Tribal leaders and their lawyers are flexing their legal muscles in courts throughout the U.S., asserting federal and state governments must abide by treaties signed with more than 374 nations. Tribal citizens and lawyers told Straight Arrow it’s a monumental moment that will be felt not just by Native Americans, but all Americans.
Tribes have waged more court battles in the past decade to affirm their rights as sovereign citizens and the U.S.’s responsibility to uphold treaties it signed. The treaties are forced agreements presidents signed with tribes to acquire their land and force them into a smaller square footage lawmakers deemed suitable.
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More than 200 years later, those tribes are forcing federal and state governments to meet in a courtroom over projects, agreements and laws that they say jeopardize those treaties. The most recent example is the Seneca Nation asserting President Donald Trump’s order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America violates the Treaty of Canandaigua, which it signed with George Washington in 1794. The Justice Department hasn’t issued a response to Seneca Nation’s objections. The White House defended the action and noted that a portion of the Great Lakes is within the country’s territory, The Associated Press reported.
“It’s night and day from the before times,” University of Michigan Professor of Law Matthew Fletcher told Straight Arrow. Fletcher is an enrolled member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.
The tribe is part of a group of culturally and linguistically connected nations located around the Great Lakes called Anishinaabe, according to the University of Minnesota. Several language programs are present throughout the region, teaching children and anyone curious how to speak Ojibwe or Anishinaabemowin.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs said that the U.S. hasn’t made any new treaties with tribes, adding that Congress ended the practice in 1871. Any agreements following that were codified through congressional action or executive orders and agreements. The first treaty was signed with the Lenape people in 1778. At least 45 treaties were negotiated since 1871, but weren’t ratified by the Senate.
Tribes across North America saw a growing need to establish legal teams to assert their rights in court in the 1970s, Fletcher said. It created a foundation for many tribes like his own to restructure their governments to further their growth as sovereign nations.
Matthew Campbell, deputy director of the Native American Rights Fund and a citizen of the Native Village of Gambell, told Straight Arrow that treaties don’t just cover what rights Native people have, but also their rights to sovereignty, dealing with people who trespass on reservations and other aspects of life.
“If it gets to the point of a lawsuit, then the tribal nation feels like that the state or the federal government are not taking into consideration their rights,” Campbell said. “And so once it’s to that point it feels like the relationship is broken down.”
Fletcher noted that the U.S. government has stepped in with Friend-of-the-Court briefs or intervening in litigation supporting the tribes, but it’s not a common occurrence. Litigation isn’t limited to one administration. Fletcher said the real target is the Justice Department, who has the legal authority to intervene in lawsuits.
When it comes to treaties themselves, Congress is the only body that can alter the agreements. For enforcement of rights, the BIA is the agency responsible for upholding the federal government’s agreed-upon duties in the treaties. The bureau cited agency policy in its denial to comment on this story.
“They decide when to back tribes who have brought a lawsuit, who are being sued, and they have complete discretion as to which cases they want to support,” Fletcher said.
Without intervention, tribes are left to make their own defense against people, corporations and governments. Not fighting, Fletcher added, enables “polluters, miners, pipeline companies, energy extraction industry to access land and resources that impact tribal rights to the reservation or to sacred sites.”
“Indian treaty rights are property rights, and they are to be protected as such,” Fletcher said.
Climate change fight keeps traditions, tribes alive
A theme in many of the lawsuits filed in the past decade centered around climate change. Fletcher said it’s a given as Natives view the Earth and its resources as relatives.
“Tribes are absolutely experiencing the impacts of climate change, of habitat loss, of drought related to climate change, and they’re also experiencing the pressure of demand for extractive development,” said Wenona Singel, director of Michigan State University’s Indigenous Law and Policy Center. Singel is an enrolled member of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians.
Their fights against climate change are being expressed through lawsuits and agreements tribes push governments to resolve.
One in particular is an agreement between Oregon, Washington and four regional tribes secured with each other and former President Joe Biden’s administration, the Washington State Standard reported in 2023. It included $1 billion in promises from the former president to restore fish and produce renewable energy in the Columbia River Basin.
Those promises are at risk after Trump ended the federal government’s obligation in June 2025 to restore salmon, steelhead and other fish in the basin harmed by dams across Idaho, Oregon and Washington, Tribal Business News reported.
Singel noted that tribes in Washington have secured more legal wins as the treaties included strong, direct concessions for Natives. Many of those tribes are arranged under the Stevens Treaties, named after former Washington Gov. Isaac Stevens.
“Effectively, the Stevens treaties created an easement that allowed for tribal access, even on individual, private property, to access and to be able to fish,” she said.
One of the most recent cases involving water rights was the Arizona v. Navajo Nation 2023 lawsuit, which reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Singel said the nation requested the court to hold that the federal government had an “affirmative duty” under the nation’s 1868 treaty to assess Navajo Nation’s water needs. She added the case ended in a 5-4 decision where the court said the treaty didn’t hold such duties.
“It’s not that the tribe was unsuccessful in asserting water rights, they were unsuccessful in demanding that the U.S., as a trustee, be declared as having and affirmative duty to assess the tribe’s water needs and develop a plan to secure water,” Singel said.
Beyond water rights, a common target in climate lawsuits are oil and gas pipelines. The latest fight is against Canadian energy company Enbridge and its Line 5 pipeline. The company seeks to place Line 5 underground and through the Straits of Mackinac, a highly contested plan Fletcher said could harm Lakes Huron and Michigan.
“There’s nothing in our treaty that says we have a right to the Great Lakes,” he said of his tribe. “What it says is we have a right to hunt and fish until the lands are required for settlement, and water can’t be settled. So, we’ll always have this right to fish.”
The Bay Mills Indian Community has led lawsuits and political action on Line 5, which has leaked multiple times. Nations have argued construction has gone on without their consent and is in violation of their treaties, which established the U.S., Michigan, Canada and the tribes surrounding the Great Lakes have equal control over the waterways.
Honoring the Earth and the resources it gives are all practices, in one way or another, seen across Native American tribes’ religion. But frustration is present with their religious practices not being held to the same respect as others.
A relationship rebuilt through litigation
All who spoke to Straight Arrow said the lawsuits initially create tensions between Tribal and U.S. governments, but they result in longstanding collaborations that could result in fewer issues down the road.
Singel added that it’s unlikely for tribes to renegotiate stronger protections in their treaties as the U.S. Supreme Court held that even if a treaty doesn’t have an expressed right, it then becomes a reserved right. She added it’s also unlikely the treaties would be renegotiated since Congress passed a law in 1871 that stated negotiations would stop.
“If a tribe does not cede hunting and fishing rights, it reserves those hunting and fishing rights,” she said. “They don’t need the treaty to expressly articulate all the rights of the tribe.”
Fletcher pointed out that in the lawsuits about cultural practices, there is a central point that Indigenous religions have been around in the U.S. before some of the major ones. It’s one area lawyers said tribes lose due to the U.S. Supreme Court not holding Native American religions to the same degree it does with others.
“I think it has a lot to do with the reality that indigenous religions are place-based and those are just not respected by the judiciary,” Fletcher said, recalling one instance where a religious practice was discounted because it only happened once every other year.
The relationship didn’t grow out of nowhere, Fletcher said, but from tribes’ legal and political activism. They’ve been instrumental in forcing federal and state governments to recognize tribes and treaty rights in creating robust legal teams and garnering support from other nations.
“It’s because the tribes have basically grown and are making it better,” he said.
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