"Our Lives Have Been Transmuted, Changed Forever"

Journalist Fergus Bordewich offers a tour of contemporary Native American communities as background to a discussion of tribal sovereignty. Nevertheless, historical guilt, like romanticism or mindless pity, is a narrow and cloudy lens through which to view present-day realities, including that of Native Americans. Instead of a nation composed of individuals making their own unhampered choices, America increasingly sees itself as composed of groups more or less ineradicable in their ethnic character. “Our lives have been transmuted, changed forever”, Rayna Green, who is of mixed Cherokee extraction and director of the Native American Program at the Museum of American History, said in a speech at the New York Public Library in 1993. Within two or three generations, the nation will possess hundreds of semi-independent “tribes” whose native heritage consists mainly of autonomous governments and special privileges that are denied to other Americans.