State Centrism, the Equal-Footing Doctrine, and the Historical-Legal Geographies of American Indian Treaty Rights

Political and legal conflicts between state governments in the United States and American Indian tribes over hunting, fishing, and gathering on former tribal lands have been widespread and common. Examples in the U.S. include historical and contemporary conflicts over hunting and fishing rights in the Rocky Mountain, Great Lakes and Pacific Northwest states. In a Canadian context, one finds similar treaty-rights fishing disputes in Ontario and most recently, the so-called “lobster wars” in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In these cases, indigenous people claim a legal, treaty-based right of access to their former lands and natural resources. One question that arises when these conflicts are examined is how have federal and state governments in the U.S. rationalized and legitimized their exclusion of indigenous people from access to natural resources on ceded lands and traditional territories? Scholars have offered either cultural or political-economic explanations for why national and subnational governments have pursued such exclusionary policies toward indigenous peoples. For some, the explanation lies in EuroAmerican cultural constructions of nature, especially definitions of wilderness as an uninhabited landscape and nature as a source of recreational pleasure. Mark David Spence explores the romantic wilderness ideal and how it was used to exclude American Indians from their traditional hunting and fishing territories in national parks such as Yellowstone and Glacier. Elsewhere, I have examined how cult sportsmanship, a normative model defining the proper cultural practice of recreational hunting and fishing, has been used to rationalize the exclusion of Ojibwe Indians from former hunting, fishing, and gathering territories in what is now the state of Wisconsin. Louis Warren, in his examination of the destruction of the local commons in the 19th-century American West, argues that it was the imperatives and expansion of market capitalism that led to exclusion of American Indians from their former territories and natural resources. Other scholars reveal that indigenous people in other parts of the world have suffered similar loss of access to natural resources

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