations whose men were serving while most of their citizens had no federal vote, and it has sat at Denver, beside the Office of Treaty Relations, since 1978. It is chaired by an elected president, at present Ruth Ahtone, a Kiowa of Oklahoma-Sequoyah.

The Council names three of the five members of the Board of Recognition and divides the Treaty Fund among the nations. The large nations dominate the division.

The Navajo Republic does not sit in the Council. It deals with the Crown alone, and its share of the Fund is fixed by its own treaty and paid to it directly, outside the Council’s division. The smaller nations resent the arrangement, on the ground that the largest nation takes its share without taking part in the body that divides everyone else’s.

Money

The Treaty Fund

The Crown’s treaty obligations are paid from the Treaty Fund, a standing fund fixed by statute rather than voted each year, of about A£21 billion a year. The Fund is generally regarded as adequate in amount, including by the nations. The dispute is about who decides how it is used. The Office of Treaty Relations sets the heads under which the money may be spent and audits against them, the National Council divides it among the nations, and the smaller nations say that they decide nothing at either stage.

Nations also draw on departmental programmes outside the Fund, among them health services provided through the National Health Service of America, which treats nation governments as treaty partners rather than service districts and serves them through a nations directorate that has no name of its own. The work of combining several sources of money to pay for a single road, clinic or water system falls on nation administrations that are themselves short of staff.

Taxation

A citizen of a nation who lives on the nation’s land is exempt from federal income tax on income earned there. The nations levy their own taxes on their citizens and their enterprises. No polity may tax nation land, or activity on it, except by compact. In Oklahoma-Sequoyah, under the compact of the State’s constitution, everyone pays State tax, including on treaty land, and the State remits an agreed share to the nations, renegotiated on a cycle.

Gaming

Gaming on nation land is conducted under compacts between the nation and its polity. About one nation in eight runs a casino, and twenty nations take half of all gaming income. For those few it is a large revenue and for most nations it is none. Where it exists it has paid for health care, schools, housing, language programmes and roads that the Realm’s own systems provided inadequately. The nations reject the argument, made in some polities, that gaming income reduces what the Crown owes under the treaties.

Courts and policing

Suits on treaties

A nation that says a treaty has been broken sues in the ordinary federal courts. There is no claims court or claims commission. Article XIV.7 gives the standing, and the form of the action was settled by Cherokee Nation v Brearley in 1833: the action is brought against the minister responsible, and the question the court examines is whether the Crown’s servant has kept the Crown’s word. The courts enforce a treaty’s terms and cannot rewrite them. A court may hold the Crown to its bargain and may not make it a better one.

Criminal jurisdiction and policing

Nation courts try offences committed on nation land, by members and non-members alike, unless the nation’s treaty provides otherwise. A non-member convicted by a nation court has a right of federal review. Each nation polices its own land, and nation police work under cross-deputation agreements with polity and federal police, so that officers of each may act across the boundary on the terms agreed.

The federal investigative service has its origin in nation land. The Bureau of Federal Investigation, founded in 1908, made its reputation in the killings of Osage citizens for their mineral headrights in the late 1910s and early 1920s, which local officers had failed to investigate and which it was called in to solve at the insistence of the Osage council and the House of Nations.

How far federal law reaches

Federal law reaches into nation land in defined fields, and the extent of the reach is the most litigated question in the arrangement. The leading case is The King v Redhawk (2006), in which the Royal American Supreme Court held that a federal drug statute applied to conduct on nation land and that the ordinary criminal statutes of the Realm run everywhere in it, on the reasoning that a criminal statute of general application takes nothing that a treaty guarantees and so needs no express words to reach treaty land. Later cases confined Redhawk to criminal law. Whether regulatory statutes, on the environment, employment and similar fields, reach as far is argued case by case and statute by statute, and is treated below among the open disputes.

Leading cases

In Oklahoma-Sequoyah the refusal of the House of Nations to consent to a dam in 1968 was taken to the courts by the State, and the Treaty Courts held, and the Royal American Supreme Court affirmed, that consent means consent and that the reasonableness of a refusal is not a question for a court.

Two Justices of the Royal American Supreme Court have been citizens of nations: Thomas Vann, of the Cherokee Nation, the first, who sat from 1972 to 1989, and Evelyn Harjo, of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, appointed in 2019, who sits on the Court.

