scholarly journals Tribal Casino Labor Relations and Settler Colonialism

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-158
Author(s):  
Theodor Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Labor Relations ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Tribal Sovereignty ◽  
Legal Basis ◽  
Federal Policies ◽  
Federal Indian Law ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Indian Law

Sovereignty provides the legal basis for tribal casinos in the United States.  However, since the industry’s rapid growth (valued at $34 billion for 2019), courts are now revisiting decades-old precedents in federal Indian law to reinterpret policies in ways that add new constraints to tribal sovereignty.  Because tribal casinos often employ large numbers of non-Native Americans, tribal casino labor relations have become a new arena for contests over the boundaries of tribal sovereignty.  This article investigates recent tribal casino labor relations court rulings (e.g. Little River, Soaring Eagle, and Pauma) through the lens of settler colonialism in order to understand new revisions to legal precedents.  It argues that settler colonialism continues to underlie federal policies and that the growth of tribal casinos reveal that the federal government may intervene to undercut tribal sovereignty.

scholarly journals Clarifying Limbo: Disentangling Indigenous Autonomy from the Mexican Constitutional Order

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Flannigan Sprague
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Tribal Sovereignty ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Indigenous Autonomy ◽  
Constitutional Order ◽  
Federal Indian Law ◽  
International Labor ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Indian Law

Abstract In contrast to U.S. Federal Indian law, which has classified indigenous tribes as “domestic dependent nations” since the early 19th century, Mexican law has only recently begun to define the political and territorial autonomy of indigenous groups. This paper contrasts the Mexican approach to this problem to that of the United States, first describing Mexico’s 2001’s constitutional reforms and their failure to clarify the nature of tribal sovereignty. It then analyzes recent court cases that protect tribal political and territorial autonomy by applying rights to consultation contained in the International Labor Organization’s Indigenous and Tribal People’s Convention 169 (“ILO 169”) and the Mexican Constitution. It concludes by arguing that in spite of this effort by the courts, Mexican law still requires a comprehensive legislative or diplomatic resolution of the lack of clarity surrounding the political and territorial autonomy of its indigenous groups.

Intolerance toward Native American Religions

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-146
Author(s):  
John Corrigan ◽  
Lynn S. Neal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Native American Religions

Settler colonialism was imbued with intolerance towards Indigenous peoples. In colonial North America brutal military force was applied to the subjection and conversion of Native Americans to Christianity. In the United States, that offense continued, joined with condemnations of Indian religious practice as savagery, or as no religion at all. The violence was legitimated by appeals to Christian scripture in which genocide was commanded by God. Forced conversion to Christianity and the outlawing of Native religious practices were central aspects of white intolerance.

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.

scholarly journals Felix Cohen and the Spanish Moment in Federal Indian Law: A Study in Law, Politics and Historiography

2008 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 419
Author(s):  
Richard P Boast
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Land Claims ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Spanish Law ◽  
Federal Indian Law ◽  
Legal Writing ◽  
Famous Paper ◽  
Indian Law

One of the best-known discussions of the historical foundations of native title law is Felix Cohen's famous paper on the Spanish Origins of Federal Indian Law, published originally in 1942 and since then reprinted many times.This article cites Cohen's paper in its political and historiographical context, paying particular attention to Cohen's role as one of the architects of the Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934, and considering also shifts in American historiography and legal writing relating to the Spanish legacy as exemplified by legal historians such as James Brown Scott and historians such as H E Bolton. This article also considers fully Cohen's analysis of the precise ways in which Spanish law penetrated the legal framework of Federal Indian Law in the United States and concludes that, as a historical discussion, Cohen's work is in need of substantial revision. In particular Cohen's arguments that Spanish law influenced federal Indian law via international law and by means of judicial consideration of old Spanish land claims seem difficult to sustain.

