This chapter explores the complications of diplomatic relations between tribal nations and the United States in the early reservation years of the 1870s, focusing on debates over tribal nationhood and the push to end treaty making with Native nations. The United States, driven by expansionist ambitions and racist ideology, increasingly viewed tribal sovereignty as an obstacle to western settlement. Amidst the violent efforts by the United States to force western Native Americans onto reservations, US policymakers and white westerners, including the western press, dismissed previous notions of tribal nationhood, working to undermine US obligations of treaty diplomacy. The 1871 rider to the Indian Appropriations Bill marked the end of US treaty making, allowing Congress to exert unilateral control over Native affairs. Any diplomatic relations between the United States and Native nations only persisted into the twentieth century because of Native American activism. Native Americans argued that their respective nations were intact and that treaty obligations and land rights still had to be met.