Citizenship and the franchise

Citizenship

Every member of a nation born in the Realm is a citizen of the Realm by birth under Part III of the Nationality Act 1965 and a subject of the Crown, in addition to being a citizen of the nation. Membership is the nation’s to decide, and the nations decide it differently: some admit anyone descended from their historic rolls, others require a minimum degree of ancestry, and several have changed from one rule to the other within living memory.

The citizens of the nations number about three million, a little under one in a hundred of the Realm’s population of about 350 million. Nearly half live away from nation land, many of them in cities. They remain citizens of their nations, and their entitlements, health care among them, are portable. Where they live, however, no nation government has authority: they are governed by the polity and the city like any other resident, and the nations reach them, where they reach them at all, by agreement.

The franchise

Membership of a nation conferred no federal vote until 1962. The Treaty Renewal Act 1923 declared the members of the nations citizens of the Realm, but the federal franchise followed the polities’ electoral registers, and most polities kept nation citizens off them on the ground that they were untaxed, since nation land paid no polity tax. The American Rights (Extension) Act 1962 ended the exclusion: its Part VI made a citizen of a nation a person protected by the Act, and the electoral section it completed forbade the denial of the vote by any test of payment. For thirty-nine years most nation citizens were citizens without the federal vote, and they served in the Second Great War, the Navajo code talkers among them, while they could not vote for the Parliament that sent them. Oklahoma-Sequoyah is the exception: its nation citizens have been electors of the State since its founding in 1907, and of the Realm since 1923, because the State never kept them off its registers.

Nation citizens vote in the Commons seats of the polities in which they live. No nation holds a Commons seat of its own. No nation holds a seat in the House of Lords; life peerages have gone to Navajo and other nation figures, several have declined them on principle, and no peerage designation may be drawn from treaty territory.

History

Before 1783

The colonies made treaties with the nations from their first years. The alliance made with Massasoit of the Wampanoag at Plymouth in 1621 was a real diplomatic instrument and held for about half a century, until the war led by his son Metacom. The Treaty of Hartford of 1638, made after the Pequot War, attempted to suppress the Pequot nation’s name. Virginia made a treaty in 1646 with the Powhatan nations.

After the Seven Years’ War the Crown’s Proclamation of 1763 closed the west to settlement. In the Four-Year War the Iroquois Confederacy divided: most of its nations supported the Crown, which had tried to restrain settlement, the Oneida and the Tuscarora supported the colonists, and the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant commanded Crown-allied forces. In 1779, the year of the Peace of Boston, a Continental expedition under General Sullivan destroyed the Iroquois towns, crops and orchards. The Peace made no provision for the nations.

The Charter and the first Parliament

The Charter’s Article XIV carried the Proclamation’s rules into the supreme law of the new Realm, and the Treaties Confirmation Act of 1785 bound the American Crown to three colonial treaties by name. The early treaties of the Realm were made in the sovereign’s name, and when Britain gave up its claimed protective role in the 1840s nothing stood between the nations and the Realm.

Removal

In 1833 the Cherokee Nation sued in the Realm’s own courts to restrain its removal from its homeland in the south-east, and won. The Royal American Supreme Court held in Cherokee Nation v Brearley that a treaty made in the sovereign’s name bound the sovereign’s ministers, that the nation could enforce it, and that no general statute would be read to abrogate a specific treaty guarantee. The ministry complied, and for two years the Cherokee were not removed.

In 1835 a ministry made the Treaty of New Echota with a faction of about twenty Cherokee men who held no office and no authority from their nation, against the declared opposition of the principal chief, the national council and most of the people. The instrument was regular on its face, and the Cherokee were removed under it in 1838. The removals of the other south-eastern nations were carried out under statute between 1834 and 1838, under the ministries of Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, lawfully, in the sovereign’s name, with the courts sitting and the newspapers printing. A substantial proportion of each nation died on the road or in the camps before it; of the Cherokee, between a fifth and a quarter. The Choctaw and Chickasaw had already ceded the whole of what became Mississippi, and the Choctaw who stayed under an article of their treaty of 1830 lost most of the land it promised them.

