Indian Affairs

The five previously published volumes of Kappler's Indian Affairs, Laws and Treaties, contain treaties and statutes relating to Indian affairs enacted through the Seventy-fifth Congress in 1938. These volumes have long needed updating. Congress, by Title VII of the Act of April 11, 1968, 25 U.S.C. § 1341, authorized and directed the Secretary of the Interior to revise and extend Kappler's compilation to include all treaties, laws, executive orders and regulations relating to Indian affairs in force on September 1, 1967. The volumes now published extend the work through the Ninety-first Congress, 1970. It is anticipated that supplemental volumes will be published at intervals sufficient to keep the compilation reasonably current.

For the most part, Kappler's format has been followed in the new volumes. There are however, certain changes which should be mentioned.

In recent years, many statutes of general application, in particular those establishing federal programs, have contained special provisions for Indians or have specifically included Indians and Indian tribes within the terms of the statute. Often these acts are lengthy and are followed by numerous amendments. Little purpose would be served by publishing the original statutes and the entire text of their amendments. Therefore, the amended acts are published, in Part III, as they appear in the United States Code, 1970 edition. Edited versions of the statutes, containing the sections which specifically refer to Indians, appear in their chronological sequence in Part I. Part III, Selected Provisions of the United States Code, in no way purports to contain the authorizing statutes for all federal programs for which Indians and Indian tribes are eligible. Many such statutes do not mention Indian tribes at all but have been administratively interpreted to include them. Kappler's volumes included executive orders relating to Indian lands. In Part IV, the equivalent section of the new volumes, secretarial and departmental orders of the Department of the Interior are included in addition to executive orders. This material has been derived from the Federal Register and begins with 1936, the first year the Federal Register was published. At the end of Part IV are two tables. The first contains a list of delegations of authority by the Secretary of the Interior. The text of the delegations is included in the main body of Part IV, and the table is intended as a guide to aid in locating them. The second table lists tribal ordinances relating to the introduction, sale, or possession of intoxicating beverages in Indian country that have been published in the Federal Register pursuant to the Act of August 15, 1953, 67 Stat. 586, which authorized Indian tribes to adopt their own liquor ordinances. The ordinances themselves are not included in this compilation, but they can be located in the Federal Register through use of this table. Part V, Tables of Statutes Affected, is new. Kappler included notations of amendments, repeals, etc., in the margins of the affected statutes. Kappler's notes were quickly out-dated however, because they were current only through the publication date of the volume containing the original statute. An additional problem with the marginal notation method is that it becomes very unwieldy when one statute is amended several times. The tables in Part V attempt to overcome these limitations. They list the amendments, repeals, etc., through 1970, for the statutes compiled in Kappler, Volumes I and III through VII.

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Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, Volume 6