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Like stars, societies are born, and this story deals with such a birth. It asks a fundamental and compelling question: How did societies first coalesce from the small foraging communities that had roamed in West Central Africa for many thousands of years? Jan Vansina continues a career-long effort to reconstruct the history of African societies before European contact inHow Societies Are Born.In this complement to his previous studyPaths in the Rainforests,Vansina employs a provocative combination of archaeology and historical linguistics to turn his scholarly focus to governance, studying the creation of relatively large societies extending beyond the foraging groups that characterized west central Africa from the beginning of human habitation to around 500 BCE, and the institutions that bridged their constituent local communities and made large-scale cooperation possible. The increasing reliance on cereal crops, iron tools, large herds of cattle, and overarching institutions such as corporate matrilineages and dispersed matriclans lead up to the developments treated in the second part of the book. From about 900 BCE until European contact, different societies chose different developmental paths. Interestingly, these proceeded well beyond environmental constraints and were characterized by \"major differences in the subjects which enthralled people,\" whether these were cattle, initiations and social position, or \"the splendors of sacralized leaders and the possibilities of participating in them.\"

A direct response to the needs and ambitions articulated by tribal administrators and leaders, this handbook seeks to serve practitioners, students, researchers, and community members alike. It grew out of an ongoing collaboration among scholars and practitioners from tribal nations, universities, tribal colleges, and nonprofit organizations who are developing practical and teaching resources in the field of tribal administration and governance. Designed as a readable, accessible volume, it focuses on three key areas: tribal management, funding and delivering core services, and sovereign tribes engaging settler governments. While the chapters complement one another by presenting a coherent and unified constellation of voices that illuminates a shared terrain of practical Indigenous governance, each chapter ultimately stands alone to accommodate a variety of needs and interests with specific best practices, quick-reference executive summaries, and practitioner notes to aid lesson applications. This humble collection of remarkable voices initiates a conversation about tribal administration that will hopefully continue to grow in service to Native nations.

How do American Indian tribal governments relate to nearby local governments? Do insights gleaned from these cases illuminate the constraints and opportunities that marginalized groups face within any system of federalism? What circumstances of marginalized governments help or hinder their effectiveness? Although some Native American tribes have transformed their fortunes with highly profitable casinos, most continue to face stark disadvantages. Some tribal governments, despite limited opportunities prevail locally by cultivating policy and political expertise. This analysis demonstrates that such expertise can be developed, even when resources are scarce.

The book describes the impact of cultural perceptions on rulers' behaviors in the United Arab Emirates, once the Trucial States. Despite differences in size, economic resources, and external political pressures, the seven emirates' rulers utilized very similar cultural expectations to gain the support of others.

American Indian reservation planning is one of the most challenging and poorly understood specializations within the American planning profession. Charged with developing a strategy to protect irreplaceable tribal homelands that have been repeatedly diminished over the ages through unjust public policy actions, it is also one of the most imperative. For centuries tribes have faced historical bigotry, political violence, and an unrelenting resistance to self-governance.Aided by a comprehensive reservation planning strategy, tribes can create the community they envisioned for themselves, independent of outside forces. InPlanning the American Indian Reservation, Zaferatos presents a holistic and practical approach to explaining the practice of Native American planning.The book unveils the complex conditions that tribes face by examining the historic, political, legal, and theoretical dimensions of the tribal planning situation in order to elucidate the context within which reservation planning occurs. Drawing on more than thirty years of professional practice, Zaferatos presents several case studies demonstrating how effective tribal planning can alter thenature of the political landscape and help to rebalance the uneven relationships that have been formed between tribal governments and their nontribal political counterparts. Tribal planning's overarching objective is to assist tribes as they transition from passive objects of historical circumstances to principal actors in shaping their future reservation communities.

Liberalism struggles with an ancient paradox. That is, it must navigate the sometimes treacherous course between individual autonomy and pluralism's accommodation. In this Article, I argue that this philosophical tension has manifested in very concrete intrusions on American Indians' tribal sovereignty. On the one hand, tribal sovereignty guards Indian nations' inherent right to live and govern beyond the reach of the dominant society. This \"measured separatism\" embodies liberalism's commitment to the accommodation of pluralism. On the other hand, critics charge that imposing liberalism onto Indian nations is necessary to prevent infractions of individual rights by tribal governments. For these scholars, individual autonomy must always be preferenced above Indian nations' sovereignty. Scholars concerned with illiberal practices perpetrated by tribal governments are increasingly calling for an expansion of federal civil rights laws into tribal communities. But these urgings are rarely accompanied by a thorough and thoughtful analysis of American Indian tribal sovereignty. In fact, most scholars writing in this area fail to acknowledge that expansion of such laws into tribal communities would potentially eviscerate tribal sovereignty and wipe out Indian differentness altogether. Accordingly, based on a detailed examination of tribal sovereignty--both as embodied in American law and as actually experienced by Indian nations--I conclude that the United States' own theory of Indian sovereignty supports the perpetuation of Indian nations' autonomous existence. Further, it mandates that internal tribal decisions regarding Indian culture and tradition be left to Indian tribes, even when those decisions are inapposite to Western liberal ideals.

