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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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