½ Dollar

The Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel, a federally recognized tribe in San Diego County, issued this piece under the same legal authority that has allowed dozens of tribal nations to produce coins since the Native American Bank Note and Coin Act interpretations of the 1990s and 2000s — a largely unexamined area of monetary law that hinges on tribal sovereignty rather than federal mint authorization. Most of these issues saw negligible circulation and were produced primarily for the collector market by private mints under contract.