Research on tribal governance in the United States is scarce within modern public administration scholarship. Nonetheless, tribal governance is a pre-Columbian practice that predates the U.S. Constitution and federal law. Drawing from several disciplines, John C. Ronquillo of the University of Georgia demonstrates that interdisciplinary sources offer rich information for present-day public administration research about Native American tribes. Tribal governance literature is definitely not \"missing,\" but instead is moderately \"unassembled\" as a subfield of public administration. Building on what is available, the author suggests several key issues within tribal governance in need of urgent academic attention.

A Tribal Order describes the politico-legal system of Jabal Razih, a remote massif in northern Yemen inhabited by farmers and traders. Contrary to the popular image of Middle Eastern tribes as warlike, lawless, and invariably opposed to states, the tribes of Razih have stable structures of governance and elaborate laws and procedures for maintaining order and resolving conflicts with a minimum of physical violence. Razihi leaders also historically cooperated with states, provided the latter respected their customs, ideals, and interests. Weir considers this system in the context of the rugged environment and productive agricultural economy of Razih, and of centuries of continuous rule by Zaydi Muslim regimes and (latterly) the republican governments of Yemen. The book is based on Weir’s extended anthropological fieldwork on Jabal Razih, and on her detailed study of hundreds of handwritten contracts and treaties among and between the tribes and rulers of Razih. These documents provide a fascinating insight into tribal politics and law, as well as state-tribe relations, from the early seventeenth to the late twentieth century. A Tribal Order is also enriched by case histories that vividly illuminate tribal practices. Overall, this unusually wide-ranging work provides an accessible account of a remarkable Arabian society through time.

Shadow Tribe offers the first in-depth history of the Pacific Northwest s Columbia River Indians -- the defiant River People whose ancestors refused to settle on the reservations established for them in central Oregon and Washington. Largely overlooked in traditional accounts of tribal dispossession and confinement, their story illuminates the persistence of off-reservation Native communities and the fluidity of their identities over time. Cast in the imperfect light of federal policy and dimly perceived by non-Indian eyes, the flickering presence of the Columbia River Indians has followed the treaty tribes down the difficult path marked out by the forces of American colonization. Based on more than a decade of archival research and conversations with Native people, Andrew Fisher s groundbreaking book traces the waxing and waning of Columbia River Indian identity from the mid-nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Fisher explains how, despite policies designed to destroy them, the shared experience of being off the reservation and at odds with recognized tribes forged far-flung river communities into a loose confederation called the Columbia River Tribe. Environmental changes and political pressures eroded their autonomy during the second half of the twentieth century, yet many River People continued to honor a common heritage of ancestral connection to the Columbia, resistance to the reservation system, devotion to cultural traditions, and detachment from the institutions of federal control and tribal governance. At times, their independent and uncompromising attitude has challenged the sovereignty of the recognized tribes, earning Columbia River Indians a reputation as radicals and troublemakers even among their own people. Shadow Tribe is part of a new wave of historical scholarship that shows Native American identities to be socially constructed, layered, and contested rather than fixed, singular, and unchanging. From his vantage point on the Columbia, Fisher has written a pioneering study that uses regional history to broaden our understanding of how Indians thwarted efforts to confine and define their existence within narrow reservation boundaries.

Durable architecture is a hallmark of Polynesian chiefdoms, associated with centralised control of residential and agricultural land. Previous work in West Polynesia has indicated a relatively late date for the onset of such construction activity--after AD 1000--suggesting that political development was influenced by events such as post-colonisation migration. The authors report new dating evidence from the excavation of a large earth mound on the island of Tongatapu. Its construction 1500 years ago indicates that, in contrast to previous findings, well-developed chiefdoms and field monuments probably dominated the landscapes of West Polynesia substantially prior to the colonisation of more easterly island nations.