What if all of these Native American tribes had US Statehood?

For sure. To be honest, my original post was a lot shorter than it could have been because I was writing in from my phone during a brief break in another activity. However, I would argue that the vulnerability of Native Americans to disease epidemics was a product of their low birth rates rather than the other way around. Most North American Native nations had cultures which had evolved in an environment relatively free of epidemic diseases, so they didn't have a lot of the cultural practices that, say, Europeans had come up with in order to deal with epidemic diseases. The idea of quarantining those infected with a new disease was one of those cultural practices that most North American Natives lacked at the time of first contact (although some of them picked it up pretty fast). The idea of having large numbers of children while only expecting a minority of them to survive until adulthood is another similar cultural practice that makes a given culture more disease resistant. I have personally been convinced by the academic articles I have read which have argued that Native Americans lack of disease resistance was more of a lack of cultural resistance than a lack of biological resistance, although there is definitely as of yet no academic consensus. The idea is that a cultural change could increase disease resistance.

I heard that theory too, the criticism of the whole "virgin soil epidemics" concept. I personally lean toward that theory, but since the consensus/science seems a bit questionable, I guess it can't be said either way.

Oh for sure. I was not trying to imply that anything would be easy. You'd need to create a new ethnic or at least a new cultural group, you'd have to boost birth rates, leading to higher population densities which would in turn lead to chiefdoms forming into states, and you'd have to have this all happen on a scale that is fairly unprecedented in OTL history. You'd also have to have this new culture adopt values which would lead it to try to be as self-sufficient as possible and to copy as much European tech as possible. However, I would argue that this is actually in some ways easier in the 17th/18th centuries for Native Americans than it is for Africans/Asians in the 19th century because 17th/18th century European technology requires a lot less in terms of infrastructure than 19th century tech. 17th/18th century firearms, for example, are still being made by artisans, meaning that a single gunsmith carries the knowledge necessary to make a gun providing that you can provide him with the necessary raw materials (smelted iron, etc.) and the necessary tools. So, by hiring a few dozen European specialists, you can train the locals to make individual tech items pretty quickly.

I'm going to stop here, because I feel this is all fairly tangential to the OP topic. To be honest, I've realized that I'm pretty much rehashing the ideas that are already written up better in my TL: Donnacona's Dream, which has as its end goal a Native North American culture that is capable of truly competing with Europeans....

The thing is, where to find the material? I was thinking of a hypothetical example in the American South-- resources to make powder can be found in the Mammoth Cave area, the metal to make the guns can be found in Birmingham area, lead can be found in southern Missouri. This relies on the peoples in those regions (and hypothetical European advisors) finding this all out on their own in a HUGE span of area, hundreds of miles. If it takes most of the day to cover this distance in a car, when you don't even have horses (unless Europeans have traded them to you), that's nothing short of incredible (even if it all looks so close together on a map!). Forming these states is definitely unprecedented and thus difficult to analyse if you're comparing it to OTL history.

Yeah, I haven't read your TL, although since I'm interested in American Indian history so much I probably should (though I have a huge backlog on this site anyway!). And yes, it would take a huge culture shift. But from everything I've read, this would pretty much amount to an American Indian wank. I guess that isn't too ASB since looking at real history a bunch of cultures pulled off what would be ASB-level of luck.

Good point, and I think this is ultimately the only answer. Have the Creek, Chickasaw, and some other related tribes form into one confederation around the Mississippi, with the Iroquois retaining their lands in the Northeast. Have these two "reservations" enter the US as states as a condition for peace with them and annexation. Same, possibly, with conglomerations of some of the smaller tribes. White settlers will flood in and quickly form a majority in all of these places, but the Native Americans there, as full citizens and with mixed-blood contacts to help them navigate the American legal world, sell vast tracts of land without being ripped off, becoming the sort of aristocracy of those states. As a result, Indian Removal and the widespread poverty of the Native Americans affected never happens.

Still an incredibly optimistic scenario, and it still results in Native cultures being lost through assimilation, but it at least seems plausible. You'd never have a Native American majority state, but I think it's plausible that the Native minority could have been a lot, lot better off than OTL.

