The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History presents the story of the indigenous peoples who lived-and live-in the territory that became the United States. It describes the major aspects of the historical change that occurred over the past 500 years with essays by leading experts, both Native and non-Native, that focus on significant moments of upheaval and change.
On the night of 16 October 1892, a double homicide occurred on Otay Mesa in San Diego County near the Mexican border. The two victims were an elderly couple, John and Wilhelmina Geyser, who lived on a farm on the edge of the mesa. Within minutes of discovering the crime, neighbors subdued and tied up the alleged killer, Josä Gabriel, a sixty-year-old itinerant Native American handyman from El Rosario, California, who worked for the couple. Since Gabriel was apprehended at the scene, most presumed his guilt. The local press, prosecutors, witnesses, and jurors called him by the epithet ?Indian Joe.? ø The sensational murder trial of Gabriel highlights the legal injustices committed against Native Americans in the nineteenth century. During this time, California Native Americans could not vote or serve on juries, so from the outset Gabriel was unlikely to receive a fair trial. No motive for murder was established, and the evidence against Gabriel was inconclusive. Nonetheless, the case went forward. Drawing on court testimony and newspaper accounts, Clare V. McKanna Jr. traces the murder trial: the handling of the case by the prosecution, the defense, the jury, and the judge; an examination of the crime scene; and the imaging of ?Indian Joe.? Through his considerable research, McKanna sheds light on a dark time in the American legal system.
In Indian Justice, Grant Foreman presents John Howard Payne’s first-hand account of the trial of Archilla Smith, a Cherokee charged with the murder of John MacIntosh in the fall of 1839. The Cherokee Supreme Court at Tahlequah (in present-day Oklahoma) found Smith guilty and sentenced him to die. Occurring immediately after the Cherokee Removal to west of the Mississippi River, the trial involved people on both sides of the bitter factional controversies then raging in the Cherokee nation. Payne’s account of this important Indian case first appeared in two installments in the New York Journal of Commerce in 1841. In his foreword to this new edition, Rennard Strickland places the case in historical and contemporary context, exploring the evolution of tribal court systems and Indian justice over the past century and a half.
A survey of Native American tribal law and its place within the framework of the U.S. Constitution from colonial times to today's headlines. Using five major court cases, Native American Sovereignty on Trial examines American Indian tribal governments and how they relate to federal and state governments under the U.S. Constitution. From the foundational U.S. Supreme Court opinions of the 1830s, to the California State Gaming Propositions of 1998 and 2000, the impact and legacy of these court cases are fully explored. The actual text of key treaties, court decisions, and other legal documents pertaining to the five tribal controversies are featured and analyzed. Clearly presented, this in depth review of essential legal issues makes even the most difficult and complex judicial doctrines easy to understand by students and nonlawyers. This concise volume tracing the evolution of Native American sovereignty will supplement coursework in law, political science, U.S. history, and American Indian studies.
Drawing from forty-five years of experience, E. Richard Hart elucidates the use of history as expert testimony in American Indian tribal litigation. Such lawsuits deal with aboriginal territory; hunting, fishing, and plant gathering rights; reservation boundaries; water rights; federal recognition; and other questions that have a historical basis. The methodology necessary to assemble successful expert testimony for tribes is complex and demanding and the legal cases have serious implications for many thousands of people, perhaps for generations. Hart, a historian who has testified in cases that have resulted in roughly a billion dollars in judgments, uses specific cases to explain at length what kind of historical research and documentation is necessary for tribes seeking to protect and claim their rights under United States law. He demonstrates the legal questions that Native Americans face by exploring the cultural history and legal struggles of six Indian nations. He recounts how these were addressed by expert testimony grounded in thorough historical understanding, research, and argumentation. The case studies focus on the Wenatchi, Coeur d'Alene, Hualapai, Amah Mutsun, Klamath, and Zuni peoples but address issues relevant to many American tribes.
"Drawing from forty-five years of experience, E. Richard Hart elucidates the use of history as expert testimony in American Indian tribal litigation. Such lawsuits deal with aboriginal territory; hunting, fishing, and plant gathering rights; reservation boundaries; water rights; federal recognition; and other questions that have a historical basis. The methodology necessary to assemble successful expert testimony for tribes is complex and demanding and the legal cases have serious implications for many thousands of people, perhaps for generations. Hart, a historian who has testified in cases that have resulted in roughly a billion dollars in judgments, uses specific cases to explain at length what kind of historical research and documentation is necessary for tribes seeking to protect and claim their rights under United States law. He demonstrates the legal questions that Native Americans face by exploring the cultural history and legal struggles of six Indian nations. He recounts how these were addressed by expert testimony, grounded in thorough historical understanding, research, and argumentation. The case studies focus on the Wenatchi, Coeur d'Alene, Hualapai, Amah Mutsun, Klamath, and Zuni peoples but address issues relevant to many American tribes"--
Robert A. Williams Jr. boldly exposes the ongoing legal force of the racist language directed at Indians in American society. Fueled by well-known negative racial stereotypes of Indian savagery and cultural inferiority, this language, Williams contends, has functioned “like a loaded weapon” in the Supreme Court’s Indian law decisions. Beginning with Chief Justice John Marshall’s foundational opinions in the early nineteenth century and continuing today in the judgments of the Rehnquist Court, Williams shows how undeniably racist language and precedent are still used in Indian law to justify the denial of important rights of property, self-government, and cultural survival to Indians. Building on the insights of Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, and Frantz Fanon, Williams argues that racist language has been employed by the courts to legalize a uniquely American form of racial dictatorship over Indian tribes by the U.S. government. Williams concludes with a revolutionary proposal for reimagining the rights of American Indians in international law, as well as strategies for compelling the current Supreme Court to confront the racist origins of Indian law and for challenging bigoted ways of talking, thinking, and writing about American Indians. Robert A. Williams Jr. is professor of law and American Indian studies at the James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona. A member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe, he is author of The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest and coauthor of Federal Indian Law.
Exploring the history of contemporary legal thought on the rights and status of the West's colonized indigenous tribal peoples, Williams here traces the development of the themes that justified and impelled Spanish, English, and American conquests of the New World.
The harrowing story of a Native American man’s tragic loss of land and family, and his heroic journey to reclaim his humanity. In 1877, Chief Standing Bear’s Ponca Indian tribe was forcibly removed from their Nebraska homeland and marched to what was then known as Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), in what became the tribe’s own Trail of Tears. A third of the tribe died on the grueling march, including Standing Bear’s only son. “I Am a Man” chronicles what happened when Standing Bear set off on a six-hundred-mile walk to return the body of his son’s body to the Ponca’s traditional burial ground. It chronicles his efforts to reclaim his land and rights, culminating in his successful use of habeas corpus to gain access to the courts and secure his freedoms. This is a story of survival that explores fundamental issues of citizenship, constitutional protection, and the nature of democracy. Joe Starita’s well-researched and insightful account bring this vital piece of American history brilliantly to life.
