Federal Indian Law

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Bruce Duthu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Executive Orders ◽  
Federal Indian Law ◽  
Dominant Society ◽  
Indian Tribes ◽  
Formal Relations ◽  
Indian Law ◽  
The U.S

United States law recognizes American Indian tribes as distinct political bodies with powers of self-government. Their status as sovereign entities predates the formation of the United States and they are enumerated in the U.S. Constitution as among the subjects (along with foreign nations and the several states) with whom Congress may engage in formal relations. And yet, despite this long-standing recognition, federal Indian law remains curiously ambivalent, even conflicted, about the legal and political status of Indian tribes within the U.S. constitutional structure. On the one hand, tribes are recognized as sovereign bodies with powers of self-government within their lands. On the other, long-standing precedents of the Supreme Court maintain that Congress possesses plenary power over Indian tribes, with authority to modify or even eliminate their powers of self-government. These two propositions are in tension with one another and are at the root of the challenges faced by political leaders and academics alike in trying to understand and accommodate the tribal rights to self-government. The body of laws that make up the field of federal Indian law include select provisions of the U.S. Constitution (notably the so-called Indian Commerce Clause), treaties between the United States and various Indian tribes, congressional statutes, executive orders, regulations, and a complex and rich body of court decisions dating back to the nation’s formative years. The noted legal scholar Felix Cohen brought much-needed coherence and order to this legal landscape in the 1940s when he led a team of scholars within the Office of the Solicitor in the Department of the Interior to produce a handbook on federal Indian law. The revised edition of Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law is still regarded as the seminal treatise in the field. Critically, however, this rich body of law only hints at the real story in federal Indian law. The laws themselves serve as historical and moral markers in the ongoing clash between indigenous and nonindigenous societies and cultures still seeking to establish systems of peaceful coexistence in shared territories. It is a story about the limits of legal pluralism and the willingness of a dominant society and nation to acknowledge and honor its promises to the first inhabitants and first sovereigns.

Federal Indian Law

Anthropology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Killsback
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
American Indians ◽  
The United States ◽  
Federal Indian Law ◽  
Chief Justice ◽  
Indian Tribes ◽  
Indian Law

Federal Indian law (FIL), also known as American Indian law, is the body of doctrine that regulates the political relationship between American Indian and Alaska Native governments and the federal government. FIL is best understood as the development of this “government-to-government” relationship, which intersects with other bodies of law like constitutional law, criminal law, and environmental law. FIL is comprised of legal doctrines, statutes, judicial decisions, treaties, and executive orders, all of which have direct influences on the rights and sovereignty of Indian tribes. In the United States there are 573 federally recognized tribes that are subject to the rights and privileges, as well as the consequences, of FIL. These federally recognized tribes are the third sovereign authority in the United States—the other two are states and the federal government—that retain inherent rights and that exercise and enjoy sovereignty and self-governance on their own lands. The historical development of FIL in the United States constitutes an important starting point in understanding the special relationship between Indian tribes and the federal government. The origins of FIL lay in three US Supreme Court cases known as the “Marshall trilogy,” after Chief Justice John Marshall, the presiding chief justice of Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), and Worcester v. Georgia (1832). At that time, the primary questions centered on the sovereign rights of Indian tribes, that is, whether Indians have dominion over themselves and their lands. Throughout the development of FIL, until today, questions of Indian tribal sovereignty—or Indigenous nation sovereignty—remained contentious as Indians continued to fight for treaty rights, autonomy, and self-determination. FIL can be described as a series of wins and losses for American Indians in their fight for sovereign rights. In the end, however, the study of FIL is equally the study of how the United States was able to legally subjugate America’s indigenous peoples and acquire their lands. FIL is basically the study of America’s justification for Native America’s colonization and the genocide perpetrated against American Indians. The literature on FIL or American Indian law is vast, but the most valuable resources are authored by and for attorneys and for students of law. Although the disciplines of Native American and Indigenous studies encompass facets of American Indian and Indigenous peoples’ lives, scholarship in FIL has proven to be beneficial. The resources cited in this article represent some of the widely used texts that provide a solid foundation for studies in FIL.

