What Orlando E. Delogu, my friend and former colleague at the University of Maine School of Law, overlooks when he writes that full tribal sovereignty is untenable is the nature of tribes as sovereigns (“Commentary: In state with dispersed tribal land, ‘full sovereignty’ seems unworkable,” May 12):

Most sovereign peoples, when absorbed by other cultures through cessations of land by war or treaty, or simply through immigration, are soon assimilated and lose their separate cultures. But American Indian tribes have resisted assimilation – even when the federal government has tried to terminate their reservations, as it did as recently as the 1950s.

In 1887, Congress passed the so-called Dawes Act, which authorized the federal government to divide reservations into allotments, with tribal members to receive small acreages on which to farm. Although the act was intended to assimilate Indians into the wider culture by turning them into farmers, the act and sequel acts were total failures. The best lands were soon taken by white people, leaving tribal lands dispersed in widely scattered fractions. Yet those reservations, pockmarked by allotments, still survive. Their tribal governments still retain their separate sovereignty, despite the jurisdictional and administrative difficulties resulting from a patchwork quilt of ownership.

What is disturbing in Professor Delogu’s approach is that he would go a step further than the Dawes Act, by reasoning that, in view of the mess we’ve made with tribal lands and rights in Maine, we may as well drop the other shoe and deprive them of full sovereignty.

Scott Gould
Cape Elizabeth