David E. Wilkins

Wilkins attended the University of North Carolina at Pembroke (then called Pembroke State University), graduating with a B.A. degree in 1976.[1] He then studied political science at the University of Arizona, where he obtained an M.A. degree with a thesis entitled An Analysis of Colonial, State, and Federal Definitions of "Indian".[1] In 1990, he earned a PhD in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[1] His PhD dissertation was called The Legal Consciousness of the United States Supreme Court: A Critical Examination of Indian Supreme Court Decisions Regarding Congressional "Plenary" Power and Tribal Sovereignty – 1870-1921.[1]

After completing his PhD, Wilkins spent a year as an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Political Science and American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona, before becoming an assistant professor there in 1991, and then an associate professor in 1997.[1] In 1999 he moved to the University of Minnesota, where he was a professor in the departments of American Indian Studies and Political Science, Law, and American Studies.[1] In 2007 he was named McKnight Presidential Professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota.[1] In 2019, he became E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professor in Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond.[1]

Wilkins has been a visiting faculty member at a number of institutions, including the Gordon Russell Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College and a visiting faculty member at Harvard University, Weber State University, and Evergreen State College.[1]

In addition to writing a number of journal articles, editing several books, and writing chapters for edited volumes, Wilkins has been the sole author of several books.

In 1987, Wilkins published his first book, called Dine' Bibeehaz'aanii: A Handbook of Navajo Government. His second book, American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice, was published in 1997. The book details a series of historical decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States that have decreased the sovereignty of Native American tribes, focusing on 15 cases spanning 170 years which he calls "particularly egregious" decisions.[2] He engages in close textual interpretation of the reasoning that the US Supreme Court invoked in these cases, arguing that the rationale behind major decisions that have diminished the sovereignty of tribes has often been based on debunked racial tropes and inaccurate history.[3] Wilkins argues that the US Supreme Court, because it takes as its starting point the US constitution, is ill-equipped to judge cases based on a preconstitutional set of nation-to-nation agreements which are already premised on tribal sovereignty.[3]

In 1999, Wilkins published the book The Navajo Political Experience.[4] The book studies the systems that have been developed and used by the Navajo Nation for a variety of legal purposes, forming a distinctive legal framework shaped both by internal factors and by interactions with the United States federal government.[5] By 2013, the book had been published in four editions.[1]

Wilkins published American Indian Politics and the American Political System in 2002. The book, which detailed historical context and contemporary issues regarding indigenous systems of governance within the United States,[6] was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Reviews.[1] He wrote a revised edition in 2007, and together with his coauthor Heidi Stark he published a third edition of the book in 2011. Stark and Wilkins also coauthored a fourth edition of the book in 2018.

In 2013, Wilkins published Hollow Justice: A History of Indigenous Claims in the United States. The book follows up on a third planned book in a series of two books written by Wilkins's mentor, Vine Deloria Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle, that the two weren't able to complete.[7] In Hollow Justice Wilkins studies the history of indigenous claims, covering topics like legal activity in the United States Court of Federal Claims and the Indian Claims Commission, the Cobell v. Salazar case, and the continuing prospects for indigenous claims.[8]

In 2018, Wilkins published the book Red Prophet: The Punishing Intellectualism of Vine Deloria, Jr. Wilkins had previously coauthored two books with Vine Deloria Jr.: Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations in 1999, and The Legal Universe: Observations on the Foundations of American Law, which was published in 2011.[1]

With K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Wilkins coauthored Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law in 2001. The book was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Reviews, and was included on a list of the 10 most influential books by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.[9] In 2017, he and Shelly H. Wilkins published Dismembered: Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights.[1]

Wilkins's work has been included on lists of important reading for topics in indigenous legal studies,[10] and he has been described as an icon of Native American civil rights.[11] In 2007 he was awarded the Dean's Medal from the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts,[1] and in 2019 he won the Daniel Elazar Distinguished Federalism Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association, which is awarded for "distinguished scholarly contributions to the study of federalism and intergovernmental relations".[12]

• Dine' Bibeehaz'aanii: A Handbook of Navajo Government, 1987
• American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice, 1997
• The Navajo Political Experience, first edition 1999
• American Indian politics and the American political system, first edition 2002
• Hollow Justice: A History of Indigenous Claims in the United States, 2013
• Red Prophet: The Punishing Intellectualism of Vine Deloria, Jr, 2018