A concise history of the law and a stout defense of tribal rights, useful to the practitioner and, ever rarer, accessible to...
Duthu (Law/Vermont Law School), a United Houma Indian Nation tribal member, examines American Indian-White relations through the prism of law and public policy.
After more than 200 years of intergovernmental relations with the states and federal government, the question of where and how the Indian tribes fit within the framework of American constitutional democracy still persists. In this latest from the Penguin Library of American Indian History series, Duthu attributes this irresolution to federal Indian law’s incorporation of a preferred creation story about nation-building and national identity and to lingering racism. Harsh charges, to be sure, but ones the author amply substantiates through his well-informed, evenhanded discussion. Citing statutes and cases, he charts the evolution of U.S. tribal law from the Marshall Court’s clear recognition of tribal sovereignty—constrained only by narrow “framework limitations,” the power to freely transact property and conduct foreign relations—through a period of unchecked congressional power over the tribes, to the current uneasy, ill-defined efforts to conduct government-to-government transactions according to negotiated agreements. His survey includes an extended discourse on the tribes’ authority over ancestral homelands and the environmental and economic progress they’ve made, an overview of the legal tension between America’s reverence for individual rights versus the Indians’ traditional elevation of group rights, and a call for greater national literacy about Indians as America’s “first sovereigns.” Notwithstanding the legacy of broken treaties, ever-shifting federal policies and popular misconceptions about, first, Indians as an inferior race, and now, Indians as a specially “favored” class, Duthu makes clear that the law can show us the way back to fair dealing. Justice begins, he argues, with a frank acknowledgment of the tribes’ constitutionally protected sovereignty, the rebuilding of tribal defenses against encroaching state authority, a revival of the treaty-making model for doing business, intelligent use of the knowledge and traditions found in Indian practice, the teachings of the Marshall Court and indigenous-rights declarations in international law.
A concise history of the law and a stout defense of tribal rights, useful to the practitioner and, ever rarer, accessible to the general reader.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-01857-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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