The wars and the bill of 1871

The middle of the century was a period of war on the plains and in the west. The Dakota war that began in Minnesota in 1862 ended with thirty-eight Dakota men hanged together at Mankato on 26 December, after a military commission had sentenced more than three hundred, and in 1863 an Act of Parliament abrogated the Dakota treaties and expelled the Dakota from the Grand Duchy, to which some returned in the decades that followed. The war brought punitive policy across the northern plains. In the winter of 1863 a Crown column killed several hundred Shoshone, most of them women, children and the old, in their camp on the Bear River. In 1864 the Diné were marched to Bosque Redondo at Fort Sumner in the Long Walk, and held there in hunger until the Treaty of Bosque Redondo of 1868 returned them to a part of their country. In November 1864 a territorial regiment attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho camp at Sand Creek, in the Colorado country, whose people had been told they were under the Crown’s protection, and killed about a hundred and fifty of them, most of them women, children and the old. The treaties of 1868 at Fort Laramie and Fort Bridger reserved land on the northern plains, including the Black Hills, Pahá Sápa, and in the Wind River country.

Grant’s ministry adopted a peace policy in 1869, to deal with the nations by treaty and civil agency rather than by campaign, with agents nominated by religious bodies. It was humane in intention and assimilationist in design, and it did not stop the wars. In January 1870 cavalry attacked a Blackfeet camp on the Marias River that was not the camp they had been sent to find, and killed about two hundred people, most of them women, children and the elderly; no one was disciplined. The bill of 1871 followed, and was thrown out by the Lords. On 25 June 1876, after prospectors had entered country guaranteed by treaty and the ministry had issued a midwinter order that could not be obeyed, a combined Lakota and Cheyenne force destroyed five companies of cavalry at the Little Bighorn. The campaign that followed ended organised resistance on the northern plains within a year. The Nez Perce bands of the Wallowa country, which a treaty of 1863 had ceded without their signatures, were driven from it in 1877.

The Ponca were removed south from the Niobrara to the Indian Territory, and a third of them died within two years. In 1879 their chief Standing Bear walked north in winter to bury his son, was arrested, and was held by the Crown court at Omaha to be a person within the meaning of the law. On 29 December 1890 soldiers killed Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee.

The record of the period is that almost nothing done on the frontier was illegal under the law of the Realm as it then stood: treaties were abrogated by statute, removals were authorised by properly made instruments, and officers acted within their instructions. Lawfulness did not make any of it decent.

Allotment and the boarding schools

From the 1880s the ministries of James G. Blaine, Grover Cleveland and, later, Theodore Roosevelt pursued allotment, which broke the nations’ communal land into individual holdings and declared the remainder surplus for sale to settlers. It was presented as protection and as the road to citizenship, and its effect was the transfer of an enormous area of land out of the nations’ hands and the destruction of collective title as a legal form. It was still being administered in 1919. The Five Tribes in the Indian Territory refused the allotment commission of the 1890s in writing, in concert and repeatedly, and the commission recommended against it and compiled rolls instead.

Alongside allotment the federal government took the nations’ children into boarding schools, forbade them their languages and punished them for speaking them, through agencies that answered to ministers who answered to Parliament. The Church of America ran boarding and mission schools of its own. Conditions were often poor and in places dangerous, children died in the schools of disease, neglect and violence, and the record of their deaths was not always kept. The programme ran for about a century. The schools are the reason a majority of the Indigenous languages of the Realm have fewer than a thousand fluent speakers.

In 1919 the Realm went to the peace table at Berlin as the champion of self-determination, and its public celebrated the Arab Kingdom as the vindication of what the Union had fought for. The American press of that year carried articles on self-determination in Arabia and on the western allotments in the same editions without remarking on the comparison, and it went unremarked for two generations.

The First Great War and the Treaty Renewal Act 1923

The nations served in the First Great War at rates far above their share of the population, and the war is the reason the relationship was renegotiated within a decade of it. The Treaty Renewal Act 1923, passed by Charles Evans Hughes’s ministry, confirmed to the nations the land that remained to them, ended allotment, returned the surplus land that had not been sold, and declared the members of the nations citizens of the Realm. The Crown renewed many of the older treaties in the years that followed, the Navajo treaty among them. The Act did not give nation citizens the federal vote.

The Nations Organisation Act 1934

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ministry passed the Nations Organisation Act 1934, which pressed model constitutions on the nations. It ended some of the agencies’ abuses and replaced many traditional governments with councils on a uniform pattern drawn up by the Indian Office. Several nations refused it. The Navajo voted the model down in 1935 and governed themselves through a council of their own until 1975; the Haudenosaunee kept the Great Law; the Pueblos and the Hopi villages kept their own governments; and the Five Tribes of Oklahoma-Sequoyah, constituted already, had no use for it.

