Connecting what happens on Indian reservations with challenges facing the United States, Chapter 1 highlights the significance of what happens in Indian country to those living in neighboring and even distant communities. Chapter 1 also presents in brief the major themes of the book—the heavy federal role in reservation development and resource exploitation, the importance of improving tribal self-governance, and the ways in which land use decisions shape reservation life—and emphasizes the centrality of both history and institutional development in understanding Indian nations today.

Decades before the ACS even came to exist, white reformers had planned black colonies for what they imagined to be the vacant wilds of the American West. They discerned how internal colonization might address the “race question” while not wasting black labor overseas; for their part, black Americans took less offense at an idea that offered them autonomy without expatriation. But as white migrants, with slaves or without, settled the West at a rate few had foreseen, Americans abandoned continental black colonies. That changed with the Civil War, which rekindled northerners’ faith in internal colonization – but for the South, not the West. While chaos within the White House mothballed President Lincoln’s foreign colonization schemes, policy makers began to trust the white North’s salvation to “natural” trends of racial migration, which just might do the job that conscious design had failed to. Yet the postwar frustrations of conservatives such as President Andrew Johnson, and of the freedpeople (who craved ownership of the land that they had long worked), showed that black resettlement would continue to hold a place in American race relations.

It is imperative that the Navajo Nation engage in meaningful land reform. This chapter highlights the challenges Dinē families face when seeking permission to use tribal trust land. Beginning with an exploration of the motivation behind the Navajo Nation’s recent effort to reform the process for obtaining a homesite lease, the chapter describes how it can be hard to find useable land even on the largest reservation. As the chapter notes, there are many reasons, including the need to find an alternative tax base now that extractive industries such as coal are leaving the reservation, that the central government should be interested in land reform. But hitting the right spot, the amount of paperwork and required fees, when it comes to formalizing use rights is hard. The Navajo Nation faces real difficulties resolving the how much control and what sort of control the central government should exercise over Dinē life, especially as it relates to the home.