Contemporary Globalization and Tribal Sovereignty

Much thinking about the rights to sovereignty by native peoples takes place in a conceptual vacuum: reservation communities are often analyzed as localities in isolation from political and economic forces at other geographical scales. This chapter shows how attention to the global scale gives us key insights into contemporary tribal sovereignty. Political globalization (for example, in international notions of human rights) has both energized and enabled advances in the struggle for self-determination on the part of Indian peoples. Economic globalization has, however, presented tribal governments with an increasingly omnipotent neo-liberal framework of ''free market'' forces that often confronts them with difficult choices regarding reservation ''development.''