WHEREAS, the Libertarian Party affirms as foundational the principles of individual liberty, self-determination, and the sanctity of voluntary agreements and contracts; and
WHEREAS, Native American tribal nations are sovereign peoples who entered into treaties with the United States government as nation-to-nation agreements constituting the supreme law of the land under Article VI of the United States Constitution, yet the United States government’s failure to honor those obligations, including under the Treaty of 1852 with Apache nations and similar agreements, is not incidental but structural, representing a systemic violation of contract and a denial of recognized sovereignty; and
WHEREAS, this pattern extends across every framework the federal government has applied to indigenous and native peoples, including its own congressional acknowledgment under Public Law 103-150 (1993) that the 1893 overthrow of the sovereign Hawaiian Kingdom was illegal and that the Hawaiian Kingdom never relinquished its claims to sovereignty, demonstrating that no single federal framework has served the cause of genuine self-determination; and
WHEREAS, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 extinguished aboriginal title to over 360 million acres, substituting shareholder corporate governance for sovereign governance, a structure the United States Supreme Court applied in Alaska v. Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government (1998) to narrow the jurisdictional standing of federally recognized Alaska Native tribes, while Alaska Native communities continue to face ongoing conflicts over subsistence hunting and fishing rights under competing state and federal regulatory authority, representing a present-day denial of self-determination; and
WHEREAS, the Libertarian Party recognizes that liberty is not granted by governments but is inherent to people, and that no act of conquest, legislation, or administrative imposition can extinguish the natural right of a people to organize and to govern themselves; and
WHEREAS, meaningful political participation requires that a people be represented within structures that reflect their actual jurisdictional and sovereign reality, and that participation within structures that dilute or ignore that reality does not constitute genuine representation; and
WHEREAS, the Libertarian Party holds that the United States federal government’s jurisdictional framework, having been imposed without the consent of tribal nations and the Hawaiian Kingdom, does not obligate the Libertarian Party to replicate those frameworks in its own recognition of free people and independent governments, and the Party aspires to model the principles it advocates by engaging with sovereign nations on terms consistent with Libertarian values of voluntary association and self-determination;
BE IT RESOLVED, that the Libertarian National Committee formally acknowledges the inherent sovereignty of Native American tribal nations and the Hawaiian Kingdom and affirms that their sovereignty predates and supersedes jurisdictional frameworks imposed by the United States government; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Libertarian National Committee commits to engage with the peoples of tribal nations, the Hawaiian Kingdom, and Alaska Native communities on their own terms, respecting their right to determine for themselves how they are represented and how they choose to participate; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Libertarian National Committee encourages officers and members of the Libertarian Party to explore pathways for meaningful participation and representation of these tribal nations within the Libertarian Party and to explore how best to empower them and the Hawaiian Kingdom to reclaim their independence.