“Little Kingdoms”: Administrative Authority, Security, and Sovereignty Co-optation in Indian Country

This dissertation examines how Native nations engage with U.S. federal security regimes, navigating the complex terrain of refusal, cooperation, and co-optation in interagency governance on Native land. Through historically embedded ethnography, it investigates interagency dynamics and traces how the federal government has strategically recognized, constrained, and redefined Native sovereignty across distinct eras of national security crisis. Building on legal history of federal Indian policy, organizational theory, and scholarship on the sovereignty of (and tensions between) Native nations and other polities, this work develops a theory of sovereignty co-optation: a process through which federal agencies incorporate Native nations into decision-making structures to legitimize and stabilize their own administrative authority while simultaneously reshaping Native governance in ways that appear collaborative yet often subordinate the interests of Native nations to federal priorities.The dissertation argues that sovereignty co-optation is not a singular event but a continuum of political and legal relations shaped by historical contingencies, racialized legal categories, and the material interests of both Native nations and federal agencies. Drawing on archival research, including administrative correspondence, agency reports, and Tribal council records, this study analyzes three case studies: the 1873 Modoc military commission, the Navajo Nation’s support of the War Relocation Authority’s Leupp Isolation Center during World War II, and the Tohono O’odham Nation’s support of the Shadow Wolves unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Each case illustrates a distinct mode of engagement: refusal, cooperation without submission, and full co-optation into federal security frameworks.This work challenges longstanding linear narratives of federal-Native relations as a progression from exclusion to inclusion, arguing instead that strategic recognition of Native sovereignty–sometimes including, sometimes excluding– has historically served federal interests in times of legal, political, and security uncertainty. By centering Native nations as sovereign actors, and not merely oppositional groups, this dissertation reconceptualizes the oscillation of tribal sovereignty not as a natural legal fluctuation but as a product of sustained colonial ambivalence. Ultimately, it offers a critical lens for understanding how Native nations have negotiated, resisted, and been shaped by the architectures of federal security governance, and how sovereignty itself remains a site of both assertion and constraint.