Book Review

NYTs Review of Sherman Alexie’s “Blasphemy”

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

Here.

An excerpt:

The most disheartening aspect of this collection is the fact that, over 20 years, the jokes themselves haven’t changed. Alexie’s narrators and protagonists still see themselves as solitary outcasts on the margins of reservation life, and it shows: we hear a great deal about vodka, meth, commodity canned beef and horn-rimmed government glasses, but nothing about the intricacies of tribal politics, struggles over natural resources or efforts to preserve indigenous cultural life. Of course, a fiction writer follows the dictates of his own imagination, not any political or cultural agenda, but that’s precisely the point: Alexie’s world is a starkly limited one, and his characters’ vision of Native America, despite their sometimes crippling nostalgia, is as self-consciously impoverished as it has ever been. What began as blasphemy could now just as easily be described as a kind of arrested development. Perhaps, willingly or not, that is the lesson he’s trying to teach us.

NYTs Review of Tim Egan’s Book on Edward Curtis

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

Here.

Louise Erdrich and TLOA in Poets & Writers Magazine

Ann Tweedy


Unfortunately the article isn’t available online, but it includes snippets of an interview with Louise Erdrich, a discussion of The Round House, and some comments by both Erdrich and Professor Bruce Duthu on the problems with the current criminal jurisdiction framework on reservations. Here’s further information about where to find it.

Book Announcement: Fred Hoxie’s “This Indian Country”

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Dr. Frederick E. Hoxie will publish his new book “This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made” on October 29, 2012 with Penguin Group as part of the Penguin History of American Life series.

Here is the book blurb (taken from the Powell’s website):

Synopsis:

A history of Indian political activism told through the inspiring stories of the men and women who defined and defended American Indian political identityIn the newest volume of the award-winning Penguin History of American Life series, Frederick E. Hoxie forms a bold counternarrative to the typical understanding of Native American history. This is not a tale of bloody and doomed battles with settlers and the U.S. Army, which casts Native Americans as mere victims of U.S. expansionism. Instead, This Indian Country describes how, for more than two hundred years, Native American political activists have petitioned courts and campaigned for public opinion, seeking redress and change from the American government.

Hoxie focuses each of his chapters on people who advanced this struggle in important ways. These figures—some famous, many unknown— hoped to bridge the distance between indigenous cultures and the republican democracy of the United States through legal and political debates. Many of these figures wielded no political power in their own time, but the cumulative product of their efforts has profoundly shaped the modern political landscape. They defined a new language of “Indian rights” and created a vision of American Indian identity. In the process, they entered into a dialogue with other activist movements, from African American civil rights movements to women’s rights and other progressive organizations.

Hoxie weaves a compelling narrative that connects the individual to the tribe, the tribe to the nation, and the nation to broader historical processes. He asks readers to think deeply about how a country based on the republican values of liberty and equality managed to adapt to the complex cultural and political demands of people who refused to be ignored. As we grapple with contemporary challenges to national institutions, from inside and outside our borders, and as we reflect on the array of shifting national and cultural identities across the globe, This Indian Country provides a context and a language for understanding our present dilemmas.

I found this book to be an engaging read but really very, very sad. The second chapter, which is about the first Indian lawyer James McDonald, a Choctaw Indian, ends in McDonald’s suicide. The fourth chapter, about Sarah Winnemucca, ended with her irrelevant and forgotten (and probably blacklisted by men, both white and Indian). The sixth chapter, on Thomas Sloane, an Omaha Indian and according to Hoxie the first American Indian to argue before the Supreme Court (Sloan v United States), won his first case but seemingly lost every one after that. Being an Indian activist didn’t seem to pay.

Many people, I imagine, will purchase this book because of the final chapter, the one on Vine Deloria, Jr. As I read the chapter, I thought Vine’s inclusion here is a little bit strange. He is well known as an Indian activist, but I imagine him more as an Indian author and intellectual. Yes, he worked for NCAI in the 1960s and then went to law school. From Dr. Hoxie’s description, Vine spent the rest of his life as an academic (although Dr. Hoxie makes a great deal of hay spelling out Vine’s criticism of Indian lawyers and academics). I know Vine did a whole lot of activist-type work (for example, he worked to get the Michigan Ottawa tribes recognized by Congress), but that work isn’t obvious here. Dr. Hoxie also pointed out Vine’s dissatisfaction with the red power movement — those guys were activists, but Hoxie makes clear Vine wasn’t with them for the most part. The chapter on Vine made me ask — what exactly is an Indian activist? Am I an activist because I write on Indian affairs? Or maybe Vine was because a bunch of non-Indians read his stuff and liked it, perhaps leading to changes to Indian policy? Reading between Dr. Hoxie’s lines, I get the sense Vine’s true activist years were the six years before the University of Arizona hired Vine in the late 1970s, when he was a “freelance writer, researcher, and consultant.” Once he joined U of A’s faculty, he enjoyed “an atmosphere of economic and political security.” Are Indian activists the ones who fail?