Widespread poverty would still exist among those American Indians. Creek society, for instance, was massively stratified in the early 19th century with the chiefs having increased their wealth at the expense of many others in their society. It definitely wouldn't be easy to be a poor Indian in this hypothetical situation, probably worse than being a poor white. But American Indians would still be an important constituency in the state, and you might be able to see a few state governors and congressmen of American Indian descent elected from the aristocracy.
 
Widespread poverty would still exist among those American Indians. Creek society, for instance, was massively stratified in the early 19th century with the chiefs having increased their wealth at the expense of many others in their society. It definitely wouldn't be easy to be a poor Indian in this hypothetical situation, probably worse than being a poor white. But American Indians would still be an important constituency in the state, and you might be able to see a few state governors and congressmen of American Indian descent elected from the aristocracy.

Avoiding the Trails of Tears alone would boost the populations of some tribes by up to 10-20%, the losses were that bad. And American Indians were ripped off left, right, and center by the government and private citizens because they were not American citizens and had limited legal recourse in court. Even with overt racial discrimination against them, just having the same legal rights as everyone else in the Union would have greatly helped their survival and well-being.

I once read a book about genocide (uplifting reading, I know) that claimed that one of the most dangerous phases for an ethnic group to be in is when they've been conquered by a stronger group and have lost their independence, but have not yet been integrated into that conquering group's social structure. At that point they're not even second-class citizens, they're zero-class citizens/aliens with no homeland/seen as vermin who can be killed at will.

After 1815 or so, this was the status that most American Indians fell into. Not to the point that they could be killed at will, but they had lost their status as independent polities, but didn't have even a low-status position in the society that had conquered and absorbed them, and they stayed in this limbo for approximately 100 years. The Cherokee academic Russel Thornton thinks that it's no coincidence that the overall numbers of Native Americans started to rise again around the turn of the century, during the same period that Native Americans on reservations were being granted US citizenship en masse.
 
two things one you have to convince the US government to use them as Mercenaries like the Brits did with the Gurkhas a between both and two you have to find away to split sacred land between both sides
 
two things one you have to convince the US government to use them as Mercenaries like the Brits did with the Gurkhas a between both and two you have to find away to split sacred land between both sides

The US government essentially did. Virtually every US-Indian war included Indian scouts from enemy tribes as part of the expedition. Even Custer had Crow scouts at the battle of Little Bighorn. Indian scouts knew the land, could stay hidden, and knew their traditional enemy's habits, as well as potentially serving as interpreters. But while this provided an income for the scouts involved, perhaps as one of the last ways to support a family using traditional warrior skills, it didn't do Native Americans much good as a whole.
 
The US government essentially did. Virtually every US-Indian war included Indian scouts from enemy tribes as part of the expedition. Even Custer had Crow scouts at the battle of Little Bighorn. Indian scouts knew the land, could stay hidden, and knew their traditional enemy's habits, as well as potentially serving as interpreters. But while this provided an income for the scouts involved, perhaps as one of the last ways to support a family using traditional warrior skills, it didn't do Native Americans much good as a whole.
I think a lot of it has to do with demands of whites over lands, I mean the black hills war was over gold verses scared land, if you could let the Amerindians do better during negotiations otherwise I honestly do not know what else could be done, whites where by and large such greedy racist assholes that I do not know what else could be done
 
I think a lot of it has to do with demands of whites over lands, I mean the black hills war was over gold verses scared land, if you could let the Amerindians do better during negotiations otherwise I honestly do not know what else could be done, whites where by and large such greedy racist assholes that I do not know what else could be done

The problem is that when the US government broke its treaty with the Lakota and screwed them over, the Lakota had little recourse. They had no political power. They had no money to hire a team of lawyers to bury the government in paperwork. They weren't even citizens. The Lakota started litigating in 1920, 50 years after the land was first confiscated, and it took until 1980 for the government to decide "Oh yeah, that land seizure was probably illegal under our own laws" and that the federal government owed the Lakota to the tune of $105 million (now over $1 billion with interest).

