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The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, also known as the Wheeler-Howard Act or informally, the Indian New Deal or the Indian Magna Carta, was a U.S. federal legislation which secured certain rights to Native Americans, including Alaska Natives.[1] These include a reversal of the Dawes Act's privatization of common holdings of American Indians and a return to local self-government on a tribal basis. The Act also restored to Native Americans the management of their assets (being mainly land) and included provisions intended to create a sound economic foundation for the inhabitants of Indian reservations. Section 18 of the IRA conditions application of the IRA on a majority vote of the affected Indian nation or tribe within one year of the effective date of the act (25 U.S.C. 478). The IRA was perhaps the most significant initiative of John Collier Sr., Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1933 - 1945.
The act did not require tribes to adopt a constitution. However, if the tribe chose to do so, the constitution had to:
1. allow the tribal council to employ legal counsel;
2. prohibit the tribal council from engaging any land transitions without majority approval of the tribe; and,
3. authorize the tribal council to negotiate with the Federal, State, and local governments.
Evidently, some of these restrictions were eliminated by the
Native American Technical Corrections Act of 2003. [2]The act slowed the practice of assigning tribal lands to individual tribal members and reduced the loss, through the practice of checkerboard land sales to non-members within tribal areas, of native holdings. Owing to this Act and to other actions of federal courts and the government, over two million acres (8,000 kmē) of land were returned to various tribes in the first 20 years after passage of the act.
In 1954, the United States Department of Interior began implementing the termination and relocation phases of the Act. Among other effects, termination resulted in the legal dismantling of 61 tribal nations within the United States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Reorganization_Act
There are 561 federally recognized tribal governments in the United States. These tribes possess the right to form their own government, to enforce laws (both civil and criminal), to tax, to establish membership, to license and regulate activities, to zone and to exclude persons from tribal territories. Limitations on tribal powers of self-government include the same limitations applicable to states; for example, neither tribes nor states have the power to make war, engage in foreign relations, or coin money (this includes paper currency).[26]
Many Native Americans and advocates of Native American rights point out that the US Federal government's claim to recognize the "sovereignty" of Native American peoples falls short, given that the US still wishes to govern Native American peoples and treats them as subject to US law. True respect for Native American sovereignty, according to such advocates, would require the United States federal government to deal with Native American peoples in the same manner as any other sovereign nation, handling matters related to relations with Native Americans through the Secretary of State, rather than the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Bureau of Indian Affairs reports on its website that its "responsibility is the administration and management of 55.7 million acres of land held in trust by the United States for American Indians, Indian tribes, and Alaska Natives."[27] Many Native Americans and advocates of Native American rights believe that it is condescending for such lands to be considered "held in trust" and regulated in any fashion by a foreign power, whether the US Federal Government, Canada, or any other non-Native American authority.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_%28US%29#Current_status