Cargo Cult Sovereignty
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call Cargo Cult Science. In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
The above two quotes are from a long rambling graduation speech by Richard Feynman at Caltech in 1974. He's being dismissive of a bunch of things, including astrology and massage and I believe in astrology and massage so I imagine tribal peoples are likely to find the speech generally offensive as do I.
It's here because the point of his speech is that science is a search for the truth about how reality actually works and you need to work at two things:
1. Avoiding common forms of cognitive bias, such as confirmation bias (trying to find examples that say you are correct and ignoring instances that suggest you aren't).
2. Don't mistake the trappings of modern science for actual science.
Cargo Cults as he describes them try to replicate the trappings or appearance of how goods showed up without understanding a whole lot of processes behind the end result of a plane or ship loaded with cargo dropping cargo off in the middle of nowhere to supply troops during World War II.
I tried looking up cargo cult on Wikipedia to try to do some fact checking and it talks about something else entirely. I don't know how accurate Feynman's description is and I don't know how well documented the phenomenon is.
My general understanding is that cargo cults were born of primitive peoples seeing planes and ships bringing supplies to remote areas during World War II and then trying to ritually summon material wealth from gods in the sea and sky because they didn't understand that these were goods produced elsewhere and the shipping industry involving planes and ships was highly regulated and controlled.
A search for "cargo is a papua new guinea word meaning" gets the following results:
Trade goods and supplies
The book Guns, Germs and Steel was born of a conversation with a PNG politician asking about the productivity of Europeans using the PNG term cargo (and the author tried to explain in the book his opinion that it's not due to genetic superiority of Europeans):
The prologue opens with an account of Diamond's conversation with Yali, a Papua New Guinean politician. The conversation turned to the differences in power and technology between Papua New Guineans and the Europeans who dominated the region for two centuries, differences that neither of them considered due to European genetic superiority. Yali asked, using the local term cargo for inventions and manufactured goods, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"
To me, this is linguistic evidence that the concept of modern goods was introduced to this population by their exposure to cargo coming off of ships and planes.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that tribal peoples may not have much in the way of written records and may not have much in the way of formal bureaucratic processes. And this fact is part of why they have been trampled by European colonization of large parts of the world.
There are fundamental differences in legal and political structure between tribal cultures, which typically own the land in common, and European style development. But modern developed countries have various political and legal differences among them so simply being different isn't per se reason to be excluded from modern status as a fully independent sovereign nation.
Some places have kings. Some places have presidents. Some places have prime ministers. Some places have both kings and prime ministers.
The British legal system is what most of the American legal system is based upon -- except for the state of Louisiana which has roots in the French legal system. No one runs around talking trash about how France isn't really a sovereign nation because their legal system differs from the British legal system, even though odds are high that Louisiana is a poor state with significant challenges in part because their state legal system is out of step with the federal legal system, so the way they do things likely doesn't mesh well with federal processes and likely routinely runs into friction over that fact.
Currently, the sovereignty of Native American tribal "nations" is a kind of fiction or a Cargo Cult Sovereignty where we call them nations but they have members as if it's a club of some sort rather than citizens and they lack a great many essential features of a sovereign nation.
Tribal governments, stripped of power by Oliphant v. Suquamish in 1978, have no authority to prosecute non-Native offenders – even when the crime happens on their own land. Federal prosecutors, nominally entrusted with these cases, decline the majority of them, citing limited resources or ambiguous evidence. State police often defer to federal agencies or claim they lack jurisdiction. The result is an elaborate bureaucratic ritual in which survivors recount their trauma again and again, only to watch their cases evaporate.
So tribes still get called "nations" and have land assigned to them called "reservations" but they don't have representation in the federal government -- there are NO government representatives in either the Senate or House of Representatives for ANY tribe in the US -- and their courts have no authority over crimes committed on their lands by non-natives and the legal system that nominally has authority over them doesn't bother to actually take responsibility for their welfare.
Many tribes get medical care via a federal thing called Indian Health Service and remarks on Reddit suggest the hospitals and clinics of this service are routinely underfunded and short staffed. Some tribes also independently have their own healthcare system on the reservation.
But they are being provided a medical system in which they effectively have little to no say because while Natives may be able to vote in state and federal elections, their people and their lands do not have separate representatives yet are treated like a separate issue. It's unsurprising that most of what I hear boils down to "It sucks to be them."
I wrote a piece elsewhere called Small Scale Community Development talking about the differences between legally homeschooling and how public schools get handled as a metaphor for how to try to scale down big city planning processes for smaller communities. For a very small tribe, that may be very directly relevant but for any tribe of any size, it should serve as food for thought concerning what I said above: Don't confuse the typical trappings of sovereignty for actual sovereignty.
Because currently tribes get talked about like they are "nations" but lack a lot of important features of a functional nation. And those things need to be worked out with an "eye on the prize" mentality that focuses on determining what's actually pertinent here and which differences matter or don't matter.
It's not important if you call your sovereign leader president, prime minister, king or chief. What's important is knowing who is responsible for what, knowing who speaks for your nation with other sovereign nations and what rights or expectations other legal entities reasonably have over your people and your lands and where to draw the line and insist "It's our people and our lands and that's our jurisdiction and our responsibility."
Because we continue politely hamstringing these people in ways that really aren't logically defensible. Because if the US Federal government wants to insist they can't try those cases then the US Federal government needs to take meaningful responsibility for actually protecting these people and it's clearly not doing so.
Last, I will leave you with this clip from the movie Lilo & Stitch where a small child produces a receipt showing she paid $2 for Stitch and arguing she owns him, you can't take him, that would be stealing.
You need to figure out how to navigate interacting effectively with the larger world and their bureaucratic processes and etc. You need to figure out how to do that within a framework consistent with your existing culture and government and processes.
I think it can be done. But step one is recognizing that's what needs to be worked out.