But my point is, why did the Lakota have that land, which even to the US was legally theirs, taken from them in violation of even US law, and why did it take 100 years for them to even be offered monetary compensation for this enormous loss? Because they had zero power. Change that, early on, and it might have been different. They probably would have still gotten screwed over, but perhaps not as badly.
 
The problem is that when the US government broke its treaty with the Lakota and screwed them over, the Lakota had little recourse. They had no political power. They had no money to hire a team of lawyers to bury the government in paperwork. They weren't even citizens. The Lakota started litigating in 1920, 50 years after the land was first confiscated, and it took until 1980 for the government to decide "Oh yeah, that land seizure was probably illegal under our own laws" and that the federal government owed the Lakota to the tune of $105 million (now over $1 billion with interest).

But my point is, why did the Lakota have that land, which even to the US was legally theirs, taken from them in violation of even US law, and why did it take 100 years for them to even be offered monetary compensation for this enormous loss? Because they had zero power. Change that, early on, and it might have been different. They probably would have still gotten screwed over, but perhaps not as badly.
You are right, so essentially you would need lawyers for every tribe in the US. Good luck with that at that time.
 
View attachment 275924 Maybe some 10 Native American states? (or 12 if we consider also Alaska and Hawaii)

Iroquis remains in Upstate New York
The five civilized tribes are admitted into the union as states.
The four Native states in the west are: Oklahoma: a place where to dump the remaining indians of the southern Louisiana pourchase land., Dakota is also admitted.
From the areas conquerred from Mexico, Apaches and Najo are given their states for fighting on the USD side (or maybe to reduce Hispanic influence, in that case the Apache state could be enlarged.

The natives have two parties in the Congress: the Traditionalsit Party and the Integration Party. traditionalsits want to preserve Native way of life, while intzegrants want to westernize the natives. Traditionalist bastions are the western states, integrationalist are ther eastern ones.
There hasnt been any native American as P/resident andthe Natives are important since they use their siitutation (as neither Reps nor Dems have majority..
Is this a map you made or did you find it somewhere?
 
Would a successful Native American rebellion in, say, Spanish America (the mid to late XVIII century saw several of these, top amongst them Juan Santos Atahualpa and Tupac Amaru II) cause any shift in opinion regarding the Natives in North America?
 
Suppose not just one but several scattered tribes contributed leadership to the Continental Congresses and other Revolutionary organizations, so that at least two or three people from more than one tribe would be counted in a typical list of "Founders," and it would be well known that the majority of several tribes joined the Patriot side (as we Yankees call it anyway) of the ARW. And therefore, in an interaction between these separate tribes and the Anglo majority of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary leaders, a solution was hit upon whereby all the Native peoples (who would be called "Indians," of course, and in the ATL where this scheme succeeds, the term has high status and is still used normally in modern times, so I use it here though I usually don't) retain control of an allotted, definite tract of land by technically separate treaties with the US Government, but are federated into an Indian Confederation which has its own central government elected by the tribes, and functions as a State in the Union for most purposes. That is, the Confederation gets two Senators in the Senate, a number of Representatives in the House depending on the rank of the combined Indian population among the states, two electoral votes plus the number of representatives for the President of the USA, and in Federal law is given a rank equal to other states, except in special matters where the Indians have special rights.

The Confederation is of course not geographically contiguous at all. With the Confederation participating in the US Continental government with a similar status to individual states under the Articles of Confederation, it is included in the Constitution of 1787 with an Article (or within the appropriate OTL Article) enumerating its commonalities with normal contiguous states and its peculiar rights and liabilities. Citizenship in the United States is automatically granted all members of tribes which enact a treaty of incorporation with the USA, and is explicitly stated to be devolved to the federal nation from their individual status as members of a native tribe--in other words, sovereignty is held to flow from individual rights "in a state of nature" via the tribe as a "natural" corporate entity to the USA due to voluntary federation. However, all Indian peoples engulfed in territory the USA claims by conquest or purchase or any other form of acquisition are required to incorporate their tribes by such a treaty.

The government of the Confederation is in principle left to the collective tribes members; that is, just as states determine voting qualifications and internal organization, the Confederation apportions voting rights to its central legislative bodies, and organizes intertribal relations as well as mediating between Indians and regular US citizens and other persons they might deal with on US soil.

