Tribal leaders from across U.S. grapple with constitution-making in Arizona

What does it mean to have a constitution? That’s a key question tribal leaders from across the U.S. are going to grapple with this week in southern Arizona during a two-day seminar at the Tohono O’odham Nation’s Desert Diamond Casino.

Up until Congress passed the landmark Indian Reorganization Act, tribes weren’t fully seen as sovereign in the eyes of the U.S. Most of them didn’t have constitutions either. 

That all changed in 1934, according to Dave Beeksma, director of the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona’s Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy.

“But there are going to be some conditions,” said Beeksma, who is also a tribal judge from the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Wisconsin. “So, what the U.S. government did, was they provided these boilerplate templates.”

“In some cases, these were literally fill-in-the-blank constitutions. We the people of — state your tribe — are constituting a constitution to do x, y and z. That created some challenges for us over the next 90 years.”

That’s why the institute, with its ever-growing database of constitutions, is helping tribes review these outdated texts. Similarly, the U.S. Constitution has been amended 27 times since its ratification in 1787. Such reform is something founding father Thomas Jefferson encouraged.

“The Cherokee Nation does something like that right now. They have a provision every 20 years where they can look and decide whether or not to have essentially a constitutional convention,” added Beeksma. “Our constitutions should be like nature. They should be like our world. They should be like our communities. They should be able to grow.”