David E. Wilkins

David E. Wilkins, a citizen of the Lumbee Nation, is a political scientist specializing in federal Indian policy and law. He is the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professor in Leadership Studies in the University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies and professor emeritus of the University of Minnesota. He studies Indigenous politics, governance, and legal systems, with a particular focus on Native American sovereignty, self-determination, and diplomacy. Wilkins was a student and friend of Vine Deloria Jr., coauthoring two books with Deloria and producing three books about his intellectual impact.

Education and positions Wilkins attended the University of North Carolina at Pembroke (then called Pembroke State University), graduating with a B.A. degree in 1976. 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". 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. 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 pre-constitutional set of nation-to-nation agreements which are already premised on tribal sovereignty. 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. By 2013, the book had been published in four editions. was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Reviews. 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.

In 2018, Wilkins wrote 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.

In 2017, with his wife Shelly Hulse Wilkins, a policy analyst specializing in Tribal-state relations, Wilkins wrote Dismembered: Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights. and he has been described as an icon of Native American civil rights. In 2007 he was awarded the Dean's Medal from the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts,

Selected works 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 Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations, 2000 American Indian Politics and the American Political System, first edition, 2002 Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law, 2002 Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance, 2003 On the Drafting of Tribal Constitutions - Felix S. Cohen, 2006 Documents of Native American Political Development, 1500 to 1933, 2009 The Legal Universe: Observations of the Foundations of American Law, 2011 The Hank Adams Reader, 2011 Hollow Justice: A History of Indigenous Claims in the United States, 2013 Dismembered: Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights, 2017 Red Prophet: The Punishing Intellectualism of Vine Deloria, Jr., 2018 Documents of Native American Political Development, 1933 to Present, 2019 Of Living Stone: Perspectives on Continuous Knowledge and the Work of Vine Deloria, Jr., 2024 Indigenous Governance: Clans, Constitutions, and Consent, 2024