The Second Great War and the National Council

The nations served in the Second Great War, too, far above their share, and Navajo code talkers carried the Realm’s communications in a language the enemy could not read. In 1944 nations whose men were serving founded the National Council of Treaty Nations.

Compacts and rights, 1949 to 1973

Harry S. Truman’s ministry rejected the termination of recognised nations as the ordinary goal of federal policy, and the Compacts Act 1949 allowed a nation to contract with a polity for services without losing any part of its status. Most of the compacts by which nations now receive roads, schools and policing from their polities descend from it.

The American Rights (Extension) Act 1962 added Part VI to the Rights Act and gave nation citizens the federal vote. The American Nationality Act 1965 made them citizens by birth and left their membership to their nations. The last federal boarding school closed in 1969.

In 1971 the Osage trust judgment was given and the ABC began its Diné service at the request of the Navajo, and in 1972 Thomas Vann became the first Justice of the Supreme Court of Indigenous descent. Richard Nixon’s ministry passed the Self-Determination Act 1973, which allowed nations to take over the federal programmes on their land. In 1974 the Court held in Lummi Nation v the Commonwealth of Cascadia that the treaty right to fish was a property right in the fishery itself.

The Hopi partition, 1974

The Hopi, a separate treaty nation whose mesas are enclosed by Diné land, had shared with the Diné a joint-use area created by federal boundary-drawing in the previous century. In 1974 Parliament partitioned it, by a Settlement Act passed under Nixon’s ministry months before he resigned on 9 August, and families on both sides, most of them Diné, were relocated by force from land allotted to the other nation.

The Navajo Republic, 1975

The Diné used the Self-Determination Act to take over the federal programmes on their land, and in 1975 constituted themselves the Navajo Republic, with a constitution, a President and Vice President, the Navajo Council, the Chapter Houses and a compact with the March of Arizona. The process was contested inside the nation, where different currents argued for different constitutional models, and outside it, by Arizona interests that preferred a simpler administrative relationship.

The Treaty Relations Act 1978

Carter’s ministry passed the Treaty Relations Act 1978: the minister, the Office, the Board of Recognition, the Schedule, the settlement of the treaty party and the consent requirement. The Office and the National Council moved to Denver. The Church of America closed its last mission school in the same year.

In 1980 the Realm settled the claim of the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy to about two thirds of Maine with a land fund that bought them something over three hundred thousand acres, on jurisdictional terms they have sought to reopen since about 1995.

The amendment and the Acts of 1990

The Fourteenth Amendment of 1989 wrote the reading rule into the Charter, without the nations being asked. The Repatriation Act 1990 required federal museums to return the remains and sacred objects of the nations; polity and private museums lag behind it, and so do the regimental museums of the Royal American Army, which the Act does not reach. The Native Languages Act 1990 reversed the policy of the boarding schools and funds the revival of the nations’ languages, building on the immersion schools the nations had begun themselves.

Apologies

Bill Clinton’s ministry apologised in the Commons in 1998 for the boarding schools. It was a ministry’s apology, made in Parliament, and not the King’s. The Church of America enacted its Penitential Rite for National Sins over the mission schools in 1999.

On 25 June 2023, the anniversary of the Little Bighorn, the King apologised in person on the battlefield for the frontier wars, on the advice of his American ministers, with the Chief of the Army Staff beside him. It was a joint apology of the Crown and the Army, the first either had made in the Realm, and the King’s third apology for anything done in his name, after those to the Parliament of South Africa in 1999 and in New Albion in 2022. Land has since been returned from Army holdings in small parcels, the Army’s campaign archive has been opened on a rolling rule, and objects held in regimental museums are being repatriated museum by museum. Several regiments have refused, and the apology created no mechanism to make them.

Since 2000

In 2005 the Navajo Republic banned uranium mining on its land. In 2006 The King v Redhawk defined the reach of federal criminal law. In 2011, during a dispute over a crude-oil pipeline under the Missouri above Standing Rock, a backbench bill was brought in to repeal the consent requirement of the 1978 Act; it never reached a second reading, and the nations still cite it. The Board recognised the Little Shell in 2016, and the Crown made its treaty with them in 2019, the year Evelyn Harjo joined the Supreme Court.

