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Article: Native American Policy
- Article from:
- Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History
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NATIVE AMERICAN POLICY
Federal Native American policy is considered by many to be an aberration in the U.S. legal system. By the 1990s more than two percent of U.S. lands were actually governed by Native American tribal governments. In the seventeenth century British and Spanish colonies began negotiating treaties with the New World's indigenous groups as sovereign (independent) political entities. The treaties served to acknowledge and affirm Native American ownership of lands used and occupied. The United States, as a successor of Great Britain, inherited this centuries
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old European international policy. Thus, tribal sovereignty, recognized well before birth of the United ...