Policies Regarding Treatment of End-Stage Renal Disease in the United States and United Kingdom

1986 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Klein Marine ◽  
Roberta G. Simmons
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Kidney Transplantation ◽  
Renal Disease ◽  
End Stage Renal Disease ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Stage Renal Disease ◽  
End Stage ◽  
The U.S

The treatment of End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) represents a victory for medical technology. Dialysis and kidney transplantation, developed in the early 1960s, offer alternative treatments to patients whose own kidneys no longer function; before, these patients faced a terminal diagnosis. Dialysis is a mechanical treatment in which the patient is connected to a machine that cleanses the blood of impurities and returns it to the body. Although recent innovations (e.g., continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis—CAPD) facilitate patient independence from a machine, replacement of the diseased kidneys is the most desirable and least expensive treatment for many patients (33;39). Kidney transplantation remains the most effective and common type of transplantation, and a new kidney (from a living-related or cadaver donor) often dramatically improves the recipient's health and general well-being (20;39). Now, in the mid-1980s, these technologies are no longer new and innovative. Further analysis of these established but costly technologies provides a perspective on the long-range implications of innovations in patient care: while some new issues have emerged, many problems originally associated with these treatments seem to have intensified. Access to treatment remains a central issue, closely linked to the dilemma of equity versus cost. The contrast in the access provided by the United States and Great Britain is dramatic (40); in 1982, the rate of ESRD treatment within the U.S. was twice that of the U.K. (353 versus 160 patients per million) (37). The U.S. policy is basically one of unlimited access, whereas the U.K. has restricted access.

Should They Stay or Should They Go? How the 2017 U.S. Travel Ban Affects International Doctoral Students

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 440-455
Author(s):  
Corina Todoran ◽  
Claudette Peterson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Doctoral Students ◽  
Research Question ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Executive Orders ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
International Doctoral Students ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Job Prospects

In the wake of the U.S. government’s executive orders restricting travel from six Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen) in January 2017, we collected data from four focus groups consisting of international doctoral students aiming to provide insight on the following research question: How do international doctoral students make sense of the U.S. political climate on their lived experiences? This article contributes to the literature by discussing a timely issue concerning international students in the United States and points out that the 2017 travel ban has affected not only international doctoral students from those banned countries but has also alarmed students from other countries, who described the climate as stressful, confusing, and hostile. Several students changed their travel plans for conferences or family visits being worried that they might not be able to reenter the United States. Other students feared the immigration rules might suddenly change and affect their visa status. Students also expressed their concerns in regard to job prospects after graduation. This article derives from a larger qualitative study exploring the experiences of international doctoral students in the U.S. academic and cultural settings.

The Imperial Republic: A Comparison of the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898

2002 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lanny Thompson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The Body ◽  
European American ◽  
Military Government ◽  
The U.S

The doctrine of incorporation, as elaborated in legal debates and legitimated by the U.S. Supreme Court, excluded the inhabitants of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam from the body politic of the United States on the basis of their cultural differences from dominant European American culture. However, in spite of their shared legal status as unincorporated territories, the U.S. Congress established different governments that, although adaptations of continental territorial governments, were staffed largely with appointed imperial administrators. In contrast, Hawai'i, which had experienced a long period of European American settlement, received a government that followed the basic continental model of territorial government. Thus, the distinction between the incorporated and unincorporated territories corresponded to the limits of European American settlement. However, even among the unincorporated territories, cultural evaluations were important in determining the kinds of rule. The organic act for Puerto Rico provided for substantially more economic and judicial integration with the United States than did the organic act for the Phillippines. This followed from the assessment that Puerto Rico might be culturally assimilated while the Phillippines definitely could not. Moreover, religion was the criterion for determining different provincial governments within the Phillippines. In Guam, the interests of the naval station prevailed over all other considerations. There, U.S. government officials considered the local people to be hospitable and eager to accept U.S. sovereignty, while they largely ignored the local people's language, culture, and history. In Guam, a military government prevailed.

scholarly journals An autopsy of the coloniality of suicide: Modernity’s completed genocide

2021 ◽  
pp. 136345932110385
Author(s):  
Tisha X ◽  
marcela polanco
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
World System ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
The U.S

