Indigeneity in the Courtroom

Indigeneity in the Courtroom
Author: Jennifer A. Hamilton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2008-11-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135864454

This book takes a novel approach to the question of how law shapes the contemporary lives of indigenous peoples in North America by examining property disputes, the use of indigenous justice in mainstream courts, and the use of genetic technologies to prove or disprove indigenous identities.

Indigeneity in the Courtroom

Indigeneity in the Courtroom
Author: Jennifer A. Hamilton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2008-11-14
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1135864446

The central question of this book is when and how does indigeneity in its various iterations – cultural, social, political, economic, even genetic – matter in a legal sense? Indigeneity in the Courtroom focuses on the legal deployment of indigenous difference in US and Canadian courts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Through ethnographic and historical research, Hamilton traces dimensions of indigeneity through close readings of four legal cases, each of which raises important questions about law, culture, and the production of difference. She looks at the realm of law, seeking to understand how indigeneity is legally produced and to apprehend its broader political and economic implications.

The White Possessive

The White Possessive
Author: Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2015-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452944598

The White Possessive explores the links between race, sovereignty, and possession through themes of property: owning property, being property, and becoming propertyless. Focusing on the Australian Aboriginal context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson questions current race theory in the first world and its preoccupation with foregrounding slavery and migration. The nation, she argues, is socially and culturally constructed as a white possession. Moreton-Robinson reveals how the core values of Australian national identity continue to have their roots in Britishness and colonization, built on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. Whiteness studies literature is central to Moreton-Robinson’s reasoning, and she shows how blackness works as a white epistemological tool that bolsters the social production of whiteness—displacing Indigenous sovereignties and rendering them invisible in a civil rights discourse, thereby sidestepping thorny issues of settler colonialism. Throughout this critical examination Moreton-Robinson proposes a bold new agenda for critical Indigenous studies, one that involves deeper analysis of how the prerogatives of white possession function within the role of disciplines.

Arguing with Tradition

Arguing with Tradition
Author: Justin B. Richland
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2008-09-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0226712966

Arguing with Tradition is the first book to explore language and interaction within a contemporary Native American legal system. Grounded in Justin Richland’s extensive field research on the Hopi Indian Nation of northeastern Arizona—on whose appellate court he now serves as Justice Pro Tempore—this innovative work explains how Hopi notions of tradition and culture shape and are shaped by the processes of Hopi jurisprudence. Like many indigenous legal institutions across North America, the Hopi Tribal Court was created in the image of Anglo-American-style law. But Richland shows that in recent years, Hopi jurists and litigants have called for their courts to develop a jurisprudence that better reflects Hopi culture and traditions. Providing unprecedented insights into the Hopi and English courtroom interactions through which this conflict plays out, Richland argues that tensions between the language of Anglo-style law and Hopi tradition both drive Hopi jurisprudence and make it unique. Ultimately, Richland’s analyses of the language of Hopi law offer a fresh approach to the cultural politics that influence indigenous legal and governmental practices worldwide.

Indigenous Peoples in International Law

Indigenous Peoples in International Law
Author: S. James Anaya
Publisher:
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2004
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780195173505

In this thoroughly revised and updated edition of the first book-length treatment of the subject, S. James Anaya incorporates references to all the latest treaties and recent developments in the international law of indigenous peoples. Anaya demonstrates that, while historical trends in international law largely facilitated colonization of indigenous peoples and their lands, modern international law's human rights program has been modestly responsive to indigenous peoples' aspirations to survive as distinct communities in control of their own destinies. This book provides a theoretically grounded and practically oriented synthesis of the historical, contemporary and emerging international law related to indigenous peoples. It will be of great interest to scholars and lawyers in international law and human rights, as well as to those interested in the dynamics of indigenous and ethnic identity.

Early California Laws and Policies Related to California Indians

Early California Laws and Policies Related to California Indians
Author: Kimberly Johnston-Dodds
Publisher: California Research Bureau
Total Pages: 60
Release: 2002
Genre: Law
ISBN:

Created by the California Research Bureau at the request of Senator John L. Burton, this Web-site is a PDF document on early California laws and policies related to the Indians of the state and focuses on the years 1850-1861. Visitors are invited to explore such topics as loss of lands and cultures, the governors and the militia, reports on the Mendocino War, absence of legal rights, and vagrancy and punishment.

