legal history – Page 22

Legend’s Grand Opening Announcement:

Don’t miss the exciting Grand Opening of “Legends of the Grand Traverse Region: Community out of Diversity.” This celebration is on Saturday, Sept. 22nd from 4:00pm to 6:30pm at the History Center of Traverse City. Attendees will tour the brand new Legends’ Exhibit, listen to the featured speaker, and then socialize at an elegant reception featuring adult beverages and tasty hors d’oeuvres. Admission is free, although good will offerings will be requested and are always appreciated!

The speaker is Matthew L.M. Fletcher, Professor of Law and Director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University College of Law, and member of the Grand Traverse Tribe of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. He will be speaking on “The Story of the Grand Traverse Band’s Treaty Rights Fight.”

Professor Fletcher’s talk is designed to complement our fall 2012 Legend’s Exhibit. It highlights three of the “Legends” of the Traverse area: Art Duhamel of the Grand Traverse Band, well known for his stands regarding native fishing rights and federal recognition of the Grand Traverse Band; The Schaub family and their famous relative, Emelia Schaub, who was the first female prosecutor in Michigan; and Augusta Rosenthal-Thompson, who in 1884 arrived in northern Michigan as the first woman physician to practice in this area.

The Legends’ exhibit will be open through October 25th. That Thursday this fall’s Legends’ activities will close with an afternoon workshop and evening presentation by Dr. Elizabeth Faue, Professor of American History and the History of Women at Wayne State University. The afternoon workshop is on genealogy and “Lost Mothers.” The evening talk is entitled: “Barriers and Gateways: Women, Gender, and the Professions in the United States.”

Don’t miss this opening celebration of the Legends of the Grand Traverse Region. These fall 2012 Legends events are only an introduction to continuing Legends activities. Over the next several years we will celebrating more Legends: People and families from diverse backgrounds who came together to build the community we live in today. Our next three Legends will be celebrated starting in March of 2013, with more Legends being announced in Fall of 2013, Spring of 2014, and hopefully far into the future.

The History Center of Traverse City thanks the Michigan Humanities Council for its crucial support of the Legends’ project. We also thank our Legends’ partners: The Grand Traverse Genealogical Society, the Northwest Lower Michigan Women’s History Project, Congregation Beth El, the Hispanic Apostolate of the Diocese of Gaylord, the Traverse City Human Rights Commission, Professor Jim Press of Northwestern Michigan College’s History Department, and Cindy Patek of the Grand Traverse Tribe’s Eyaawing Museum and Cultural Center

Kenneth Casebeer on Subaltern Voices of the Cherokee Nation’s Trail of Tears

September 19, 2012Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Kenneth Casebeer has posted his paper, “Subaltern Voices in the Trail of Tears: Cognition and Resistance of the Cherokee Nation to Removal in Building American Empire,” on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

Empire, since publication of the book by the same name, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri has generated almost an obsession for revisionist social theorists. In this literature, the idea and history of empire is structurally dialectical – the ongoing interaction between imperialist colonizers and subordinated indigenous or subaltern populations and cultures connected with the colonized space. Included in this literature are two recent works that present a curious view of American Empire, and its relatively early and key history of removal of Eastern Native nations to west of the Mississippi. The curiosity in the book by Sean Wilentz, and an article more focused on law by Paul Frymer , is that the exceptional histories of removal they report includes the voice of none of the removed populations, the subalterns by which the imperialists are in part constructed. In this review the record is simply being documented as necessary to recover the subalterns assumed by the histories because they were there, and had to be there, in the history of subordination. Contrasting the stunted reasoning of the federal government with Cherokee resistance and subsequent dénouement links removal’s significant contribution to the legitimation campaign supporting slavery and Dred Scott, and in material terms, contributed to the inevitability of the secession and the Civil War.

Mark Killenbeck on the History of the Commerce Clause

August 19, 2012Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Mark Killenbeck, author of several excellent legal histories, including one on M’Culloch v. Maryland and another on the Tenth Amendment, has posted his short history of the Interstate Commerce Clause, “A Prudent Regard to Our Own Good? The Commerce Clause, in Nation and States.”

