When States' Attorneys General Write Books on Native American Law: A Case Study of Spaeth's "American Indian Law Deskbook"

1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 229
Author(s):  
Paul E. Lawson
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela R. RIley ◽  
Kristen Carpenter

We appreciate the opportunity to participate in this symposium, convened to examine Professor Wenona Singel's article, Indian Tribes and Human Rights Accountability. Amongst her many professional accomplishments, Professor Singel is well known as a scholar in American Indian law, the Chief Justice of an active tribal appellate court, and a Reporter on the American Law Institute's Restatement of American Indian Law. Her influence, therefore, is felt and respected throughout the academy, the practicing bar, and Indian country. At an early stage of her career, Professor Singel is already recognized as a thought-leader, someone who is both brave and careful in her willingness to articulate and address some of the most trenchant challenges in American Indian law. Professor Singel's newest article is perhaps the most evocative example of her intellectual and community leadership. Her observation that Indian tribes could, on occasion, do better in extending civil and human rights to citizens, employees, and residents in Indian country, is strikingly forthright. And her resulting proposal-advocating for the creation of an intertribal, treaty-based mechanism to adjudicate human rights disputes-is deeply respectful of tribal sovereignty, calling on tribes to take the first steps toward increased accountability and to turn to their own laws and norms as a basis for improving their systems of governance. And, finally, her proposal is notably provocative, having inspired passionate conversations at major gatherings of tribal leaders and scholars across the country, and a lively, focused discussion among Indian law scholars, lawyers, and leaders at the symposium on October 4-5, 2012. In this spirit, and on the occasion of this symposium, we are prompted first to situate Indian Tribes and Human Rights Accountability in the larger body of Professor Singel's scholarship to date, and second to describe the way in which she has inspired us to embark on a new research project of our own.Published in: 2013 Michigan State Law Review 293 (2013)


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Weiss ◽  
James W. Springer

Engaging a longstanding controversy important to archaeologists and indigenous communities, Repatriation and Erasing the Past takes a critical look at laws that mandate the return of human remains from museums and laboratories to ancestral burial grounds. Anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss and attorney James Springer offer scientific and legal perspectives on the way repatriation laws impact research. Weiss discusses how anthropologists draw conclusions about past peoples through their study of skeletons and mummies and argues that continued curation of human remains is important. Springer reviews American Indian law and how it helped to shape laws such as NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act). He provides detailed analyses of cases including the Kennewick Man and the Havasupai genetics lawsuits. Together, Weiss and Springer critique repatriation laws and support the view that anthropologists should prioritize scientific research over other perspectives.


2020 ◽  
pp. 196-223
Author(s):  
Michael D. McNally

This chapter discusses repatriation law and a cluster of legal cases involving possession of ceremonial eagle feathers, where courts have consistently affirmed the collective contours of Native religions. Courts have upheld an exemption to the criminal penalties for feather possession tailored to members of federally recognized tribes against legal challenges by individual practitioners of Native religions who are not members of those tribes. These cases illustrate well the difficulties and the possibilities of religion as a category encompassing collective Native traditions. The coalition that persuaded Congress in 1994 to pass the Peyote Amendment to AIRFA was successful in part because it was largely the same circle of advocates, lawyers, tribal spiritual and political leaders, and allies who had recently won congressional passage of two repatriation statutes: the National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAI) in 1989 and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) the next year. The chapter thus tells the story of Native-led efforts to secure these two laws and offers an interpretation of them not as religious freedom laws, but primarily as additions to federal Indian law that encompass religious and cultural heritage.


1994 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 225
Author(s):  
David H. Getches ◽  
Nicholas J. Spaeth ◽  
Julie Wrend ◽  
Clay Smith

Nordlit ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Virginia Castor

In a novel critics have described as a "thriller-like" coming-of-age story, Louise Erdrich's The Round House (2012) integrates two apparently conflicting approaches to Native American law. First, Felix S. Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law legitimizes the need for working with allies to Indigenous peoples in developing contextual applications of settler state laws. The second draws on the authority of authorless Anishinaabe stories and dreams. While Cohen and his descendants in tribal law practice are allies to the Anishinabeg, dream narrations by the narrator's grandfather affirm the contemporary vitality of Anishinaabe approaches to justice. Finally, Erdrich's narration suggests why restorative justice for women in Indigenous communities in the United States should matter for her international audience.


Linguaculture ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Cornelia Vlaicu

This paper looks at Ojibwe writer Louise Erdrich’s National Book Award-winning The Round House as a novel that mixes and reworks genres from a Native American perspective to narrativize the “(post)colonial” (Cheyfitz) status of contemporary American Indian nations. An autobiographical story that can be read as a “postcolonial Bildungsroman” (Nayar), The Round House uses crime fiction as a pretext for writing Indian sovereignty. The legal is fully involved in the construction of the Indian colonized subject. Erdrich’s novel can be read as a confession to “a wrong thing that serves an ideal justice” (RH 306). The main character’s statement that “[t]he sentence was to endure” (RH 317) can be understood both in terms of his admitted moral guilt, and as a proclamation of “survivance” (G. Vizenor). The paper approaches the novel in light of the inseparability of U.S. federal Indian law and American Indian literature (Cheyfitz). My reading relies on Lyotard’s “différend” and on Agamben’s “state of exception” to discuss the plot and its dénouement as Erdrich’s way to wage a contemporary “Indian war” (E. Cook-Lynn).


2019 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Nicolas G. Rosenthal

A vibrant American Indian art scene developed in California from the 1960s to the 1980s, with links to a broader indigenous arts movement. Native American artists working in the state produced and exhibited paintings, prints, sculptures, mixed media, and other art forms that validated and documented their cultures, interpreted their history, asserted their survival, and explored their experiences in modern society. Building on recent scholarship that examines American Indian migration, urbanization, and activism in the twentieth century, this article charts these developments and argues that American Indian artists in California challenged and rewrote dominant historical narratives by foregrounding Native American perspectives in their work.


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