Obviously, the attitudes and behaviors of "white" Americans would have to be different in the ATL for this to work, but the idea of the POD is that a substantial number of them recognize the Indians (those who allied anyway) as important members of the Federal union, and over time the political ebb and flow establishes the Indian Confederation as a crucial and normal part of the machinery of the USA, with the result that in general it and the Indian peoples it represents and governs weather the worst storms in notably better shape than OTL.

The theme of the thread is to incorporate particular Native peoples as States of the Union. One reason this would have been unlikely is that the demographics are generally against it, the largest Native groups being smaller than the smallest states. With the precedent established that consummation of union with the USA would involve statehood for individual tribes, the non-Native majority would find itself swamped out of power in the Senate, and despite the population of the separate tribes being much too low to ever have more than one Representative, the sheer number of them would also give them disproportionate power in the House as well, as well as in electing Presidents. The outcome of treating say just the Iroquois or the Cherokee as complete states would be to create an aversion to admitting any more Indian states, and attempts, probably successful, to disfranchise and abolish the already admitted ones, and at any rate other Native groups of much greater population than the established Indian states would not be admitted as such.

On the other hand, when I look at the statistics available for total Native American population (hardly any such is tabulated by the Bureau of the Census until 1900 however) it does seem that in all the years reasonably indicative data is available, the aggregate "Indian" population as reported is at any rate in the same ballpark as the smallest States of the Union by population.

Of course the very first Census was not until 1790, and for a hundred years after that Indians were not counted in any consistent way, precisely because until the late 1810s none of them were considered to be US citizens at all except by special and peculiar acts or circumstances. After 1817, tribes began to be admitted to US citizenship collectively. But even in later Census years when some Indians were counted, it would only be these (and probably not all of these) admitted as citizens, or residents of reservations who might have an intermediate status (technically citizens but exempt from many taxes and excluded from state and Federal representation). No attempt whatsoever was made to comprehensively census all Native residents of US territory until 1890; until then the shrinking "Indian Territory" (once, all the Louisiana Purchase west of the Mississippi, later most of the territory now comprising Oklahoma, then half of that--then none of it with Oklahoma statehood) was not counted at all.

In the ATL, the individual tribes, as they submit to being absorbed into the Union and incorporated into the Indian Confederation, do not get the vast, sweeping land grants initially conceded OTL--but neither do any of them get forced to relocate. All are granted Lands that are small by the standards of eary 19th century grants, but in proportion to the national per capita area of land available times their populations. And these Lands, once defined in treaty, are rarely if ever alienated from the tribe involved--unless it dies out, but even then the land does not revert to the Federal Government but is available for the Indian Confederation to allocate to peoples of other tribes. Because the leadership of the IC and most of the Tribal Lands will become accustomed to dealing with the general machinery of US society, by and large the Indians will be able to defend their right to what is left to them, and control interactions with the larger society so as to avoid worsening disruption. With the power of the scattered Indian peoples united in one body with state-like status but geographically spread all across the continent, Indians can offset their small and often collapsing numbers with other assets that they can use to advantage in the domestic politics of the USA and its transforming economy.

I would think that in these conditions, the demographic fate of the Native peoples will be somewhat less grim, and politically a much larger number of people would qualify and be counted as "Indians" that is possible or desired in OTL conditions.

First of all, while much of the demographic collapse of Native populations OTL was due to tragic circumstances involving the more or less inevitable introduction of Eurasian disease organisms to populations with no resistance, in a situation where the Indians have advocates with a vested interest in conserving their numbers, many contributing factors to the collapse can be offset or avoided. Intertribal warfare would cease, for instance. The wholesale disruption of the economic basis of traditional lives would be somewhat mitigated by large and definite land grants, and or explicit treaty rights such as hunting certain ranges while limiting or preventing Anglo citizens from overhunting or settling those lands. The Confederation would probably start organizing and sending aid to stricken communities early in the 19th century. They would advocate against sharp dealings taking advantage of the ignorance and naivete of small formerly isolated tribes who would in any case be protected better by treaties written under the influence and advice of the Confederation's agents. They would recognize that different Indian tribes have different concepts of property and territory and modes of government, and draft the treaties and design their interfaces with Confederation as well as Federal and neighboring state powers accordingly.