The Land is Our History

The Land is Our History
Author: Miranda C. L. Johnson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190600063

This book chronicles the extraordinary story of indigenous activism in the late twentieth century. Taking their claims for justice to law, indigenous peoples transformed debates about national identity and reframed the terms of belonging in settler states. - from the back cover.

Where the River Ends

Where the River Ends
Author: Shaylih Muehlmann
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2013-05-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822354454

Living in the northwest of Mexico, the Cucapá people have relied on fishing as a means of subsistence for generations, but in the last several decades, that practice has been curtailed by water scarcity and government restrictions. The Colorado River once met the Gulf of California near the village where Shaylih Muehlmann conducted ethnographic research, but now, as a result of a treaty, 90 percent of the water from the Colorado is diverted before it reaches Mexico. The remaining water is increasingly directed to the manufacturing industry in Tijuana and Mexicali. Since 1993, the Mexican government has denied the Cucapá people fishing rights on environmental grounds. While the Cucapá have continued to fish in the Gulf of California, federal inspectors and the Mexican military are pressuring them to stop. The government maintains that the Cucapá are not sufficiently "indigenous" to warrant preferred fishing rights. Like many indigenous people in Mexico, most Cucapá people no longer speak their indigenous language; they are highly integrated into nonindigenous social networks. Where the River Ends is a moving look at how the Cucapá people have experienced and responded to the diversion of the Colorado River and the Mexican state's attempts to regulate the environmental crisis that followed.

Hawaiian Blood

Hawaiian Blood
Author: J. Kehaulani Kauanui
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2008-11-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 082239149X

In the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (HHCA) of 1921, the U.S. Congress defined “native Hawaiians” as those people “with at least one-half blood quantum of individuals inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands prior to 1778.” This “blood logic” has since become an entrenched part of the legal system in Hawai‘i. Hawaiian Blood is the first comprehensive history and analysis of this federal law that equates Hawaiian cultural identity with a quantifiable amount of blood. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui explains how blood quantum classification emerged as a way to undermine Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) sovereignty. Within the framework of the 50-percent rule, intermarriage “dilutes” the number of state-recognized Native Hawaiians. Thus, rather than support Native claims to the Hawaiian islands, blood quantum reduces Hawaiians to a racial minority, reinforcing a system of white racial privilege bound to property ownership. Kauanui provides an impassioned assessment of how the arbitrary correlation of ancestry and race imposed by the U.S. government on the indigenous people of Hawai‘i has had far-reaching legal and cultural effects. With the HHCA, the federal government explicitly limited the number of Hawaiians included in land provisions, and it recast Hawaiians’ land claims in terms of colonial welfare rather than collective entitlement. Moreover, the exclusionary logic of blood quantum has profoundly affected cultural definitions of indigeneity by undermining more inclusive Kanaka Maoli notions of kinship and belonging. Kauanui also addresses the ongoing significance of the 50-percent rule: Its criteria underlie recent court decisions that have subverted the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and brought to the fore charged questions about who counts as Hawaiian.

Indigeneity: Before and Beyond the Law

Indigeneity: Before and Beyond the Law
Author: Kathleen Birrell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2016-07-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1317644816

Examining contested notions of indigeneity, and the positioning of the Indigenous subject before and beyond the law, this book focuses upon the animation of indigeneities within textual imaginaries, both literary and juridical. Engaging the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin, as well as other continental philosophy and critical legal theory, the book uniquely addresses the troubled juxtaposition of law and justice in the context of Indigenous legal claims and literary expressions, discourses of rights and recognition, postcolonialism and resistance in settler nation states, and the mutually constitutive relation between law and literature. Ultimately, the book suggests no less than a literary revolution, and the reassertion of Indigenous Law. To date, the oppressive specificity with which Indigenous peoples have been defined in international and domestic law has not been subject to the scrutiny undertaken in this book. As an interdisciplinary engagement with a variety of scholarly approaches, this book will appeal to a broad variety of legal and humanist scholars concerned with the intersections between Indigenous peoples and law, including those engaged in critical legal studies and legal philosophy, sociolegal studies, human rights and native title law.