From the Latin American modernity/coloniality project, we address the inhospitality of the modern/colonial and globally designed world-system in relation to suicidality. In our vernacular Spanglish, guided by epistemological disobedience, and responding to epistemicide, we interpellate ourselves to unmask the hidden colonial structures of power of modernity’s global design on suicide knowledge. Our intent is to argue, specifically from the perspective of coloniality and our racialized, gendered, and monetized bodies, that suicide is rather an extension of modernity’s colonial genocide. From the decolonial geo and body-politics of knowledge, our discussion on modernity’s Eurocentric rhetoric on suicide departs from the materialization of suicidality in our flesh. We story experiences of our bodies with life and pleas of death, within the context of our immigrant backgrounds, and as family therapists in the United States (U.S.). We adopt autopsy as an analogy from where to advance such analysis to contest Eurocentric configurations of suicide from within, but against modernity. We emphasize the hidden racism and capitalism of suicide embedded within the persuasive Eurocentric promises of the Anglo scientific method and the U.S. American Dream. We address the concepts of epistemicide, coloniality of knowledge and of being. It is our hope to contribute to further advance decolonizing possibilities to reinscribe options that would border with the current Western knowledge on suicide. This may require other configurations of the body, knowledge, hence ways of being, doing, thinking, sensing, feeling, imagining, and dreaming to coexist among pluriversal hospitable worlds of life and death.

Native Acts, Immigrant Acts: Citizenship, Naturalization, and the Performance of Civic Identity during the Progressive Era

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Cristina Stanciu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civic Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Native People ◽  
Immigration Restriction ◽  
Federal Indian Policy ◽  
Federal Indian Law ◽  
New Immigrants ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Law

Abstract This article reveals the complicity of immigration restriction laws and federal Indian policy with organized Americanization in legislating an imagined, desirable “new American” at the beginning of the twentieth century, when resurgent nationalism threatened to restrict undesirable immigrants as it also sought to assimilate Indigenous people into a mass of Americanism. While the immigrant has figured in the U.S. national imaginary as someone who desires America, the American Indian was not desired to enter into political membership—although Native land was desired, and subsequently taken by settlers through strategies of dispossession written into federal Indian law. This essay argues that the Indian—read as an imagined category with little connection to the lives of Native people—occupies an anomalous position in the legal history of naturalization, finalized with the passing of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, at the same time that racist immigration restriction quotas also limited the entrance of new immigrants into the United States through the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. For Native people, Americanization and the imposition of citizenship were extensions of colonialism, adding one civic status over another—domestic dependent, ward, or U.S. citizen. For new immigrants hailing from southern and eastern Europe, forced by economic and cultural constraints to relocate to the United States, in contrast to their Anglo-Saxon or Nordic settler predecessors, Americanization meant a renunciation of political allegiance to other sovereigns, the acquisition of English, and civic education for citizenship. This essay challenges the myth of America as a “nation of immigrants,” and the settler colonial nation-state's ongoing infatuation with its colonial project as it continues to erase Indigenous presence and sovereignty.

An American Language

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosina Lozano
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Language Recognition ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
History Of ◽  
The U.S

An American Language is a political history of the Spanish language in the United States. The nation has always been multilingual and the Spanish language in particular has remained as an important political issue into the present. After the U.S.-Mexican War, the Spanish language became a language of politics as Spanish speakers in the U.S. Southwest used it to build territorial and state governments. In the twentieth century, Spanish became a political language where speakers and those opposed to its use clashed over what Spanish's presence in the United States meant. This book recovers this story by using evidence that includes Spanish language newspapers, letters, state and territorial session laws, and federal archives to profile the struggle and resilience of Spanish speakers who advocated for their language rights as U.S. citizens. Comparing Spanish as a language of politics and as a political language across the Southwest and noncontiguous territories provides an opportunity to measure shifts in allegiance to the nation and exposes differing forms of nationalism. Language concessions and continued use of Spanish is a measure of power. Official language recognition by federal or state officials validates Spanish speakers' claims to US citizenship. The long history of policies relating to language in the United States provides a way to measure how U.S. visions of itself have shifted due to continuous migration from Latin America. Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are crucial arbiters of Spanish language politics and their successes have broader implications on national policy and our understanding of Americans.

Palestine Unbound

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 130-134
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Task Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Tel Aviv ◽  
The Us ◽  
Intention To Move ◽  
Arab Israeli Conflict ◽  
The U.S

This section, updated regularly on the blog Palestine Square, covers popular conversations related to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict during the quarter 16 November 2017 to 15 February 2018: #JerusalemIstheCapitalofPalestine went viral after U.S. president Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and announced his intention to move the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv. The arrest of Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi for slapping an Israeli soldier also prompted a viral campaign under the hashtag #FreeAhed. A smaller campaign protested the exclusion of Palestinian human rights from the agenda of the annual Creating Change conference organized by the US-based National LGBTQ Task Force in Washington. And, UNRWA publicized its emergency funding appeal, following the decision of the United States to slash funding to the organization, with the hashtag #DignityIsPriceless.

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