Jack of Harts

The dissolution of Old California was an unfriendly slide. California had been suffering from decades of one party rule that emptied the State treasuries and dumped most of their water reserves straight into the ocean. Crops were dying in the fields and several major cities suffered from plagues thought lost to the Dark Ages. Add a combination of natural and manmade fires burning down forests the size of other States, assorted other natural disasters, or nearly weekly stories about another manmade mass casualty event or domestic terror attack, and people were comparing California to the Biblical stories about Egypt back in the time of Moses. Leaders in the big cities looked down on the country bumpkins as too deplorably stupid, racist, and backwards to have any say in how they lived. And those outside the big cities were just plain done with being told how they were going to be allowed to live. The divorce between urban and rural districts, when it happened, was not a peaceful one. And as often happens in cases like that, the suburbanites got pulled along for the slide into chaos. It was not a fun time to be a Californian.

The new Second Great Depression-era Constitution allowed local areas to formally leave the States they were part of to form their own States. They would need Federal recognition, which generally came swiftly if they had a large enough population base. The Indian Tribes of the time did not have enough population to match the requirements, in individual terms. They were certainly large enough as a whole, though, and the Indian Nations quickly joined the America Federal government as a non-contiguous Nation State with small enclaves all over America. Many have become States in their own right as their populations increased in the centuries that followed, and The Indian Nations command immense wealth and power in Jack’s day. They are certainly one of the great “State alliances” of the time, even if they never use the term State in their own internal documentation. They are Nations, and proud of it. They are simply allied with other nations to promote the common security of all.

Various Indian Tribes all over America became functionally independent during the Second Great Depression. They had long inhabited an odd grey area in the law where they were considered sovereign nations while being controlled by the Federal government. The loss of Federal cohesion resulted in the better run Indian Tribes stepping outside that grey area and taking effective control of their destiny. Most of these had successful casinos or other Indian-owned businesses that allowed them to hire tribal police forces and exert order in their sphere’s of influence. Those sphere’s often went outside their official borders, and resulted in some interesting political quandaries when the various States reformed the Federal government. Most of them were solved without bloodshed.