How recognition may empower or restrain Native American mobilization has not received sufficient scholarly attention and remains largely unexplored and under-theorized. This paper contributes a partial remedy to this oversight by explicitly theorizing how political recognition can mediate Native American collective action and lead to differential mobilizational outcomes. In this paper I build on and add nuances to the models of indigenous mobilization offered by Joane Nagel and Stephen Cornell and contribute to the broader literature on tribal acknowledgement by theorizing tribal status as a factor in Native American mobilization. (Contains 2 tables and 44 notes.)