Open a local paper in places that abut Native reservations, and you’re likely to find a quarrel over land. A golf course creeping onto burial grounds, a pipeline coursing under sacred waters, a casino planned where nearby residents don’t want it. For most non-Native people, these kinds of disputes are their introduction to the fact of Native sovereignty: that Native nations are not minorities or relics but nations possessing their own territory, laws, and jurisdictions, not to mention their own wealth and plans for what to do with it. In his brilliant new study of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and its frictions with adjacent local governments, Douglas Metoxen Kiel teases out the deep historical roots and immense stakes of these seemingly minor controversies. He reframes them as products of a stunning Native resurgence in the twentieth century and of settlers’ vitriolic resentments toward nations that are thriving and influential.

Kiel’s book covers the history of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, one of three Oneida communities, with the others located in western New York and Ontario, Canada. He begins his account in an era after the General Allotment Act of 1887, which mandated the carving up of collectively held sovereign territories into individually held tracts of private property—property that was, of course, suddenly subject to taxation by neighboring municipalities. After large swaths were sold off as “surplus” by the federal government, settlers swooped in to seize the allotments that remained through manipulative purchase or by grabbing lands lost to tax forfeiture. Before the policy was brought to a halt in 1934, the Oneida lost a full 98% of their 65,400-acre reservation.

Today, the Oneida Nation is in sight of recovering more than half of that territory. Kiel explains how. First, through deft engagement with federal programs, starting with the New Deal. The Oneidas leapt at the opportunity to channel the resources of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project toward the preservation of their language, under pressure from a diminishing number of speakers at the time. In a later period, Oneidas made use of Great Society programs to build housing and expand education, including in the Oneida language. Second, the Oneidas were mobile, flocking to cities for employment decades before the federal government initiated relocation programs in the 1950s. Kiel’s story upends assumptions about authenticity as yoked to reservation spaces. Where one might expect a dilution of Oneida culture as members spread to Milwaukee, Chicago, and Green Bay, the nation instead gained vigor. As Kiel observes, Oneidas grew only more attached to their Oneida-ness within the Indigenous activist communities they found in urban settings.

Third, and perhaps most intriguing for this journal’s readers, the Oneidas built tribal enterprises. They did so early, and with remarkable success. Kiel praises the “bingo queens,” Sandra Ninham and Alma Webster, who founded a small gaming operation in the early 1970s to raise funds for tribal programs. By the time the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 was enacted, the Oneidas were experienced entrepreneurs and poised to expand. The nation now operates a thriving hotel and casino and is among a minority of tribal nations that have successfully diversified their business activities, with ventures in banking, real estate, and retail. A reservation once impoverished became the largest employer in the region and host to a small welfare state, with gaming revenue providing healthcare, education, and cultural revitalization. “Today,” Kiel writes, “the Oneida Nation stands as a model of tribal economic development and self-determination” (p. 112).

Which is exactly what makes some of their neighbors so upset. Alongside services and programs for their citizens the Oneida Nation plowed gaming profits into a steady reversal of the allotment era’s devastation, buying back land once part of the reservation piece by piece. As the Oneida territory expanded, the village of Hobart, which is entirely enclosed by the Oneida reservation, saw its tax base contract. To offset these losses, Hobart planned a downtown and business district; the Oneida attempted to thwart their plans by buying up land needed for the development (at 15 times its value, no less). It’s a rather stunning historical reversal. A century earlier, municipalities wielded taxes to seize Oneida allotments. Now the Oneidas applied their own form of revenue—from tribal enterprises—to take that land back, and in the process deprive municipalities of their revenue.

It sounds like war, but the Oneida had been generous to Hobart, striking service agreements to share the costs of services and infrastructure, and offering Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT). Hobart could have continued to cooperate with the nation and reap the benefits of proximity to such an engine of economic development. Instead, they chose to launch what Kiel calls a “counter-sovereignty” campaign, recruiting activists from the euphemistically named Citizen Equal Rights Alliance, an organization that has mounted legal challenges to Native jurisdiction and federal Indian law across the nation. Hobart has thus far failed, but as Kiel notes in his conclusion, the wider counter-sovereignty movement lives on.

Kiel’s succinct and readable study makes several important contributions. He shifts the focus from state governments, which have a better-known history of challenging Native sovereignty, to the municipalities that currently spearhead counter-sovereignty campaigns. Kiel captures under-appreciated forms of Indigenous power: cultural tenacity, mobility, institution-building, language preservation, and social welfare, all examples of the principle that “some of the most revolutionary acts are also the quietest” (p. 101). He fends off any misinterpretation of Native enterprises as somehow hindered by nations’ special relationship with the federal government. Where free-market advocates (and even some Oneidas, Kiel observes) have seen abolishing the federal trust responsibility toward Native nations as the best means to unlock reservation resources, Kiel shows that sovereignty was key: it formed the basis for legal claims, allowed access to federal programs, granted jurisdiction over reclaimed land, and established the legal framework for thriving enterprise. Scholars of business history will have much to learn from Kiel’s book. In fact, everyone should read it before cracking open that local paper.