Here is the abstract:

This lecture was delivered on May 23, 2012, as part of the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual Leon Silverman Lecture Series. My goal was to discern what key founders envisioned when they crafted and approved the Commerce Clause and explore how it has been interpreted and applied by the Court. I take as my starting point themes struck by James Madison in his Vices of the Political system of the U. States, in which he noted a “want of concert in matters where the common interest requires it,” a flaw “strongly illustrated in the state of our commercial affairs,” to the point that “the national dignity, interest, and revenue [have] suffered from this cause.” Madison’s lament was not, however, about the need to guard against an overbearing federal government. Rather, he was concerned about the corrosive effects of a “a mistaken confidence” in “the justice, the good faith, the honor, the sound policy, of . . . several legislative assemblies” whose actions were marked by “caprice, jealousy, and diversity of opinions.” Madison also counseled against excessive reliance on interpretations grounded solely in the drafting and ratification debates, speaking of the need to “liquidate and ascertain” meaning over time, recognizing, as did Chief Justice John Marshall, that the Constitution was “intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.” A close and careful reading of both Madison and Marshall – in particular, Marshall’s opinion for the Court in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) – suggests, accordingly, that sharp departures from the original understanding of the Commerce Clause occurred long before Wickard v. Filburn (1942), and that there is substantial support for an expansive reading of the nature and scope of the commerce power in the words and intentions of the founders.

Judge Matthew Martin on the Origins of Westernized Tribal Jurisprudence

June 29, 2012Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

EBCI Judge J. Matthew Martin continues his interesting scholarly work in the legal histories of tribal justice systems with “Chief Justice John Martin and the Origins of Westernized Tribal Jurisprudence,” recently published in the Elon Law Review.

From the article:

Judge John Martin created the modern Tribal Court. This template, still in use today, envisions a Court based on notions of jurisprudence easily recognizable to western eyes, yet leavened with aspects of Tribal culture and tradition. The model comprises a Court system that is familiar and dedicated not only to sovereignty, but also to defiance. The significance of the beginnings of the modern Tribal Court has been consistently underestimated, particularly by the Supreme Court of the United States. John Martin’s crucial role in it has largely been forgotten.

The Atlantic on the Evolution of the Anglo-American Legal System (and Reasons Why Tribes Should Think of Another Way)

June 16, 2012June 16, 2012Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here.

An excerpt:

Taxpayers clearly pay too much for too little justice. Changing to a truth-seeking system might be a remedy. This would require, at a minimum: outlawing the concealing of evidence; re-training academics to teach law students techniques of finding the truth instead of mugging up a million ways to defeat it; dismantling the professional cartel by training judges separately from lawyers; appointing six times as many judges, on the basis of rigorous examinations, and giving them back control of the process; compelling lawyers and judges to take an oath to tell the truth; having lay jurors and trial and appellate judges sit together to render their verdicts and levy penalties (if any) together.

Justice Russell Fox said the public knows that “justice marches with the truth.” It’s high time we tried to reunite the two.

On This Day in History: 1924 Citizenship Act

June 2, 2012June 2, 2012Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all noncitizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided, That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.

Racialized Ivory Soap Ad from 1889

May 9, 2012May 9, 2012Ann Tweedy3 Comments

I came across this very offensive ad yesterday in the course of microfilm research. It’s from the Daily Argus Leader and was published in 1889.

ivory ad

ICT Profile of Fletcher’s New Book: “The Eagle Returns”

May 8, 2012May 8, 2012Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

Here. An excerpt:

The Eagle Returns: The Legal History of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians (Michigan State University Press, 2012) is a governmental, legal and political history of the tribe. The volume focuses on their status as a treaty tribe and as the first tribe to be recognized—or, perhaps more accurately, re-recognized—by the federal government under the Bureau of Indian Affairs’s administrative recognition process.

“It is the story of survival against the arrival and savage intervention of several European nations—and the United States—in the affairs and property of the Anishinaabek of the Grand Traverse Bay region,” Fletcher writes in his introduction. Professor of law and director of the Indigenous Law & Policy Center at Michigan State University College of Law, Fletcher also runs Turtle Talk, the Indigenous Law & Policy Center’s legal blog and an unrivaled source of court documents pertaining to Indian casework and law.