Under Thomas Markham the federal government strengthened treaty consultation, health, water and the nations’ control of their own data, while its departments kept the habit of deciding which nation institutions counted as capable. A federal inquiry into the missing and murdered women of the nations, chaired by a retired judge, reported in 2021, and most of its recommendations have not been implemented. Under Ana Valdez the Greens in the coalition did not get the renegotiation of the western water compacts they had asked for. Harrison Bitsui was elected President of the Navajo Republic in November 2026, and Lena Whitefeather became Minister for Treaty Relations when the Whitlock ministry was commissioned on 12 September 2028.

New Albion compared

New Albion, the King’s other North American realm, made its relationship with its First Nations by the same means and has arrived at a different arrangement. Eleven numbered treaties, signed between 1871 and 1921 with the nations of the plains, the Shield and the Mackenzie, are the legal foundation of the settlement of its west, and they made the Crown of New Albion the formal treaty partner of the nations that signed them. Its Indian Act of 1876 put the reserves under federal agents, banned the potlatch and the sun dance and for a time required a pass to leave a reserve; it was repealed in 2019 by the First Nations Governance Act, which lets each nation adopt its own constitution, and about a third have.

Three differences stand out. New Albion gave the federal vote to First Nations people who kept their treaty status in 1960, two years before the Realm. Its residential schools were investigated by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that heard more than six thousand witnesses and reported in 2015; the Realm’s acknowledgement of its boarding schools was a ministry’s apology in the Commons in 1998. And at a demise New Albion’s treaty nations are told by the Crown directly, through the Governor-General’s office, a step the Realm’s plans do not contain. The King apologised in New Albion for the Crown’s part in the residential schools in July 2022, the year before his apology at the Little Bighorn.

Failings

Removal. The removals of the 1830s were carried out lawfully, by statute, in the sovereign’s name, by governments answerable to Parliament. They were avoidable, as the ministry’s compliance with Brearley in 1833 had shown, and every removal after that judgment was a choice made by people who had seen the alternative work. The Long Walk of 1864 and the removal of the Ponca belong to the same record.

Citizens without the federal vote, 1923 to 1962. The Treaty Renewal Act made the nations’ members citizens and left them off the federal register for thirty-nine years, because the franchise followed the polities’ registers and the polities excluded them as untaxed. Parliament left the exclusion in place until 1962. Nation citizens fought in the Second Great War, and the code talkers carried its communications, while most of them could not vote.

The model constitutions of 1934. The Nations Organisation Act was meant to end the agencies’ abuses and did end some of them. It also pressed a uniform pattern of council government on nations that had governments of their own, and where it was accepted it replaced them. The division between the councils it created and the governments it displaced persists in several nations.

Consent never entrenched. The nations’ chief protection lives in an ordinary Act. When the Charter was amended in 1989 on the nations’ behalf, the reading rule was entrenched and the consent requirement was not, and the nations were not asked about either. The bill of 2011 showed how the requirement could be attacked, and the protection depends on Parliament continuing to leave it in place.

Missing and murdered women. Women of the nations have gone missing and been killed at rates far above those of the Realm at large, and their cases have fallen into the gaps between nation, polity and federal police, with slow responses and poor records. The federal inquiry that reported in 2021 documented the failures and made recommendations to end them, and most of those recommendations have not been implemented.

The boarding schools, allotment and the Hopi relocations of 1974 are set out in the history above and are not repeated here.

Open disputes

How far federal law reaches

Redhawk settled that the ordinary federal criminal statutes run on nation land. Whether regulatory statutes, on the environment, employment and similar fields, reach as far is undecided. The Crown’s law officers argue that a general statute of the Realm applies everywhere in the Realm unless it excludes nation land; the nations answer that the reading rule of the Fourteenth Amendment and Brearley’s rule against abrogation by general words require a statute to say so before it reaches them. The courts have decided particular statutes both ways and have not stated a rule.

Wyoming v Royal Parks Service

State of Wyoming v Royal Parks Service, consolidated with the Sovereign’s reference on the Greater Yellowstone Wildlife Migration Compact, asks whether a national trust may follow an animal across a park’s boundary. The nations’ stake is the compact’s recognition of their relationships with bison, elk and wolves across the wider homeland. The Greater Yellowstone Intertribal Governing Council, chaired by Dr Renee Hill, an Eastern Shoshone legal scholar, argues that those relationships do not derive from the park boundary and never did. The Royal American Supreme Court has heard the case and judgment is reserved.