Also, in these circumstances, the Indians collectively have power. Not disproportionate to their share of population, but not less than that either. Individuals who OTL would seek to distance themselves from their Native connections for the sake of a better status in the dominant society might here choose instead to stress these connections, and it might be in Tribal and Confederation interests to encourage this. Even OTL tribes technically are responsible for determining their own membership; with their hands untied, it might well be that individuals with far too little blood connection to the people they claim, or unable to prove it with sufficiently reliable documentation OTL, might be welcomed in as either full tribal members, or a status that might be called "Friends of Tribe X" might be established for people with no plausible blood claims whatsoever but who are deemed valuable assets by the Tribe collectively.

Thus there would be a certain inflation, by OTL standards, of the status of Indian and thus their numbers.

If the demographic collapses of OTL can be mitigated so that say only 2/3 or half the number of people who died of disease OTL actually perish, and if other causes of premature mortality or high infant mortality can be addressed, the populations as we would count them OTL could be substantially larger, perhaps as much as doubled. Then, with tribes and the Confederation being lax about who can be counted as either an Indian or Friends granted more or less of the political and economic rights of Indians (but subject always to both Tribal and Confederation approval, with the Federal government having some say in the matter as well) we might be looking at 4 or 5 times the numbers of OTL in any given decade.

In the tabulations given after 1900, the lowest percentage of Indian populations given were in 1920 and 1950, at 0.2 percent of the total. Nowadays it is given at 0.9 percent--probably I would guess in part to the improvement of the social status of Native Americans, which causes more people to agree to be described as such. Surely also there is some improvement of quality of life to account for some of the increase--although that doesn't very well account for a proportional increase, especially since later decades of the 20th Century have also involved a fairly high rate of immigration. A lot of immigrants are from Mexico, but the definition of "native American" in the USA involves claiming connection to a people ancestrally resident in US territory, so the fact that many Mexicans and Central Americans do claim to belong to Native peoples would not apply to claiming to be an American Indian. Probably much of the actual demographic relative gain is because of poverty rather than wealth, with the general correlation of higher birth rates among poorer people. But I think clearly some of it is due to a higher rate of voluntary identification, fewer people dodging the label and more claiming it.

At one percent or less of the national population, the Indian Confederation would tend to have very few Representatives in Congress. Even so, at the modern figure of 0.9 percent, out of 300 million people that is 2.7 million, a population between New Mexico and Nevada, and thus would net the Confederation between 3 and 4 Representatives and thus 5 or 6 electoral votes for the President. At 0.2, the population would be 600,000--which is less than Vermont, but more than Wyoming.

Note that since incorporated Indian Tribes comprising the Conf ederation would always be counted as citizens but never as citizens of states, as long as the number of Representatives was being increased as states were added and populations grew (in the 19th century) the Confederation population would be counted (whereas most of the OTL people who would qualify were not counted by US censuses nor toward state appropriations) so the number of seats would have increased a bit more rapidly, and possibly been capped somewhat earlier. And today, once the size of the House has been fixed, the various states would have fewer seats to appropriate, while the Confederation would claim the balance.

If today, 5 times as many people claimed the identity of Indian as do OTL, and this claim were accepted by the interested parties, that would be 13.5 million people, or supposing the numbers we'd count strictly would be doubled, so there are 5.4 million we'd count, with 8.1 million others who would be denied the status by our rules, then if the ATL USA has identical population plus 2.7 million more Indians not eliminated, those other 8 million are a deduction from the net state populations. With 13.5 million, the Confederation would rank between Illinois and New York states--but it might rank higher still, in the fourth spot, due to the other states losing on average 2.7 percent of their populations. Of course we'd expect some unevenness, with the states farther to the west being notably less populous in terms of the non-Native populations they can count, and also lacking significant chunks of the territory they govern OTL, with considerably more than 3 percent of their land having been granted in perpetuity to numerous Tribes. Four Corners would probably not exist at all, with the respective corners of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado being completely removed from any state jurisdiction, assigned piecemeal to various tribal people (mostly Navajo, but also tracts for Pueblo and some Apache groups). In addition to a huge Navajo tract with other peoples contiguous to it, lots of other large patches within and sometimes straddling OTL state borders would also be completely alienated from the various state governments--just as, to be sure, the Haudensee would enjoy autonomy in the Iroquois tract. All of these lands, be they small and densely peopled or sprawling and sparse, would be under the Confederation instead; even in New England the Praying Indians might be able to reassert their claims and get some autonomous land set aside within Massachusetts, Connecticut or even Rhode Island. So by and large, the Western states of this ATL will be relatively smaller in population and area than OTL, but even the Eastern states will give way a little bit.

