Here is the announcement for our spring speaker series.
Fiction
American Indian Law Review to Publish Papers from MSU Conference “American Indian Law and Literature”
Here is a listing of the articles to be published in volume 33, no. 1:
- From Hatuey to Che: Indigenous Cuba Without Indians and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – Larry Catá Backer
- “Channeling Thought”: The Legacy of Legal Fictions from 1823 – Jen Camden & Kathryn E. Fort
- Interpretive Sovereignty: A Research Agenda – Kristen A. Carpenter
- Crossover – Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic
- Red Leaves and the Dirty Ground: The Cannibalism of Law and Economics – Matthew L.M. Fletcher
- Genealogy as Continuity: Explaining the Growing Tribal Preference for Descent Rules in Membership Governance in the United States – Kirsty Gover
- Writing the Living Law: American Indian Literature as Legal Narrative – Amelia V. Katanski
- How Lawyers Resolve Ethical Dilemmas: An Essay on James Welch’s The Indian Lawyer – Renee Newman Knake
- Narrative Braids: Performing Racial Literacy – Margaret Montoya & Christine Zuni Cruz, interviewed by Gene Grant
- At the Edge of Indian Law Scholarship: A Poem Instead of a Footnote – Frank Pommersheim
Review of Louise Erdrich’s Collection of Short Stories
Here is the review of “The Red Convertible” — from the NYTs:
Last fall, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the group that hands out the Nobel Prize in Literature, disparaged American letters, saying our fiction was “too isolated, too insular” and “too sensitive to trends” in our own “mass culture” (in short, too American) to matter much to the wider world. But it’s the very Americanness of our literature — the hybrid nature of our national makeup, the variety and breadth of our landscape, our mania for self-invention and reinvention — that captured the international imagination at a time when most readers could never visit the country they dreamed about. It still does today.
Activist Judge Cancels Christmas
An oldie but goodie from the Onion:
WASHINGTON, DC—In a sudden and unexpected blow to the Americans working to protect the holiday, liberal U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt ruled the private celebration of Christmas unconstitutional Monday.
Supreme Court Upholds Bill of Rights 5-4
From the Onion:
WASHINGTON—In a landmark decision Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly ruled to uphold the Bill of Rights, the very tenets upon which American society is based. “After carefully considering the relevance of the 10 inviolable rights that comprise the ideological foundation on which our nation is built, the court finds that these basic freedoms remain important for the time being, and should not be overturned,” read the majority opinion authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who cast the tie-breaking vote. “Until such time as it can be definitively proven that citizens no longer require the protections provided by the Bill of Rights, it shall remain the principal legal guidance for the United States of America.” The Supreme Court’s latest decision comes on the heels of last month’s 6-3 ruling to abolish the pursuit of happiness from the three inalienable rights guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence.
Fascinating Writers: Louise Erdrich
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.
David Sedaris on Undecided Voters
An excerpt from the New Yorker:
I don’t know that it was always this way, but, for as long as I can remember, just as we move into the final weeks of the Presidential campaign the focus shifts to the undecided voters. “Who are they?” the news anchors ask. “And how might they determine the outcome of this election?”
Then you’ll see this man or woman— someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. “Well, Charlie,” they say, “I’ve gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I just can’t seem to make up my mind!” Some insist that there’s very little difference between candidate A and candidate B. Others claim that they’re with A on defense and health care but are leaning toward B when it comes to the economy.
I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?
Short Fiction: “Truck Stop” Now Available
Here is my short story (available in final form at BEPRESS), published in the UMKC Law Review as part of their Law Stories series, with the following abstract:
Every American Indian person — repeat, every American Indian person — is related to or knows someone or is someone who has been adopted out of or removed from their reservation family. A significant percentage of each recent generation of American Indian people has grown up among strangers, either adopted by non-reservation families or force-fed through a state foster care system. This is, of course, one of the fundamental issues Congress hoped to address when it enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. This fictional narrative is my take on what it means for an Indian person to lose their family — and to regain it much, much later.
What Margaret Wente Wrote Was Really Dumb — and also not true
In a recent column in Canada’s Globe and Mail titled, “What Dick Pound said was really dumb – and also true”, Margaret Wente submits a high profile critisism of Aboriginal socio-cultural systems, first nations politics and aboriginal knowledge systems. With this article, Wente dives 1000 leagues below the “savage” comments made by Dick Pound. Her conclusions are poorly founded, contradictory, and backward-ic. Yet, if you read the online discussion at the Globe and Mail that has followed her column, you’ll see (not surprisingly) there are many people who agree with her views. The column is an example of poorly researched provocateur journalism; yet, as has occurred with similar publications in the past, we can expect it to have a long shelf life and misinform scores of people.
“American Indian Education” Reading and Signing — Saturday 1-3 PM
On October 25, I will be reading from and discussing my book, “American Indian Education: Counternarratives in Racism, Struggle, and the Law,” at Everybody Reads bookstore, located at 2019 Michigan Avenue, Lansing, Michigan.
The website for the reading is here. And the link to the my book page is here.
Turtle Talk 
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