Free Websites for Legal Research: Native American Treaties & Tribal Law

In 2023 the US Supreme Court decided against the Navajo Nation. It can't proceed with a claim to enjoin the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior from developing a plan to meet the Navajo Nation’s water needs and manage the mainstream of the Colorado River in the Lower Basin so as not to interfere with that plan.

US Supreme Court decided in 2020 that land reserved for the Creek Nation since the19th century remains “Indian country.”

US Supreme Court decided in 2019 that Wyoming’s statehood did not abrogate the Crow Tribe’s 1868 federal treaty right to hunt on the “unoccupied lands of the United States”; the lands of the Bighorn National Forest did not become categorically “occupied” when the forest was created.

The Federal Government and the State have concurrent jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed by non-Indians against Indians in Indian country.

from the National Indian Law Library. Includes cases from Tribal Courts.

The two Indian Affairs volumes of American State Papers contain documents relating to U.S. Indian affairs from 1789 to 1827. Part of the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project.

Government Printing Office, 1873. Prepared at the direction of Congress, the treaties in this volume are arranged alphabetically by tribe. Available online through the Internet Archive.

Compiled at the request of the Secretary of War, this volume has ratified treaties from 1778 to 1826. It is available online through Google Books.

U.S. National Archives and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC) in Santa Fe have digitized 374 ratified Indian treaties from the archives' holdings,

Available as part of the Oklahoma State University Library's digital collection.

Compiled by Albert Gallatin in 1811. Available online at Google Books.

Includes treaties concluded by the confederate states with Indian tribes. Available at Academic Affairs Library University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of the Documenting the American South project.

from the Yale Law School Avalon Project, Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy

Compiled by direction of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, this volume contains ratified treaties from 1778 to 1837. Available online at Google Books.

Ratified Indian treaties were published in the Statutes at Large. Volume 7 of the Statutes at Large, published in 1846, has Indian treaties from 1778 to 1842, printed in chronological order. Thereafter, Indian treaties are intermingled with treaties with foreign nations. Part of the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project.

New York Post 1/27/24

Law360 9/15/19

Arizona State Univ. Law Library

CRS Report 12/26/19

Library of Congress

Library of Congress

From 2014- present

Penn State Dickinson Law Library

University of Oklahoma Law Library LibGuide

Elizabeth Reese, 73 Stanford L. Rev. 555 (2021). There are 574 federally recognized tribal governments within the United States, whose laws are largely ignored. This Article brings to the fore the exclusion of tribal governments and their laws from our mainstream conception of “American law”.

Matthew Fletcher, article in the Michigan Law Review 2022

Oklahoma State University

Jurist 10/19/23