Red Man's Land/White Man's Law is a history of the legal status of the American Indians and their land from the period of first contact with Europeans down to the present day. It begins with the efforts of colonial authorities-Spanish, British, and French-to deal with tribal sovereignty and carries the discussion of U. S. -Indian legal relations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tribal sovereignty was eroded from the very beginning, but more recently it has emerged as a powerful force in American and Canadian law and touches upon many current legal issues, such as land allotment and land claims; definitions of Indian status; hunting, fishing, and water rights; and tribal relations with Congress, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Canadian government. First published in 1971, this second edition contains a new preface and an extensive afterword discussing important legal events and issues in the last twenty-five years, making this a complete, up-to-date survey of legal relations between the United States and the American Indian.
The last "Indian War" was fought against Native American children in the dormitories and classrooms of government boarding schools. Only by removing Indian children from their homes for extended periods of time, policymakers reasoned, could white "civilization" take root while childhood memories of "savagism" gradually faded to the point of extinction. In the words of one official: "Kill the Indian and save the man." Education for Extinction offers the first comprehensive account of this dispiriting effort. Much more than a study of federal Indian policy, this book vividly details the day-to-day experiences of Indian youth living in a "total institution" designed to reconstruct them both psychologically and culturally. The assault on identity came in many forms: the shearing off of braids, the assignment of new names, uniformed drill routines, humiliating punishments, relentless attacks on native religious beliefs, patriotic indoctrinations, suppression of tribal languages, Victorian gender rituals, football contests, and industrial training. Especially poignant is Adams's description of the ways in which students resisted or accommodated themselves to forced assimilation. Many converted to varying degrees, but others plotted escapes, committed arson, and devised ingenious strategies of passive resistance. Adams also argues that many of those who seemingly cooperated with the system were more than passive players in this drama, that the response of accommodation was not synonymous with cultural surrender. This is especially apparent in his analysis of students who returned to the reservation. He reveals the various ways in which graduates struggled to make sense of their lives and selectively drew upon their school experience in negotiating personal and tribal survival in a world increasingly dominated by white men. The discussion comes full circle when Adams reviews the government's gradual retreat from the assimilationist vision. Partly because of persistent student resistance, but also partly because of a complex and sometimes contradictory set of progressive, humanitarian, and racist motivations, policymakers did eventually come to view boarding schools less enthusiastically. Based upon extensive use of government archives, Indian and teacher autobiographies, and school newspapers, Adams's moving account is essential reading for scholars and general readers alike interested in Western history, Native American studies, American race relations, education history, and multiculturalism.
Hostis humani generis, meaning "enemy of humankind," is the legal basis by which Western societies have defined such criminals as pirates, torturers, or terrorists as beyond the pale of civilization. Sonja Schillings argues that the legal fiction designating certain persons or classes of persons as enemies of all humankind does more than characterize them as inherently hostile: it supplies a narrative basis for legitimating violence in the name of the state. The book draws attention to a century-old narrative pattern that not only underlies the legal category of enemies of the people, but more generally informs interpretations of imperial expansion, protest against structural oppression, and the transformation of institutions as "legitimate" interventions on behalf of civilized society. Schillings traces the Anglo-American interpretive history of the concept, which she sees as crucial to understanding US history, in particular with regard to the frontier, race relations, and the war on terror.
The articles in this volume trace the development of the theory that humanity forms a single world community and that there exists a body of law governing the relations among the members of that community. These ideas first appeared in the writings of the medieval canon lawyers and received their fullest development in the writings of early modern Spanish intellectuals. Conflict and contact with ’the infidel’ provided a stimulus for the elaboration of these ideas in the later Middle Ages, but major impetus was given by the English subjugation of Ireland, and by the discovery of the Americas. This body of work paved the way for the modern notions of an international legal order and universal norms of behavior usually associated with the publication of Hugo Grotius’s work in the seventeenth century.
For all its foundation on the principles of religious freedom and human equality, American history contains numerous examples of bigotry and persecution of minorities. Now, author Philip Perlmutter lays out the history of prejudice in America in a brief, compact, and readable volume. Perlmutter begins with the arrival of white Europeans, moves through the eighteenth and industrially expanding nineteenth centuries; the explosion of immigration and its attendant problems in the twentieth century; and a fifth chapter explores how prejudice (racial, religious, and ethnic) has been institutionalized in the educational systems and laws. His final chapter covers the future of minority progress.
An ethnography of urban Native Americans in the Silicon Valley that looks at the creation of social networks and community events that support tribal identities.
In 1959, the Supreme Court ushered in a new era of Indian law, which recognizes Indian tribes as permanent governments within the federal constitutional system and, on the whole, honors old promises to the Indians. Drawing together historical sources such as the records of treaty negotiations with the Indians, classic political theory on the nature of sovereignty, and anthropological studies of societal change, Wilkinson evaluates the Court's work in Indian law over the past twenty five years and considers the effects of time on law.
Native American Studies covers key issues such as the intimate relationship of culture to land; the nature of cultural exchange and conflict in the period after European contact; the unique relationship of Native communities with the United States government; the significance of language; the vitality of contemporary cultures; and the variety of Native artistic styles, from literature and poetry to painting and sculpture to performance arts.