I really enjoyed this book. But I came away wanting to not be an Indian activist. I say that somewhat facetiously. I’m teasing but there were some pretty successful activists — those people that got Nixon to give Blue Lake back to the Taos Pueblo for one for example. The people who run PLSI for another. When’s that book coming out?

Julia GoodFox’s Review of Rob Williams’ “Savage Anxieties”

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here. An excerpt:

When the United States ceased its campaign of military assaults against what is now called Indian Country, Tribal Nations and American Indians were not exactly left alone to pick up the pieces of our communities. Instead, what transpired over the 20th Century was a metamorphosis of anti-Indianism from militarized violence and terrorism into a form of assaults that were more palatable for the contemporary Republic. The result is that for over a hundred years, then, U.S. hostilities against us have moved to a battlefield that involves the frontlines of media and popular culture, the checkpoints of education, and the minefields of legislative and other political activities. As Williams shows, these are all connected, and all have their roots in the ideas called Western Civilization. For those who are perplexed about the U.S.’s inability to “get” anti-Indianism but yet can “get” racism against African-Americans, for example—the same country that would not wear blackface or similar imagery at sports events or Halloween or Frat parties, but without batting an eye will don redface or fight to keep anti-Indian mascots—Williams’s study shows that Western Civilization has constructed itself in opposition to the fact that Indigenous Peoples. If American Indians are not recognized as the equal of non-Tribal peoples, then the mainstream U.S. believes that anti-Indianism is normal or a form of common sense. It is just a small leap from redface events to an entire system based upon the inability to recognize the political and legal rights of American Indian Tribes.  This construction has nothing to do with what genocide-deniers on our lands would call “God’s will” or “inevitable” (i.e., Manifest Destiny), but rather has everything to do with the use of culture to perpetuate the oppression of others. The results are indisputably catastrophic, except to those in ignorance or willful denial.

Harvard Law Review Profiles (and Lauds) Stephen Pevar’s Updated “Rights of Indians and Tribes”

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here. An excerpt:

In this updated edition of his landmark 1983 work, Stephen L. Pevar continues his decades-long effort to distill the intricacies of Indian law into an easy-to-understand format that will help Indian tribes vindicate their rights and their sovereignty. Mr. Pevar concisely explains important concepts in Indian law through a question-andanswer format, drawing on history, case law, legal scholarship, and sociology to explain not only what the state of Indian law is, but also why it has come to be that way, taking into account major recent developments in Indian law. While Mr. Pevar is proud of the progress Indian civil rights activists have made since the “termination era” of 1953 to 1968, which he describes in scathing terms, he also expresses fear for the future of Indian rights and sovereignty, which he views as threatened by a conservative Supreme Court and aggressive federal legislators (pp. 11–15). The book contains a number of useful maps, lists, and charts, as well as the texts of major Indian law statutes and over 130 pages of helpful footnotes. Mr. Pevar’s work will be of interest to legal scholars, historians, Indian law litigators, and Indian rights activists alike.

More details about Stephen’s book here.

Review of The Indian Civil Rights Act at Forty

Kate Fort

Here.

Together, the fifteen authors have done the essential spadework; they have tracked down scores of tribal constitutions, statutes, and case law that apply to ICRA. To the extent that numbers can convey scholarship, there are about 1,600 footnotes over about 77 pages. The sources include tribal authorities from the Navajo Nation to Bill Moore’s Slough, a settlement in Alaska. So apart from its effective analyses, the book becomes valuable just as a database. This intensive research represents a great deal of time saved for the academic and the practitioner.

