Some Native American tribes have had difficulty establishing their land claims because the United States government did not recognize their status as tribes; therefore during the 1970's some Native Americans attempted to obtain such recognition through the medium of U.S. courts. In presenting these suits, Native Americans had to operate within a perceptions and definitions that can exist between cultures whose systems of discourse are sometimes at variance.
In one instance, the entire legal dispute turned on whether the suing community—a group of Mashpee Wampanoag in the town of Mashpee, Massachusetts—constituted a tribe. The area had long been occupied by the Mashpee, who continued to have control over land use after the town's incorporation. But in the 1960's after an ruling: a body of Native Americans "governing themselves under one leadership and inhabiting a particular territory."
The town claimed that the Mashpee were not self-governing and that they had no defined territory: the Mashpee could legally be self-governing, the town argued, only if they could show written documentation of such a system, and could legally inhabit territory only if they had precisely delineated its boundaries and possessed a discourse between cultures can sometimes stand in the way of guaranteeing the fairness of legal decisions.
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