Under Trump, Tribes Must Choose: Partners or Protesters

FLAG OF THE OGLALA SIOUX

The entrance of the Oglala Sioux Tribe into Minneapolis’s anti-ICE protests has put Indian Country on a collision course with a political reality it has managed to delay but not avoid. A Trump–Vance administration will not treat tribal sovereignty as symbolic or moral. It will treat it as transactional. Tribes that can negotiate deals, enforce law, and govern territory will be heard. Tribes that confuse sovereignty with protest theater will not.

This stands in stark contrast to the Biden–Haaland posture, which elevated tribal sovereignty through rhetorical and moral frameworks—boarding school reconciliation, environmental stewardship, and “nation-to-nation” consultation—without demanding much administrative output from tribes.¹ That environment incentivized tribes to perform sovereignty, rather than exercise it.

Trump does not operate in the realm of performance. His governing instincts sort actors into three categories: partners, spectators, and obstacles. Energy tribes, gaming tribes, and high-capacity contracting tribes fall into the first bucket.²³ Tribes with symbolic grievances but no administrative or economic leverage fall into the second. Tribes that cannot resist the lure of protest culture fall into the third.

To understand why this matters, it’s helpful to distinguish two sovereignty models currently in play in Indian Country.

The first—legal sovereignty—is built through courts and contracts. A recent and under-reported example involves the Oglala Sioux Tribe itself, where a federal district judge upheld the Tribe’s civil jurisdiction over a non-Indian mortgage lender under the Montana v. United States framework.⁴ The Montana doctrine allows tribes to regulate and adjudicate disputes involving nonmembers when they arise out of “consensual relationships” on tribal land.⁵ This is sovereignty with enforceable remedies: the ability to regulate commerce, enforce contracts, and police territory.

The Tribe has also sued the Department of the Interior for chronic underfunding of law enforcement, arguing that treaties impose a federal trust duty to ensure public safety on tribal land.⁶ In 2023, U.S. District Judge Roberto Lange credited that argument at the preliminary injunction stage and ordered the federal government to amend contracts to meet actual policing needs.⁷ Whatever one thinks of the merits, this is sovereignty in a form the federal government recognizes: jurisdiction, institutions, and enforceable obligations.

The second model—spectacle sovereignty—is what Minneapolis represents. It is rooted in the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) strategy of visibility through confrontation, most famously manifested in the 71-day armed occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.⁸ There, sovereignty was performed through dramatic defiance of federal power rather than through governance or administration. AIM-era activism taught an entire generation of Sioux political actors that cameras, not courts, generate attention. For a time, that was true. But spectacle does not scale—and it does not survive a federal administration that values energy, infrastructure, and federal supremacy over symbolic grievance.

Spectacle sovereignty also collapses a crucial distinction: tribes are not sanctuary cities. Sanctuary cities operate on a theory of moral nullification, claiming local authority to obstruct federal enforcement. Tribal sovereignty rests on federal recognition of nationhood, rooted in treaties and congressional plenary power.⁹ When tribes act like sanctuary cities—blocking ICE, invoking treaties as vetoes on federal immigration authority, or allying with anti-border activists—they undermine the legal hierarchy on which their sovereignty depends.¹⁰

Under Trump, that mistake is fatal. The United States does not negotiate nullification. It did not in the Cherokee removal crisis.¹¹ It did not in the 1832 Nullification Crisis.¹² It did not at Wounded Knee. And it will not in Minneapolis.

If tribes wish to survive the coming four years with sovereignty intact—and ideally strengthened—they must shift from grievance sovereignty to capacity sovereignty. Build courts. Build police. Articulate interests in transactional terms. Police their own radicals. Stop collapsing treaty sovereignty into protest cosplay. A sovereign that cannot enforce law or negotiate resources is not a sovereign; it is a nonprofit with flags.

There is a path forward for tribes under Trump—through law, through deals, through policing, through infrastructure, and through resource development. There is no path through Minneapolis. The choice is simple: be partners or be protesters. Washington will not treat the two as equal.

CITATIONS (SELECT)

¹ Dept. of the Interior, “Progress in Indian Country,” White House Tribal Nations Summit Report, 2024.² Stephen Cornell & Joseph Kalt, What Can Tribes Do? Strategies and Institutions in American Indian Economic Development (Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, 1992).³ Gavin Clarkson, “Tribal Enterprise and Federal Contracting,” American Indian Law Review, vol. 41 (2017).⁴ Mazaska Owecaso Otipi Financial, Inc. v. Montileaux, U.S. District Court for the District of South Dakota (Oct. 22, 2025).⁵ Montana v. United States, 450 U.S. 544 (1981).⁶ Complaint, Oglala Sioux Tribe v. United States Department of the Interior, D.S.D. (2022).⁷ Order Granting Preliminary Injunction, D.S.D. (May 25, 2023).⁸ Paul Chaat Smith & Robert Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (1996).⁹ United States v. Kagama, 118 U.S. 375 (1886) (upholding congressional plenary power over tribes); Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515 (1832) (recognizing tribes as “distinct, independent political communities”).¹⁰ Compare sanctuary litigation: United States v. California, 921 F.3d 865 (9th Cir. 2019).¹¹ Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1 (1831); Worcester v. Georgia, supra; Treaty of New Echota (1835).¹² South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification (1832); Force Bill (1833).