Whether the consent requirement could be repealed

On the orthodox view the consent requirement, being statutory, could be repealed by an ordinary Act, and Parliament could then change a nation’s status without its consent by express words. The nations, and some constitutional lawyers, answer that the treaties made since 1978 were made on the faith of it, that a repeal would abrogate those treaties, that Article XIV.6 and the honour of the Crown in XIV.8 forbid the Crown to take back by statute what it promised by treaty, and that the reading rule requires the treaties to be read as the nations understood them, which included the consent. No court has been asked, because no repeal has come near enactment: the bill of 2011 never reached a second reading.

Other disputes concerning particular nations, among them the title to Pahá Sápa, the Haudenosaunee land claim, the Maine settlement and the citizenship of the Cherokee Freedmen, are treated in the articles on the polities concerned.

The nations by polity

The table lists the nations on the Schedule that the Register names, grouped by arrangement and polity. Where the Register does not record a nation’s principal treaty, the column is left blank. The Alaskan entries are peoples, each comprising many of the Kingdom’s 229 nations, and the two Minnesotan entries comprise its eleven.

Peoples outside the Schedule

Some peoples hold no federal standing, or a standing that is incomplete or contested:

• The Lenape communities of New Jersey. The Province of New Jersey recognised three Lenape communities in 1982. The Realm has never completed federal recognition, and the Treaty of Easton of 1758, which the Realm treats as having extinguished the remaining Lenape claims in the Province, leaves them little to found it on.
• The Abenaki bands of Vermont. The four bands are recognised by the Republic of Vermont and are party to no treaty. Their petition to the Board of Recognition was refused.
• The peoples of the Territory of Loreto. The Cucapá, Kumeyaay, Paipai and Kiliwa, and the descendants of the Cochimí, Guaycura and Pericú, were transferred with the peninsula in 2027 without being separately consulted. Their recognition is under way and undecided, including the question whether Article XIV reaches peoples whose land was taken by Spain and Mexico under instruments to which the Crown was never a party.
• The Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke and Golden Hill Paugussett of Connecticut, whose standing differs from that of the Mashantucket Pequot and the Mohegan and has been contested.
• Native Hawaiians, who are not a treaty nation; their constitutional form is the Crown of Hawaiʻi.

Beyond these are the peoples who hold nothing at all, having been dispossessed under the system that advanced with the western frontier.

Assessment

The arrangement works better than the record behind it would predict. Nations govern land, courts, police and membership under a law that a polity cannot reach except by compact or settlement, recognition is decided by a board on which the nations hold the majority, the minister cannot overturn it, the membership of a nation cannot be second-guessed by any department, and a change to a nation’s status or land needs its consent. The Navajo Republic exercises the widest autonomy of any nation in the Realm. The land base, though reduced by a century and a half of cession and allotment, is larger than it would have been had allotment run its course, because the reaction to the First Great War ended it.

It is also a set of protections assembled one at a time, each partial, and the most important of them is the least secure. The consent requirement can be removed by the majority that made it. The reading rule was entrenched without the nations being asked. The minister sits outside the Cabinet, the Prime Minister meets the nations only when they ask, and the plans for the demise of the Crown forget them. The Fund is adequate in amount and disputed in its use, and the division of it among the nations favours the large over the small. Nearly half of the nations’ citizens live where no nation government can reach them, and the median nation is small, rural and poor.

The four arrangements have no principle behind them, and the Realm has not supplied one. Whether a nation holds a republic, a compact or a chamber was decided by where its land lay and what it could obtain when its terms were made, and the courts enforce each arrangement on its own terms without asking why a nation holds it. The question of why there is only one republic is argued in both directions and is unresolved.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The United Kingdom of America, whose constitution the nations stand partly outside
• The Navajo Republic, the one republic among the nations
• Daily Life in Indigenous Nations and Treaty Lands, the daily-life companion to this article
• Daily Life in the Navajo Republic
• The State of Oklahoma-Sequoyah and its House of Nations
• The Kingdom of Alaska, whose nations rest on the accession settlement of 1884
• The Grand Duchy of Minnesota and its Treaty Nation Senators
• The Province of New York and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy
• The Charter of Union, Article XIV
• The American Rights Act, Part VI
• The American Nationality Act 1965, Part III
• The Crown in Right
• The Governor-General, who signs the treaties and receives the delegations
• The Royal American Supreme Court
• New Albion, the comparison

Categories

Institutions · The Crown and Government · Treaty Nations · Constitutional Law