"Meeting Ronnie Lupe, the chairman of the White Mountain Apache tribe, is rather like an audience with the chieftain he would once have been. At 82 he has a sage’s bearing, takes his time speaking and does not allow himself to be interrupted. He has ears as long as those on statues of the Buddha. He sits surrounded by Apache flags, insignia and the tribal seal, which he says he co-designed with a medicine man long ago. His office commands a view in one of the sacred directions of the Apache, across a reservation in remote Arizona that is roughly the size of Delaware but home to only about 12,000 tribal members.

Born in a wikiup, a traditional Apache brush wigwam, and brought up on stories of bloodshed between his forebears and the white man, Mr Lupe has been in tribal government, off and on, since 1964. His career thus spans several historic changes for Indian tribes, each of which affirmed and increased their sovereignty. “When I was first elected, I received no financial reports, no letters, they all went over there,” he recalls, pointing across the street to a branch of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the federal agency that handles relations with tribes. “Over the years I took their power away.” Then he flips his middle finger in the BIA’s direction. “I’m not responsible to you, I’m a sovereign nation.”

That sovereignty is still a topic of discussion at all should be surprising. America’s constitution names three sovereigns: the federal government, states and tribes. The “treaties” America signed with tribes in the 18th and 19th centuries also implied sovereign parties. Tribes could not keep armies or devise a currency, but they could issue their own passports, as the Iroquois have famously done (which made their lacrosse team miss a tournament in 2010, after Britain refused to recognise the documents). The Iroquois, the Sioux and the Ojibwe (Chippewa), even separately declared war on Germany in 1941."

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Gambling on nation-building (The Economist 4/7)