Intertwined Institutional Designs: Indigenous Nations, the United States, and the Distribution of Authority Across Generations

Institutions shape political life long after the moment of their design. They sort populations, distribute
power, define who belongs, and set the terms on which communities engage the state. In the United
States, congressional interventions into Indigenous governance have drawn and redrawn membership
boundaries, reorganized property and resource regimes, built systems of classification and enrollment,
and unilaterally restructured relationships established by treaty. The resulting governing arrangements
remain central to contemporary conflicts over resource control, environmental and climate policy
authority, criminal and civil jurisdiction, and the political and legal standing of Indigenous individuals
and nations. This dissertation examines how governing arrangements between Indigenous nations and
the United States are designed and imposed, how they endure, and how they are contested and at
times transformed. The dissertation consists of three papers that examine political participation,
legislative decision-making, and delegation. 

The first paper examines how institutional membership rules shape political participation
through the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971. ANCSA created a system of for-
profit corporations and distributed shares, corporate voting rights, and other benefits only to Alaska
Natives born on or before December 18, 1971, excluding later-born descendants from the institutions
and benefits available to slightly older members of their communities. Using regression discontinuity
and difference-in-differences designs, alongside archival and field evidence, I find that those barely
excluded from ANCSA turned toward federal elections, voting at significantly higher rates than just-
older shareholders. At the same time, those included within the corporate system organized through
that institutional structure to extend benefits to later-born descendants. The paper shows how
institutional design can reallocate political participation across arenas rather than simply increasing or
suppressing it, and examines the collective obligations and institutional positions at stake in these
efforts to expand membership.

The second paper examines when information-gathering requirements constrain legislative
decisions and when they fail to do so. It studies congressional termination policy in the mid-twentieth
century, under which Congress sought to dissolve federal trust and treaty relationships with
Indigenous nations. Congress commissioned House Report 2503 to guide decisions about which
tribes would be selected for early termination. Combining a termination readiness index constructed
from Census data and the report with committee assignment data and archival evidence, the paper
finds that tribes selected for early termination were not systematically better prepared according to
Congress’s stated criteria, and that resource wealth does not explain the selection pattern on the
resources measured by the report. Instead, the structure of the Senate committee responsible for
Indian Affairs created conditions under which legislators faced few incentives to use available
information. The paper shows that information alone does not discipline political decision-making
when accountability mechanisms connecting decision-makers to affected populations are weak.

The third paper develops a formal model of federal–tribal delegation under conditions of state-
imposed assimilation. The model explains when the federal government may prefer to delegate
authority to Indigenous nations that resist assimilation: assimilation efforts can reduce the local
knowledge and governing capacity that make delegation valuable, while nations with greater
organizational capacity may resist assimilation strategically and preserve the informational advantages
that sustain delegation. The model identifies conditions under which the federal government prefers
to delegate to nations that maintain political autonomy rather than fully assimilate, while also
specifying limits to the argument where governments do not rely on local informational advantages.
Together, these papers show how efforts to reorganize Indigenous governance can produce political
processes that reshape the arrangements they create.