Race and the Origins of Plantation Slavery

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Legal Basis ◽  
The North ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Staple Crop ◽  
Academic Debate

“Twenty and odd” Africans arrived in Virginia aboard a Dutch vessel in 1619 shortly after permanent colonization of the English Americas began. There has been significant academic debate about whether the enslavement of peoples of African descent in England’s early 17th-century colonies was an inevitable or “unthinking decision” and about the nature and degree of anti-black racism during the 17th century. The legal and social status of African peoples was more flexible at first in the English colonies than it later became. Some Africans managed to escape permanent enslavement and a few Africans, such as Anthony Johnson, even owned servants of their own. There was no legal basis for enslavement in the British Americas for the first several decades of settlement and slave and servant codes emerged only gradually. Labor systems operated by custom rather than through any legal mechanisms of coercion. Most workers in the Americas experienced degrees of coercion. In the earliest years of plantation production, peoples from Africa, Europe, and the Americas often toiled alongside each other in the fields. Large numbers of Native Americans were captured and forced to work on plantations in the English Americas and many whites worked in agricultural fields as indentured and convict laborers. There were a wide variety of different kinds of coerced labor beyond enslavement in the 17th century and ideas about racial difference had yet to become as determinative as they would later be. As the staple crop plantation system matured and became entrenched on the North American mainland in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and planters required a large and regular supply of slaves, African laborers became synonymous with large-scale plantation production. The permeable boundaries between slavery and freedom disappeared, dehumanizing racism became more entrenched and U.S.-based planters developed slave codes premised on racial distinctions and legal mechanisms of coercion that were modeled on Caribbean precedents.

Native Americans: Overview

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary N. Weaver
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
First Nations ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Attitudes And Beliefs ◽  
Federal Policies ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Nations People ◽  
Women Social Workers

First Nations Peoples, the original inhabitants of what is now the United States, are diverse and growing populations. There are approximately 5.2 million First Nations Peoples within the boundaries of the United States, accounting for 1.7% of the general population (Norris, Vines, & Hoeffel, 2012). First Nations people tend to be younger, poorer, and less educated than others in the United States. The contemporary issues faced by these peoples are intimately intertwined with the history of colonization and current federal policies that perpetuate dependency and undermine self-determination. Social workers must overcome the negative history of the profession with First Nations Peoples, in particular social work involvement in extensive child removals and coercive sterilization of Indigenous women. Social workers have the power and ability to make important differences in enhancing the social and health status of First Nations Peoples, but this must begin with an awareness of their own attitudes and beliefs, as well as an awareness of how social workers have contributed to, rather than worked to alleviate, the problems of First Nations Peoples.

Religion as Collective Right

2020 ◽  
pp. 171-195
Author(s):  
Michael D. McNally
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
First Amendment ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
The United States ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Federal Indian Law ◽  
Indian Law ◽  
The One ◽  
Rhetorical Force

This chapter considers efforts to legislate Native American religious freedom in the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA, 1978). Where courts and even common sense have seen AIRFA as a religious freedom statute—as an extension of the legal protections of the First Amendment into the distinctive terrain of Native American traditions—the chapter suggests a different view. If the legal force of “religious freedom” discourse has been only dimly effective for Native sacred claims in courts, this chapter is the one that most pointedly shows how Native peoples drew on the rhetorical power of the sacred and religious freedom to win significant legislative protections specific to Native peoples. It does so through interviews with Suzan Shown Harjo. These interviews show how the remarkable legislative accomplishment of AIRFA and, later, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990), carry the rhetorical force of religious freedom into the legal shape of federal Indian law, with its recognition of treaty-based collective rights and the United States' nation-to-nation relationship with Native peoples.

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.

Apples to Oranges? The American Monumental Landscape

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Tebeau
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grassroots Activism ◽  
Public Role ◽  
American Landscape ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Choices

Abstract Grassroots activism has pushed cities across the United States to reconsider Confederate Monuments. Historians have played an important public role in those discussions. To date approximately 100 such monuments, of the more than 1500 that dot the American landscape, have been removed. The Confederate monuments debate has lent support to the work of activists challenging a wide range of objectionable monuments. For example, memorials that commemorate individuals involved in settler colonialism and the genocide of Native Americans, including monuments to U.S. Presidents, are being reassessed. A broad-based reconsideration of the monumental landscape will require hard political choices as Americans reckon with their difficult national past.

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