Thus, the Confederation today might actually rank near the top, just below California, Texas and Florida, and be apportioned 27 or so Representatives. Obviously, the Confederation would long ago, from the first years of the current Constitution in fact, have learned the art of apportioning votes so that the very many Tribes included, far more than 27 and varying in size from a few hundred or less to hundreds of thousands or (given the multipliers of higher core populations and more fringe members being let in) millions. I can think of a number of methods that might be used in lieu of the simple matter of assigning groups of Tribal tracts to disjoint Districts; this might be one of many ways that the Confederation is not like a State at all.

What I lack is any information indicating the total Indian population that would have been included in the boundaries of the USA as defined by the Treaty of Paris--that is, the old 13 colonies plus what was called later "the old Northwest" and "the Old Southwest," these all being east of the Mississippi. Although some groups might possibly have grown, we have every reason to suppose the Native population between the Mississippi and the Appalachians would have been larger in 1783 than ever after OTL, and even in the ATL it will probably plummet before reaching a nadir sooner and higher than OTL, at a wild guess sometime in the 1850s or later. Even so, and bearing in mind that even before being massively disrupted by European invaders population densities were quite low compared to Europe or even the cores of the early settler colonies, it is a really vast, sweeping area and it is hard to believe that in the 15 states as of the apportionment of 1792 there were only a bit over 7000 Indians which the 0.2 percent demographic nadir would imply; it seems clear that even there there would be at least an order of magnitude more.

Farther west then, there must have been hundreds of thousands if not millions of Indians living west of the mountains, and they would exist in enough numbers that the Indian Confederation would be among the biggest "states," or perhaps the biggest bar none by a comfortable margin.

I suppose then that especially in the early years of the 19th century, the Federal government would put up roadblocks between the newly included peoples and full membership in the Confederation, to keep the Confederation in the middle or lower ranges of "state" power. Gradually though I suppose all Native peoples would gravitate toward incorporation into the Confederation, and hostile interests will only be able to slow this trend, not stop it.

So in the early days of the USA, before the Constitution and in the generation or two immediately after it is adopted, strong anti-Indian factions might try to limit the Confederation to just the few tribes that did aid the Revolution on the whole, and surely some of the Founders would oppose the existence of the Confederation. But others would champion it, and among them some individuals would be Indians from these and other tribes, so it goes through and gradually, slowly early in the 19th century but faster later, other tribes, including the remnants of some who were bitterly opposed to the USA, would come around to accepting the terms of incorporation and the Confederation would grow. As the rate of US population growth picks up from the already high levels of the Revolutionary era, due to increasing immigration combined with high rates of natural growth, there would be less concern to limit the size of the Confederation, which being a player in US politics would acquire a diverse mix of both allies and enemies, and indeed with internal factions most Anglo factions would have some Indians or other supporting them; few if any could afford to oppose them all as a bloc. The fervent demographic rise of the non-Native peoples will keep the electoral power of the Confederation in check, especially because of the terrible implosion of Indian population; by adding new tribes at a fast rate the Confederation might just barely maintain its population while around it old states and new alike surge up. By the middle of the century the role of Confederation advisors and envoys in mediating peace with the hitherto undisturbed peoples in the west might be generally valued across most partisan lines, and liquidation of the Confederation would be unthinkable politically.

