Here.
Book Review
Fletcher Review of John Borrows “Law’s Indigenous Ethics” in Transmotion Journal
New Issue of Transmotion Journal: Native American Narratives in a Global Context
Examples of articles and papers:
Fletcher Book Review — ” Protectors: The Indian Trust and Killers of the Flower Moon”
My review of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon has been published in the Michigan Law Review. You can download the paper here or here.
An excerpt:
Killers of the Flower Moon will be an eye-opener for those who are not aware of what it means for the United States to shirk its duties to Indian people. Osage people alive today are direct victims of the Osage Reign of Terror (pp. 280–91). Grann’s book tells an interesting story about the early days of the FBI, the development of early criminal investigation techniques, and the slow death of frontier injustice and corruption. It is a story ripe for a suspenseful and entertaining film. But Killers of the Flower Moon could be so much more. For whatever reason—be it the fame of the author, the focus on major American historical figures like J. Edgar Hoover, or the fact that the FBI is investigating the current president—Grann’s work has the attention of much of the American public. Killers of the Flower Moon should be a call to action for the United States to take its duty of protection seriously, but instead the stories of real American Indian lives are a framing mechanism for a true-crime FBI story. Indian tribes standing against the political winds that threaten the trust relationship, the duty of protection the ancestors negotiated for in the nineteenth century, deserve more. The thousands of American Indian women who suffer sexual assaults every year and the thousands of American Indian children who witness and suffer violence every year deserve much more.
Continuing thanks to Wilson Pipestem and Alex Skibine.
Reviews of Nick Estes’ “Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance”
LTBB Judge Profiled in New Book on Judging
Here is “Judges discover strength in pivotal decisions” from the National Catholic Reporter.
The article reviews the new book, “Tough Cases: Judges Tell the Stories of Some of the Hardest Decisions They’ve Ever Made.”
Fletcher Review of David Grann’s “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Here is “Failed Protectors: The Indian Trust and Killers of the Flower Moon,” forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review.
Abstract:
This Review uses Killers of the Flower Moon as a jumping off point for highlighting for readers how so many Indian people in Indian country can be so easily victimized by criminals. And yet, for however horrible the Osage Reign of Terror, the reality for too many Indian people today is much much worse. The federal government is absolutely to blame for these conditions. This Review shows how policy choices made by all three branches of the federal government have failed Indian people. Part I establishes the federal-tribal trust relationship that originated with a duty of protection. Part II establishes how the United States failure to fulfill its duties to the Osage Nation and its citizens allowed and even indirectly encouraged the Osage Reign of Terror. Part III offers thoughts on the future of the trust relationship in light of the rise of tribal self-determination. Part IV concludes the Review with a warning about how modern crime rates against Indian women and children are outrageously high in large part because of the continuing failures of the United States.
Reviews of Sherman Alexie’s New Book
Slate: “Mother-Stung”
BuzzFeed News: ‘Sherman Alexie on Not Being “The Kind of Indian That’s Expected”‘
An excerpt:
Even though he was ensconced in liberal Seattle, Alexie knew how the election would go down. “My friends were mad at me, but I knew,” he said, shaking his head. “I wasn’t shocked and I’m still not shocked. It’s total exploitation, with everything up for grabs. Health care, gone. Destroy the environment in search of more profit. State-sponsored violence. Targeted incarceration. You know what’s happening, though: The whole country is becoming a reservation.”
The Atlantic Spotlight on Photojournalist Daniella Zalcman’s “Signs of Your Identity”
Link: Erasing Indigenous Heritage by Emily Anne Epstein (Oct. 30, 2016)
Excerpt:
For nearly a century, the Canadian government took indigenous Canadians from their families and placed them in church-run boarding schools, forcibly assimilating them to Western culture. Children as young as 2 or 3 years old were taken from their homes, their language extinguished, their culture destroyed. With support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, photographer Daniella Zalcman has been documenting the lingering effects of this trauma for her book, Signs of Your Identity, this year’s winner for the FotoEvidence Book Award.
Final Commentary on TNToT: “Repeating the Mistakes of the Past in “The New Trail of Tears””
The final commentary on TNToT was published in the LA Review of Books.
An excerpt:
Riley’s real interest is to bring unfettered free markets and “property rights” to Indian country. She suggests the disestablishment of tribal land holdings as the solution to imaginary corruption, as well as to all the other problems in Indian country. In other words, corruption and mismanagement starts with sovereignty and collective property, so if we get rid of both Indians will be better off. Unsurprisingly, Riley hearkens back to the allotment policies enshrined under the Dawes Act, a federal program in the 19th century that mandated the confiscation of Indian reservations by the federal government, followed by the liquidation of those assets at pennies on the dollar of their market value and their public sale to non-Indians on the cheap. It was a state-sponsored land grab of unprecedented proportions with negative effects on Indians still felt to this day. What an odd model for a property rights advocate! Allotment meant the dispossession of 100 million acres of Indian lands from 1887–1934 and economic devastation from which most tribes have not, and maybe cannot, recover. The depredations of the Dawes Act are a major reason why federal law and policy was reoriented to protect tribal lands and sovereignty, yet Riley’s ahistorical analysis ignores all of this.