All the authors who analyzed available tribal authorities cited the difficulty of generalization. This diversity is a reasonable result of possibly hundreds of different tribal courts. [*288]

Literary Scholarship on the White Earth Revised Constitution Ostensibly Drafted by Gerald Vizenor

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here are a pair of articles about a constitution drafted at White Earth by a team headed by Gerald Vizenor.

Lisa Brooks article

David Carlson article

These are from the most recent issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures. I have a book review in the same issue of Vizenor’s Native Liberty:

Fletcher review

 

Book Review of Atwood’s “Children, Tribes, and States”

Matthew L.M. Fletcher2 Comments

Here, from the Law & Politics Book Review (h/t to Legal History Blog). An excerpt:

In CHILDREN, TRIBES, AND STATES: ADOPTION AND CUSTODY CONFLICTS OVER AMERICAN INDIAN CHILDREN, Barbara Ann Atwood provides a thorough and compelling discussion of US statutory law, case law and policy, and their effects upon American Indian tribal law, policy and culture in general, and specifically their dual application to American Indian children. In this well-researched treatise, Atwood painstakingly documents and analyzes over 200 years of US federal and state child welfare policy and procedure regulating the custody placement and adoption of the American Indian child.

Professor Atwood has been publishing scholarly legal articles in the subject-matter area of American Indian family law and policy for over 20 years. Although she has included portions of her prior works in this book, the articles are in substantially revised form – this book is far from a mere “re-hash” or compilation of her prior work.

From the book’s first sentence in the “Introduction” – “When sovereigns compete to determine the interests of children, fundamental questions of power and legitimacy inevitably arise” –Atwood sets the clear tone of the book. She confirms an underlying premise that “American law should respect the distinct worldviews held by Indian tribes and their richly diverse approaches to community, family, parenting, child welfare, and adoption [which are all divergent from US norms].” Early on, Atwood states that the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 “compels respect for Native culture within the United States.” Thereby she signals her plan to provide a well-documented critique of US federal, state and American Indian tribal child welfare law and policy. From chapter to chapter, this goal is met.

 

Book Review of Laughing Whitefish

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here, from Bill Castinier [for more on People v. Hildabridle, see this — People v Hildabridle]:

John D. Voelker, former Michigan Supreme Court justice (1956-1960) and author of The New York Times bestseller Anatomy of a Murder, called his book Laughing Whitefish “the toughest job of writing I ever tackled.”

First published in 1965 and out of print for decades, Whitefish also has been one of the toughest of Voelker’s 10 books to find. Writing under his pen name, Robert Traver, Voelker wrote five novels, three books on fishing and two books of essays and short stories.

But thanks to a chance meeting between Grace Voelker Wood, one Voelker’s sisters, and a board member of the MSU Press during a celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Anatomy, a new edition of Whitefish will be published in June by the Press.

The new edition also contains an introduction written by Matthew L. M. Fletcher, associate professor of law and director of the Indigenous Law & Policy Center at Michigan State University’s College of Law, that puts the seminal historical fiction novel in context by detailing how the book was based on actual Michigan Supreme Court cases regarding Indian property rights and tribal law and customs. Fletcher is a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.

In a presentation to the Michigan Historical Society in 1970 about the novel, Voelker called the “basic story…rather simple.” He continued, “Most simply put, it was all about iron ore, Indians and infidelity to one’s promises.”

In the book, Voelker, writing as Traver, told the story of Charlotte Kawbawgam (in real life Kobogum), whose father, Marji Gesick, had been promised a “wee fractional interest” for his assistance in leading a group of businessmen to North America’s largest iron ore deposit. Problems resulted when neither Gesick nor Gesick’s heirs were compensated as promised.

Voelker told how he had learned of the fascinating story, which involves tribal customs, including polygamy, long before he wrote his blockbuster. But he had been derailed by his successful career and the amazing success of Anatomy, which was made into a movie shot on location in Marquette and Ishpeming.

Voelker said he adopted a pen name while he was a prosecuting attorney (1935-50) in Marquette. He was often quoted as saying, “I didn’t want the voters to think I was an author on company time.”

The lawyer and author had spent most of his life in the Upper Peninsula, when in 1957 he was tapped by Governor G. Mennen Williams to be a Supreme Court justice. He became noted for his literary-like decisions and dissents. His writing for the Court was also punctuated with his trademark sense of humor (if there is any doubt, read his writing inPeople vs Hildabride about police invading a nudist camp).

He later wrote that his “neglected Indian story receded even farther into the background.”

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