In The Eagle Returns, Fletcher takes on the guise of storyteller, and that role is reflected in the chapter headings: “The Story of the 1836 Treaty of Washington,” “The Story of the 1855 Treaty of Detroit” and “The Story of the Dispossession of the Grand Traverse Band Land Base” are just some of the entries.

Although the chapter titles are specific to the Grand Traverse Band, in a more general sense they could serve as a template for any number of indigenous nations. The book is a reminder that so many of them have followed the same post-European settlement trajectory of cultural and economic erosion, genocide, dispossession and poverty, up to the brink of legal extinction—only to survive through resilience and resourcefulness to emerge strong and prosperous in the latter part of the 20th century.

The Eagle Returns is not just a legal history. It is also filled with details about the material lives of the pre-treaty Anishinaabek peoples. At one point Fletcher writes deftly of their renowned birchbark canoes: They were “the finest canoes in the northern hemisphere, capable of carrying over a ton of people and equipment for two-year treks, creating an ability to travel over all of the Great Lakes and their major tributaries.”

Other compelling passages detail episodes like the negotiations between the Anishinaabek leaders, who were called ogemuk, and Henry Schoolcraft, the Indian Commissioner for the United States and “an ardent land speculator prone to fits of deep ethnocentrism.” On March 28, 1836, Schoolcraft signed off on the Treaty of Washington, whereby the tribes ceded an area of 13,837,207 acres—more than one-third of Michigan’s land area. The treaty provided for permanent reservations and prohibited the ethnic cleansing of Michigan Indians. But within months the Senate rewrote it to limit the reservations to five years and provide an option to remove Indian communities to the south and west.

“The Senate added the carrot of $200,000 to the bands that chose to remove to these lands in exchange for their reservations lands,” Fletcher writes. The president agreed to the amended treaty on May 27, 1836, but the Anishinaabek were not notified of the changes until July.

Still other chapters detail the further dispossession of the Grand Traverse Band and its “administrative termination” beginning in the 1870s. The story brightens with the band’s re–recognition on May 27, 1980; its famous victorious battle for treaty rights to hunt, fish and gather on public lands; its successful gaming enter-prises; and the modernization of the tribe’s ancient law and justice systems.

Fletcher says that he intends The Eagle Returns to serve as a reference for policymakers, lawyers and Indian people and for an educated general audience. But for the author, the book is also a considerable labor of love.

“It is written for the people of the Grand Traverse Band,” writes the author, “who have not had the benefit of drawing upon one source for the bulk of their legal and political history.”

Coverage of the 44th Annual Dakota Conference in the Argus Leader

April 29, 2012April 29, 2012Ann Tweedy4 Comments

Here are some links to articles on, and photos of, the 44th Annual Dakota Conference that was held this weekend at Augustana College. The theme was Wounded Knee 1973. Unsurprisingly, Russell Means’ comments and keynote address got the most coverage. The highlight for me was a panel on Native Women’s role in Wounded Knee, which included presentations by Professor Elizabeth Castle, Marcella Gilbert, and Danyelle Means. I also really enoyed a talk by Professor Emerita Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and a talk and poetry reading by Allison Hedge Coke and Renee Sans Souci. Finally, a panel discussion by Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, and Senator James Abourezk was very illuminating, as was a talk by journalist Kevin McKiernan, who covered the occupation from the inside for NPR.

Articles

http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012304280008

http://www.argusleader.com/viewart/20120429/NEWS/304290038/Means-lashes-out-during-look-back-AIM

http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012304280010

Photos
http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/gallery?Site=df&Date=20120427&Category=news&ArtNo=204270804&Ref=ph&Item=0&odyssey=mod|mostpopphotos

Thelda Perdue to Lecture on Indian Lands and the SCT at the Supreme Court Historical Society

April 26, 2012April 26, 2012Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here.

Details from the site:

November 14, 2012 | 6:00 PM
The History of Native American Lands
and the Supreme Court
Professor Theda Perdue
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill