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Despite growing interest in state race-making, we know little about how race-making plays out in the everyday practice of policy governance. To address this gap, I examine the implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), which sought to end generations of state policies that denied tribal sovereignty and forcibly removed Native children from their tribes. ICWA’s protections extend to children based on tribal citizenship, not racial status. Marshalling 40 years of archival data from the government agencies charged with ICWA enforcement, I analyze how ICWA implementers determine a child’s Indian status. I find that authorities routinely eschew the requirement to treat Indian as a citizenship category, re-defining it as a race. Yet whether and how state actors racialize Indianness varies by the institutional contexts in which they work. Comparing state child welfare agencies, state courts, and federal courts, I identify three institutional characteristics that organize race-making practices: evidentiary standards, record-keeping requirements, and incentive structures. These characteristics influence whether state decision-makers operationalize “Indian” as a racial category and the cognitive and ideological processes that undergird their classifications. I also demonstrate that changes in these institutional characteristics yield concomitant shifts in whether and how state agents engage in racialization.

Access and the ability to work with Tribal data can vastly improve the ability of Tribal Nations to support their citizens’ health and well-being. In this commentary, we expand on previous calls for state and federal public health agencies to share data with Tribes by default. Previous research has described the legal and ethical lay of the land concerning public health data sharing while underscoring the importance of respect for Tribal sovereignty. In this commentary, we expand on this argument by proposing additional pathways through which data can benefit Tribes and identifying critical steps for Tribes to fully benefit from Tribal data. Specifically, we argue for (1) renewed interest and investment in Tribal data science education; (2) proactive data practices, laws, and policies that support long-term health and well-being; and (3) the federal government honoring its trust responsibility to support Tribal data resources.

There are 574 federally recognized domestic dependent tribal nations in the United States. Each tribe is separate from its respective surrounding state(s) and governs itself. And yet, none of them have the power to send representatives to Congress. Our democratic representative structures function as if tribal governments and the reservations they govern do not exist. But tribal citizens do not simply live within a state and are not simply governed by that state like any other state citizen. Rather, it is tribal law and tribal governments--not state law or state governments--that primarily govern and shape the lives of tribal citizens living on reservations. Tribal governments are not complementary or subsidiary to state governments--they are frequent rivals for power and resources. This system, simply put, doesn't make sense. Tribes should have their own representation in the federal government. This Article makes the case for why and examines how this seemingly obvious omission in our democratic structuring came to pass.

Background: When conducting research with American Indian tribes, informed consent beyond conventional institutional review board (IRB) review is needed because of the potential for adverse consequences at a community or governmental level that are unrecognized by academic researchers. Objectives: In this article, we review sovereignty, research ethics, and data-sharing considerations when doing community-based participatory health-related or natural-resource-related research with American Indian nations and present a model material and data-sharing agreement that meets tribal and university requirements. Discussion: Only tribal nations themselves can identify potential adverse outcomes, and they can do this only if they understand the assumptions and methods of the proposed research. Tribes must be truly equal partners in study design, data collection, interpretation, and publication. Advances in protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) are also applicable to IRB reviews, as are principles of sovereignty and indigenous rights, all of which affect data ownership and control. Conclusions: Academic researchers engaged in tribal projects should become familiar with all three areas: sovereignty, ethics and informed consent, and IPR. We recommend developing an agreement with tribal partners that reflects both health-related IRB and natural-resource-related IPR considerations.

Genomic studies often rely on individual-based consent approaches for tribal members residing outside of their communities. This consent model fails to acknowledge the risks to small groups such as tribes, which can implicate the community as a whole.