Re: Legal status of Indian Reservations and CDA

[Greg Broiles <gbroiles@darkwing.uoregon.edu>]

At 06:03 PM 2/17/96 +0000, you wrote:
>If I remember correctly, are not American Indian reservations considered 
>qusi-sovergin states under the law?

Indian tribes no longer function as sovereigns - they're considered domestic
dependent nations. The lack of *state* (CA, OR, WA, etc) jurisdiction over
Indian country comes from federal preemption. Tribes retain some civil
regulatory jurisdiction, but it does not function to exclude federal
regulation. (see http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~gbroiles/torres.html for more
re tribal regulatory jurisdiction)

>If this is true, what would stop me from negotiating with some tribe to 
>establish an ISP on the reservation and then placing whatever material I
>wanted on that site without fear of reprisals from the US goverment.

The problem with this is that the feds have jurisdiction over crimes
occurring within Indian country. Tribes may also exercise jurisdiction over
tribal members who violate tribal law. ( * Modulo PL-280, modulo the civil
rights act of 1968, which gave and took away and gave back (sort of)
criminal jurisdiction to the states in 5 states - CA, OR, WA, MN, NE (?),
and other states/tribes who choose to opt into PL-280's framework. Yow.)

Doing business within Indian country won't help you escape Federal law;
Federal law enforcement is often the local law enforcement. 

(State jurisdiction over gambling, jurisdiction over taxation of economic
transactions, and criminal jurisdiction should be considered independently;
they are all created or extinguished by different Federal statutes,
sometimes state-by-state, sometimes tribe-by-tribe. Also, the Pueblos of New
Mexico and Arizona(?) may have a different status because they gained their
land from the government of Mexico.)

Jurisdictional questions under Federal Indian law are always messy. If it
was as easy as "do it on a reservation", people would've been doing it for
years with drugs & alcohol. But the Feds thought of that already. 

--
"The anchored mind screwed into me by the psycho-  | Greg Broiles
lubricious thrust of heaven is the one that thinks | gbroiles@netbox.com
every temptation, every desire, every inhibition." | 
	-- Antonin Artaud		   	   |