Tearful Traces
DURING ITS FIRST DECADES, the United States Supreme Court struggled mightily to define the legal status of Indian tribes and their land claims. “Their story is that of courts caught in a collision between law and morality on the one hand, desire and force on the other,” retired Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a treatise on those cases. “That story forces us to examine the relation between law and politics.”
The litigation reached its apex in 1832 in ; the Justices made clear that dealing with the Indians was the sole province of the federal government. The ruling in not only marked a major legal victory for the Indians—although one giving tribes no immediate help—but also was a decision that brought the