The more successful the Confederation is in bringing the tribes under its wing to some sort of workable accommodation with the modernizing world around them, the sooner the demographic collapse stops and reverses, and the entity will begin to keep pace with its rank in the list of states by population. In the 20th century I expect it would start rising again steadily; by then all the surviving tribal peoples would be "in."

With this kind of power, I suspect that before the end of the 20th century, at least one US President would be from the Confederation, and Indian Justices of the Supreme Court probably would have been appointed before 1900.
 
Suppose not just one but several scattered tribes contributed leadership to the Continental Congresses and other Revolutionary organizations, so that at least two or three people from more than one tribe would be counted in a typical list of "Founders," and it would be well known that the majority of several tribes joined the Patriot side (as we Yankees call it anyway) of the ARW. And therefore, in an interaction between these separate tribes and the Anglo majority of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary leaders, a solution was hit upon whereby all the Native peoples (who would be called "Indians," of course, and in the ATL where this scheme succeeds, the term has high status and is still used normally in modern times, so I use it here though I usually don't) retain control of an allotted, definite tract of land by technically separate treaties with the US Government, but are federated into an Indian Confederation which has its own central government elected by the tribes, and functions as a State in the Union for most purposes. That is, the Confederation gets two Senators in the Senate, a number of Representatives in the House depending on the rank of the combined Indian population among the states, two electoral votes plus the number of representatives for the President of the USA, and in Federal law is given a rank equal to other states, except in special matters where the Indians have special rights.

*snip*

An interesting concept.

The foundation is the real question, though, not the structure atop it. Which tribes could have been made to come over to the rebel cause, and with what Point of Divergence? What POD or PODS would so radically alter the nature of colonial attitudes toward their non-European neighbors, that they'd even allow Indians into Revolutionary organizations, much less accept them in leadership roles? With the enormous claims and faint strength of the tribes, how could they and the colonists ever agree to a deal? How could the gap between traditional British allies (Iroquois, Catawba, Cherokee) and traditional British enemies (most of the remaining cis-Mississippian tribes) be bridged in the brief period between the French departure and the American Revolution?

What strikes me is how much time this foundation requires to lay. A diehard optimist might argue for a French and Indian War POD, but it's difficult for me to imagine anything later than 1740 or so. And that in turn means that something much resembling OTL's US constitution is strikingly unlikely. Anything that would so alter the fundamental thinking of early Americans could not help but yield an equally unfamiliar constitution. If, indeed, there is a new constitution at all - who's to say the original Articles might not be better in this version of the United States.

If, indeed, there is a United States. Reading recently on the London side of the equation, I've been realizing that Britannia truly was not following her interests when it came to choosing her American policy. I wonder if PODs a certain depth back in time from the Revolution don't risk averting it entirely - the personalities and failings on the British side seem remarkably contingent.

Personally, if I were writing any such thing there would still be a US, of course! Institutionalized states for the native-peoples would be more interesting and easier to speculate on in a familiar system. But that doesn't necessarily make it likely.

~

To address the OP question more directly, I'll say more or less the same thing I do in every thread of this sort: Fix the population problem, and everything becomes relatively easy. Leave populations similar to OTL, and everything else is a bandaid.
 

The biggest problem with that is conceptions of race make or break this admittedly interesting scenario--you need the white majority in the US to be less racist while at the same time creating a pan-Indian identity that didn't exist until last century or so. The latter is probably easier than the former.

What I would most expect if this idea got off the ground is that certain tribal groups would use the power this gave them to beat up on their enemies. I would fully expect a clever Indian leader to work his way around anything stopping him from doing so. That would certainly hinder the Confederation's spread as well as the critical pan-Indian identity needed to maintain it as well as lead to demographic loss since a place like the Great Plains of the early-mid 19th century was one of the most violent places on Earth mostly thanks to the huge amount of tribal warfare going on.

There's also the issue I would think that the tribes who started it--Iroquois, Cherokee, etc., would also be the ones dominating it in a sort of paternalistic manner. This could produce significant resentment from tribes who joined later on as well as hinder the expansion of the Confederation. On the other hand, that might be what the Confederation needs, a sort of "internal revolution", as the various tribes largely excluded from power work together against the Eastern tribes's dominance.
 
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