Author: Kate Fort

NMAI To Put Collection Online

Kate Fort

From the Washington Post:

Going to Meet Its Public

Indian Museum Will Put Entire Collection Online

Jacqueline Trescott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 30, 2009; Page C01

Even with three locations in its empire, the National Museum of the American Indian can display barely 1 percent of its 800,000 objects. To help close that gap, the museum has decided to set up a digital showcase.

On Monday, the museum plans to launch its “Fourth Museum” to give scholars, students, teachers, cultural historians and those far away from the museum’s homes in Washington and New York the opportunity to look into its archives.

And

Researching what viewers want out of a virtual museum, the small team discovered people were curious about how the museum acquired things. “We hadn’t thought of doing a history of how we got the items. We just had brief catalogue cards,” McMullen said.

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Two Recent Indian Law Related Posts at the Legal History Blog

Kate Fort

Here are two recent Legal History Blog posts which may be of interests to readers of this blog.  Follow the links for more information about both:

Hernandez-Saenz Reviews “Empire of Laws and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico”

H-Law has published “Law and Indigenous Peoples in Seventeenth-Century Mexico,” a review by Luz Maria Hernandez-Saenz, Department of History, University of Western Ontario, of Brian Philip Owensby’s Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2008).

Soliz and Joseph on Native American Literature, Ceremony and Law

Native American Literature, Ceremony, and Law is a new essay by Cristine Soliz, Colorado State University-Pueblo, and Harold Joseph. It will appear in MLA OPTIONS FOR TEACHING LITERATURE AND LAW, Austin Sarat, Cathrine Frank, Matthew Anderson, eds., 2009. Here’s the abstract (only the abstract, not a fuller essay, is available to download on SSRN).

New Native News Blog

Kate Fort

Jodi Rave, a reporter for The Missoulian/Lee Enterprizes where she covers the Native news beat, has started blogging at The Buffalo Post.  She hopes to “share more news with readers via my blog. Otherwise, many of these news tidbits might not ever make it into the print edition.”

H/T Indianz

UVIC Law 2009 Summer Session and Indigenous Law Program

Kate Fort

The Faculty of Law, University of Victoria, will once again be offering a Summer Session of fully accredited LL.B. degree courses in Summer 2009 (May 6 to August 17). In addition to course offerings in subjects such as Evidence, Business Associations, and Civil Procedure, we are particularly delighted to announce that the 2009 Summer Session will feature a special concentration in Indigenous Law – a program that consists of three innovative courses taught on an intensive basis over 6 weeks (June 29 to August 17) and focusing on the relationship between Canadian law and the legal systems of three Indigenous Nations.

Professors for the Indigenous Law courses include:

Dr. John Borrows, F.R.S.C., Law Foundation Professor in Aboriginal Justice, UVic Law (Ojibway)

Dr. Gordon Christie, Professor, UBC Law (Inuit)

Professor Val Napoleon, Professor of Law and Native Studies, University of Alberta (Cree & Dunne’zaa)

The Indigenous Law Courses to be offered (June 29 to August 17) are:

Law 340 Indigenous Lands, Rights and Governments (1.5 units)

Law 343 A03 The Management of Interpersonal Relations in the Legal Orders of Indigenous Peoples (1.5 units)

Indigenous Elders and practitioners will also be involved in the course delivery, and there will be a special conference in Indigenous Legal Traditions during the Program on July 16-17.

These courses will provide an unparalleled insight into the relationship between Canadian law and Indigenous legal traditions that will break new ground in the field. Experience developed in the Program will be used to develop further courses and programs on Indigenous peoples’ laws within Canadian law schools.

Law students from other Canadian law schools, lawyers, and graduate students from other disciplines studying Indigenous issues are encouraged to apply and participate in this exciting Indigenous Program.

For further information please contact:

UVic Law’s Admissions Office:
Faculty of Law
University of Victoria
PO Box 2400 STN CSC,
Victoria, BC V8W 3H7

Phone: (250) 721-8151
Fax: (250) 721-6390
Email: lawadmss@uvic.ca<mailto:lawadmss@uvic.ca>

Obama Expected to Name Salazar Interior Secretary

Kate Fort

From the Washington Post this morning:

President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Chicago schools executive Arne Duncan as his education secretary at an event in the city today, transition aides said, and is expected to tap Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) later this week to serve as secretary of the interior, all but finalizing his selections for major Cabinet posts.

