Northwestern University’s Tribal Constitution Project will catalog hundreds of Indigenous documents

Beth Redbird took to sociology wanting to make societies better. While working in the areas of affordable housing development and anti-poverty programs, Redbird learned the power of data. Now Redbird, an Oglala Lakota and Oklahoma Choctaw, is all about showing the world the data contained in tribal constitutions.

As co-director of the Tribal Constitution Project, Northwestern University assistant professor Redbird is focused on gathering, analyzing and cataloging hundreds of constitutions of North American Indigenous tribes passed from 1934-2020. By looking at the structures of self-governance between nations, Redbird is focusing a lens on the development of tribal sovereignty and the influences that shaped constitutions within the history of the United States.

Redbird is on this National Science Foundation-funded journey with co-director Erin Delaney, a Northwestern law professor. The project partnered with the New York University-Yale American Indian Sovereignty Project, where law student volunteers trained in Indigenous law notate the contents of each tribal document.

“Constitutions are one of the most significant components of tribal sovereignty,” she said. “For better or worse, they determine the structure of a tribal government. They allow access to self-determination. But they’re also one of the primary ways that a tribe asserts its sovereignty. These constitutions are a direct indication of how nations seek to control their own affairs, and they articulate how a tribe sees itself as a people and as a nation.”

According to Redbird, the collection of tribal constitutions got its start in 2018 at NU’s Institute for Policy Research when the summer research fellows program helped launch an archival mission to unearth every constitution enacted by a federally recognized tribe in the continental U.S. Over the next four years, more than 10 undergraduates helped collect, clean and catalog more than 1,200 constitutional documents by searching dozens of law libraries and legal repositories, contacting tribal nations and with assistance from librarians and archivists.

The project shows the constitutions’ origins, citizenship, and rights in the United States. Redbird said the initiative’s goals are about creating a tool for use by tribal courts and lawyers who want to assert sovereignty, claim treaty rights, reclaim land and engage in sovereignty affirming action; for use by researchers for policy analysis; and for pedagogical use for teachers and students.

“Native studies is vastly undertaught in public schools, and most schools omit discussions of tribes as nation and modern tribal issues altogether,” Redbird said. “That omits not only the entire history of the United States with Native peoples, but it omits the contributions of Native peoples to modern American society and to the world. One of the goals of the Constitution Project is to help people understand that tribal governments still exist. And they’re vibrant and they’re diverse and they’re interesting, and they’re innovative. And they’re important, and they contribute.”

Dorene Wiese, chief executive officer of the American Indian Association of Illinois, an urban-based nonprofit dedicated to transforming American Indian education into an experience founded in Native culture, language and history, says the project is important because the American Indian population is still in a civil rights struggle.

“Legal documents … keep us alive,” she said. “We have treaties and constitutions that have been approved by the federal government. We look at them all, they’re going to say that the tribe is a corporation, and members really are not given that much power in terms of the governance of the tribe itself. Tribes always have had things that they needed to do for their people and their land for survival. The government has always interfered with that and tried to control everything about Indian people — religion, music, dance. These constitutions were written to appease the federal government, not in the best interest of our own people.”

Plans are being made to create a public web portal that contains history and facts about tribal governments, and information about the contents of the constitutions. The portal will also serve as a mechanism for tribes to contextualize their own constitutions as the narrators of their own stories.According to Redbird, allowing tribes to narrate their own history and describe their governments in their own voice is not only vital to the concept of sovereignty, but important to accurate knowledge about what’s actually contained in the documents.

“These documents do something really important,” Redbird said. “They express how a tribe asserts its sovereignty. They represent the structure of a tribe on the ground, as seen in federal policy. This is not the be all and end all of how tribes govern but what it is, is an expression that is read by courts and the federal government in deciding tribal rights, tribal sovereignty, tribal cases. It’s also a statement by the tribe on the things they wish to officially claim sovereignty over.

“Sovereignty is not one size fits all. Tribes make strategic decisions, to use their autonomy in very specific ways to benefit their members. What these constitutions do is provide a snapshot for how tribes see themselves, how they perceive their future as nations and how they are asserting their sovereignty today. One of the questions (we) are seeking to answer is how much influence the federal government has had in the passage of these constitutions.”

drockett@chicagotribune.com