How do Native Americans influence the US?

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This is the script for my video posted on July 17, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

The US contains 575 federally recognized Native American tribes, and every one of them is a sovereign nation in a limited but very real sense. Federal law calls them domestic dependent nations. They govern themselves, they control natural resources and water on their lands, and they hold treaty rights that are still binding federal law today, which gives them a disproportionate impact on the US's geopolitical dynamics. So how do Native American tribes influence how the US navigates the world?

Before Europeans arrived in the Americas, native tribes were substantial military and diplomatic powers.

The Iroquois Confederacy, for example, practiced sophisticated diplomacy via the Covenant Chain framework, which managed intercultural trade, regulated territorial disputes, and established mutual military defense.

Some even say that the Confederacy’s structure influence the design of the US federal system.

The early US made roughly 370 ratified treaties with tribes, treating them as sovereigns to be negotiated with.

But over time, the government eroded these rights. In 1823, Johnson v. McIntosh established the discovery doctrine, holding that tribes could occupy but not hold full title to their own land, and only the federal government could buy it.

In 1831, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia defined tribes not as foreign states but as domestic dependent nations, though 1832’s Worcester v. Georgia decision held that tribal nations are distinct political communities where state law has no force.

But an 1871 rider to the Indian Appropriations Act ended treaty-making for good. The government would no longer deal with tribes as independent nations to negotiate with. Existing treaties stayed in force, and tribes kept their underlying sovereignty, but from that point on, Congress dictated terms through legislation rather than negotiation.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the US government forcibly removed natives from their lands, confined them to reservations often very far from where their people had lived for thousands of years, and cut their holdings from 138m acres to just 48m. Mid-20th century policies of further aimed to dissolve tribes entirely and move natives to cities.

But in 1975, the US government enacted the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which let tribes run federal programs themselves and rebuilt their formal capacity for self-governance.

The 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act set the rules for tribal casinos, which became a major revenue source, especially where tribes could offer gaming that was tightly restricted elsewhere in the state. These pieces collectively produced the modern dynamics of Native American tribes. Two concepts form the foundational tension of federal Indian law. The federal trust responsibility creates a moral and legal obligation for the US government to protect tribal lands, assets, and sovereignty, while the Congressional Plenary Power, derived primarily from the Constitution’s clause on Indian Commerce, gives Congress broad and supreme authority over Indian affairs. It allows Congress to limit, modify, or fully eliminate certain tribal powers. These principles directly conflict with each other at times.

I mentioned before that tribal land holdings were cut to a fraction of their former size. This allotment left a sort of checkerboard of trusts, fees, and non-Indian land parcels within reservation boundaries that cripples development of tribal land. Some parcels have more than 100 co-owners.

In 2020 though, the US Supreme Court ruled that a vast portion of eastern Oklahoma remains a legally recognized Native American reservation, meaning the state of Oklahoma can't prosecute tribal members for crimes committed on those lands. Those cases go to tribal or federal courts instead. Two years later the Court walked part of that back, ruling that states share jurisdiction when the offender is non-Native, but the reservation ruling itself still stands.

Here’s the thing: tribal lands hold a disproportionate share of US energy and mineral resources that it desperately wants to reduce reliance on China. The largest known US lithium deposit at Thacker Pass in Nevada was approved for mining by the US Bureau of Land Management in 2021 without consent from local tribal governments. One tribe later signed a benefits agreement and backed the project. Several others fought it in court and lost.

There have been similar cases for copper in Arizona, uranium in the Navajo Nation, and oil in North Dakota, and in general, tribal consultation rights act as procedural chokepoints. Tribes rarely win the final ruling, but they can impose delay, cost, and litigation risk on projects the US considers strategic.

Tribes also have a huge influence on water rights, which are becoming increasingly important in the southwest as the Colorado River faces shortages. Reservations have priority rights on water to fulfill their needs, and about a quarter of the Colorado River basin’s water supply is subject to the rights of local tribes.

Reservations often grant easements to oil companies for pipelines to pass through tribal lands, and this has actually caused disputes between Canada and the US. In 2019, the Bad River Band of Wisconsin filed a lawsuit because a pipeline carrying Canadian oil across its land had an expired easement and was no longer allowed to operate there. Canada formally invoked their 1977 Transit Pipelines Treaty with the US, arguing that a shutdown would violate Canada’s right to uninterrupted flow of hydrocarbons. This was a rare case where a tribe triggered an international dispute.

Interestingly, American Indians born in Canada with at least 50% Indian ancestry cannot be denied admission to the US and may become permanent residents, in the last explicit racial classification remaining in US immigration law.

At the Mexico border, meanwhile, the Tohono O’odham Nation was split between the US and Mexico by the 1854 Gadsden Purchase, and thousands of members live there today. The tribe has long cooperated on border security but sued the Department of Homeland Security in 2026 to block construction of a wall on its land, calling it a violation of its tribal rights. The tribe says its own security efforts helped drop border detentions on its land by 95 percent.

The Iroquois Confederacy I mentioned earlier still exists as well and actually issues its own passports, though they’ve faced issues getting into some countries even with support from the US government.

Tribal casinos alone brought in a record 43.9 billion dollars in gross gaming revenue in Fiscal Year 2024. For tribes with successful operations, gaming often funds their governments, lobbying, and political engagement, though the money is heavily concentrated and many tribes see little of it. Natives are US citizens and can vote, and they proved decisive in the 2020 presidential election because Joe Biden won Arizona by just over 10000 votes, and native voters skewed heavily in his favor, though Native Americans are not a monolith and this voting pattern is not universal.

Native Americans are increasingly involved in US politics and government. There are currently four native representatives in Congress. Natives serve in the military at the highest per-capita rate of any ethnic group, and tribal lands in places like the Dakotas, the southwest, and Alaska either host or sit directly beside major military installations.

These tribes have tremendous cultural and narrative power, and mistreatment of them by the federal government is received very poorly on the international stage. They might only make up about 2% of the US population, but Native Americans have an outsized influence on the country’s dynamics today.

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