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Drawing on recent work in Native American legal history, environmental justice studies, and legal geography, my paper examines how Native American activists and politicians have strengthened their political and territorial sovereignty via new tribal institutional and constitutional mechanisms of self-determination since the 1930s. Native people's claim to environmental sovereignty emerged formally in 1987 when the U.S. Congress established the Treat as States (TAS) program, which required the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to grant Native nations the right to both set their own regulatory procedures as an independent sovereign authority. The paper will address the ways in which Native people have sought to employ their “third sovereignty,” supported by federal courts and legislation that validated their treaty rights, to both mitigate the environmental injustices of settler colonialism and demonstrate a new model of environmental governance on reservations by asserting their own environmental regulatory practices and processes.