And from the same article:

The selection of Salazar is expected to be popular among environmental advocates but, as with Obama’s earlier Cabinet choices, would set off a political scramble: Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter (D) would appoint a replacement to complete Salazar’s term through 2010, when a potentially tough fight would follow. And the move would put a freshman, Rep. Mark Udall, who won the other Senate seat last month, in position as the state’s senior senator. Salazar’s brother, John, serves in the House and could be among those considered for the appointment to succeed him in the Senate.

Ken Salazar, who has pitched himself as a moderate throughout his political career, was elected to the Senate in 2004 after serving six years as Colorado’s attorney general. His departure for the Cabinet would leave only two Hispanics in the Senate, one of whom, Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), is retiring at the end of the next Congress.

Reuters and the Denver Post reported on this yesterday (H/T Indianz).

Meg Noori in the Freep

Kate Fort

Patricia Montemurri at The Freep profiles Meg Noori, a University of Michigan professor who teaches Anishinaabemowin.  Click through for some nice photos and an audio clip of her class.

“Izhaadaa Giizhigowaande!

Catch Margaret (Meg) Noori at any University of Michigan event and that’s how she exhorts fellow Wolverines to “Let’s Go, Blue.”

Meg, 43, is a professor of Ojibwe Language and Literature. In the classroom and at home, she seeks to celebrate and preserve a language of the American Indians who populated the Great Lakes region for several hundred years before European settlers arrived.

Using the language of her ancestors every day, says Meg, “is one of the most meaningful things I can do.”

Fascinating Writers: Louise Erdrich

Kate Fort

In Bookslut’s new feature, Fascinating Writers, Lorette C. Luzajic writes about Louise Erdrich:

The Professor’s Wife: The Life and Work of Louise Erdrich

“The beauty of Love Medicine saves us from being devastated by its power,” said Toni Morrison of Louise Erdrich’s first novel, high praise from a writer who would soon win both a Nobel and a Pulitzer prize.

The novel quickly became a bestseller and won a heap of awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the L.A. Times Best Novel of the Year, and the Janet Kaufman Award for Best First Novel. But numerous publishers rejected the stunning, unusual narrative before Erdrich’s husband posed as a literary agent and launched her prolific and revered career as one of America’s foremost voices in literature. The novel came out in 1984, the same year as Jacklight, her first poetry collection.

It’s astonishing that Oprah Winfrey hasn’t book-clubbed Ms. Erdrich, given the magnate’s penchant for women’s survival stories, multicultural writing, and great literature. More than twenty years and nearly as many books later, all highly acclaimed, it’s impossible to imagine a world without the mixed families and topsy-turvy happenings in Erdrich’s deeply original books. Part Chippewa, and part German, the writer’s stories are set in an invented landscape called Red River Valley, a reservation town on border of North Dakota and Minnesota, two states where she was raised. And despite extreme personal trials, including raising adopted children with fetal alcohol syndrome, a son’s death, her husband’s suicide, and allegations from their children of child abuse, Erdrich continues to produce works that attract both mass market and literary readerships.

MSU Law Student Accepted to NARF Summer Clerkship Program

Kate Fort

Jaimie Park, a MSU Law student 2L and NALSA member, was accepted to NARF’s summer clerkship program for the summer of 2009.  She’ll be working in the Anchorage office.

Congratulations to Jaimie!

Sports Mascots–Lenawee County Schools

Kate Fort

This is an older article from the Tecumseh Herald (I attended Tecumseh Elementary and Junior High–Tecumseh’s sports teams were called the Indians, and still are.):

Petition drive looks to Eliminate Redskins
By Tecumseh Herald
Created 10/08/2008 – 5:11pm

By MICKEY ALVARADO

A petition to change Clinton High School’s Redskins mascot has been issued to the school superintendent, Dave Pray, by Elspeth and Kylista Geiger. In a letter to the editor in the Clinton Local last week, the two Clinton residents claimed that,“The use of the mascot produces derogatory images of people that arede-humanizing to entire nations of people within this country. The redskins as a mascot is a kin to celebrating the marginalization of American Indians and promoting the belief that they are not real people but characters for our amusement.”

Both the Michigan Civil Rights Commission (2002) and the Michigan State Board of Education (2003) passed resolutions to eliminate the use of a person’s race or culture as a school’s mascot, logo and nickname. Michigan’s State Board of Education unanimously passed a resolution “strongly recommending the elimination of American Indian nicknames, mascots or logos, fight songs, insignias, antics and team descriptors by Michigan public schools.”

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Spring Speakers Series Finalized

Kate Fort

The final dates and speakers for our Spring Speakers Series has been finalized.  The Indigenous Law and Policy Center at MSU College of Law will be hosting four events this spring, and all of the details can be found at our Spring Speakers Series, 2009 page.