Native American Women in the Modern United States

In the years following the US Civil War, the federal government implemented a campaign to assimilate Native peoples into an expanding American nation and a modernizing American society. As policymakers and social reformers understood it, assimilation required a transformation in Native gender roles, and as a result, Native American women were the targets of several assimilationist initiatives. Native women navigated federal interventions strategically, embracing what was useful, accommodating what was necessary, and discarding what was not. As mothers, grandmothers, and healers, women provided stability for families and communities enduring disruption and coerced change. In the 20th century, Native women embraced new economic and political roles even as they adapted long-standing customs. Many began working for wages; although often confined to menial labor such as domestic service in other women’s homes, growing numbers of Native women also pursued white-collar occupations in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and later in tribal governments. As tribal governance evolved over the course of the century, some women obtained positions on tribal councils and tribal courts. Native women have also made intellectual contributions—as tribal members and ultimately as American citizens—to modern understandings of democracy, citizenship, sovereignty, and feminism. Since the late 20th century, Native women have been at the forefront of movements to revitalize Indigenous languages and cultures.

Role of Government Interest Sarereiket Hold in Village in District Madobag Mentawai Islands

The problem in this study is How the Sarereiket Tribe Role in organizing Government in the Village of Madobag Mentawai Islands District. The purpose of this study was to determine the Role of the Sarereiket Tribe in organizing Government in Madobag Village, Mentawai Islands Regency. This study uses qualitative and descriptive methods. In this study, the population is Madobag village apparatus, village representative body (BPD), hamlets, tribal organizations, community shops and Madobag village community environment. The sample in this study is Madobag village apparatus six people, one village representative body (BPD), three hamlet heads, two community shops and two people in the Madobag village environment. with purposive sampling technique. Based on the results of this study it is suggested that to realize good leadership at the village level, the village head must play a greater role in every village administration activity that concerns the public interest and is clearer in making decisions and being fair and being consistent in carrying out decisions especially in Sarereiket tribal governance in the village of Madobag.

RURAL DEVELOPMENT, ROYAL HISTORY, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR AUTHORITY IN EARLY APARTHEID ZULULAND (1951–4)

From 1951, apartheid officials sought to implement soil rehabilitation programs in Nongoma, the home district of Zulu Paramount Chief Cyprian Bhekuzulu. This article argues that these programs brought to the surface fundamental questions about political authority in South Africa's hinterland during the first years of apartheid. These questions arose from ambiguities within native policy immediately after the passage of the 1951 Bantu Authorities Act: while the power of chiefs during the colonial and segregationist era in Zululand had been tied to their control of native reserve land, in Nongoma, these development interventions threatened that prerogative at the very moment apartheid policy sought to strengthen ‘tribal’ governance. In response, the Zulu royal family in Nongoma called on treaties with the British from the conquest era, colonial law, and the very language of apartheid to reassert chiefly control over land, and more importantly, to negotiate this new apartheid political order.

The Constitution

Chapter seven details the adoption of the superintendent’s constitution, the various groups vying for power at the time, and the community’s reaction and decision on the Indian Reorganization Act. By the early 1930’s the people of Turtle Mountain had been pursuing a claim against the federal government for decades. At the end of the Allotment Era, the federal government presented the community with a constitution that functioned less a governing document and more a tool to perpetuate control over tribal governance through the federal government. While many in the community recognized the deficiencies in the proposed constitution they nonetheless were led to believe that the constitution was a mandatory step toward a claim. Choosing the claim more than the constitution itself, Turtle Mountain ratified the proposed document. When the Indian Reorganization Act presented an alternative, the people of Turtle Mountain rejected it in fear of the consequences for the claim.

Claiming Turtle Mountain's Constitution

Claiming Turtle Mountain’s Constitution examines the formation and adoption of the first constitution of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians through the eyes of the tribal members who voted to adopt it. Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this work of legal and social history describes the seminal moment in which the people of Turtle Mountain chose their constitution as a means to accomplish a much larger political goal: beginning a lawsuit against the federal government. By decentering the federal government, the federal actors of the time, and federal legislation such as the Indian Reorganization Act, Claiming Turtle Mountain’s Constitution reorients the tribal citizens who made this important decision at the heart of their own governance and legal, political, and social history. The Plains Ojibwe and Métis who merged together – within the vise of settler colonialism – to become the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians were distressed at the federal government’s disruption of their leadership structure, their treaty, and their reservation and for decades sought a lawsuit against the federal government to rectify these wrongs. The tribal nation adopted a constitution in 1932 that many recognized as deficient and limiting in the hopes that it would lead toward a lawsuit. Tribal citizens have lived with the consequences of this difficult choice ever since. Claiming Turtle Mountain’s Constitution argues that understanding the origins of tribal constitutions from the tribal nation’s perspective is crucial to understanding both historical and contemporary tribal governance and American constitutionalism more broadly.