Indian nations opted to ignore Anglo-American influences and continued to follow customary laws and governmental systems that had existed for centuries prior to European colonization. 13 Indian sovereignty has long been recognized as being complete and exclusive in reference to matters affecting tribal members within Indian country. This position was confirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1883 when it struck down a murder conviction by the U.S. District Court of the Dakota Territory of a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, as an improper assertion of state jurisdiction in a matter over which only the tribe had authority. However, it is interesting to note that the relatively forceful recognition of Indian sovereignty in the Marshall decisions of the 1820s and 1830s had succumbed to a patronizing tone, in which members of First Nations were seen as inferior and needing to be introduced slowly to the "civilized" standards of the American government, as the justification for preventing state intrusion into tribal areas of sovereignty. Indians, it was said, were ? subject to the laws of the United States, not in the sense of citizens, but, as they had always been, as wards subject to a guardian; not as individuals, constituted members of the political community of the United States, with a voice in the selection of representatives and the framing of laws, but as a dependent community who were in a state of pupilage, advancing from the condition of a savage tribe to that of a people