In an auditorium in Belcourt, North Dakota, on a chilly October day in 1932, Robert Bruce and his fellow tribal citizens held the political fate of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in their hands. Bruce, and the others, had been asked to adopt a tribal constitution, but he was unhappy with the document, as it limited tribal governmental authority. However, white authorities told the tribal nation that the proposed constitution was a necessary step in bringing a lawsuit against the federal government over a long-standing land dispute. Bruce's choice, and the choice of his fellow citizens, has shaped tribal governance on the reservation ever since that fateful day. In this book, Keith Richotte Jr. offers a critical examination of one tribal nation's decision to adopt a constitution. By asking why the citizens of Turtle Mountain voted to adopt the document despite perceived flaws, he confronts assumptions about how tribal constitutions came to be, reexamines the status of tribal governments in the present, and offers a fresh set of questions as we look to the future of governance in Native America and beyond.

According to author Roland Marmon, "the Turtle Mountain Chippewa are the most prominent of the Plains Chippewa tribes in America with a membership of nearly eighty thousand people. The Turtle Mountain Chippewa were also affiliated with the ethnically European and Indian mixed Métis people, who constitute the largest Indigenous group in Canada, and were caught between national identities and Canadian and United States Federal policy." These Chippewa records have been transcribed from the National Archives microfilm M-595, Roll 604: Indian Census Rolls 1885-1940, (Turtle Mountain) Chippewa Indians 1932 with Birth and Death Rolls, 1924-1932. The original 1932 census was typed using a columnar set form with labels at the top of each column. This transcription has been revised using semicolons to separate each column due to size. Persons named in the 1932 Chippewa census are identified by name, census number, sex, age, relationship to head of household, degree of blood, marital status, residence, and allotment, annuity, and identification numbers. Each census, in the original, is in alphabetical order but in a few instances a name has been inserted that disrupts the sequence and has created the need for a limited index in the back of the book. The records of births and deaths, which follow the 1932 census transcriptions, are arranged chronologically and thereunder alphabetically by surname. Each person born or deceased within a particular year is identified by date of birth, sex, ward (yes/no), degree of blood, and where enrolled in the tribe. In all cases the author has been careful to copy the names and dates exactly as indicated on these microfilm records.