legal history

Online Documents of Maori Legal History

Kate Fort

From the Legal History Blog:

The New Zealand Legal Text Centre had recently launched an on-line archive of documents relating to the legal history of the Maori, the indigenous people of the islands. Here is the announcement:

The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre is proud to announce the launch of the Legal Maori Archive, a collection of more than 14,000 pages of around 250 19th century documents that illustrate the bi-lingual nature of New Zealand’s legal history. The Legal Maori Archive is freely available to the public and can be accessed via the NZETC website.

Among the many documents featured in this collection are the following:

The Proceedings of the Kotahitanga Parliaments

Henry Hanson Turton’s Maori Deeds of Land Purchases in the North Island of New Zealand

Maori translations of Acts and Bills circulated among Maori communities by the Crown

The Archive has been created in conjunction with Mamari Stephens from the Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Law as part of a project to establish a corpus of legal Maori documents, which will allow the analysis of the language and eventually a dictionary of legal Maori terms and concepts. It is the first time the documents have been brought together in one place and is the largest collection of separate documents that the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre has digitised. The Legal Maori Project seeks to resource speakers of te reo Maori who may not currently have access to a shared vocabulary to describe Western legal concepts. This Project will collate, develop and make available the terminology from Legal Maori texts, including those from the Legal Maori Archive, to all speakers and learners of te reo Maori and all researchers

Podcast on the History of the Department of Interior: “Sick Man” of American Government

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Thanks to Legal History Blog for this one (the “sick man” line is from that blog):

Patricia Limerick
Parks and Politics: Saving the American Environment
The University of Colorado, Boulder
July 22, 2008
Running Time: 51:41 (click here to find the play button)


Bureaucrats, University of Colorado professor of history Patricia Limerick argues, are often the most overlooked (at best) or reviled (at worst) of government officials, but they wield tremendous powers that shape Americans’ daily lives. Nowhere is this more true than in the bureaucracy of the U.S. Department of the Interior. A wide-ranging agency charged with both protecting land and promoting its use, the Department of the Interior implements federal law over millions of acres of land and mediates the claims of environmental, mining, foresting, farming, and ranching interests, among others. Bureaucracies like the Department of the Interior may be boring, Limerick argues, but historians cannot ignore their impact on the development of the American West.

Alistair Bonnett on Black Indians

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here is a short article about black Indians called “Shades of Difference,” published in the Dec. 2008 issue of History Today.

Bonnett — Shades of Difference

Book Review of “Race and the Cherokee Nation”

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From H-Net (h/t to Legal History Blog):

Fay A. Yarbrough. Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the
Nineteenth Century. Philadephia University of Pennsylvania Press,
2008. x + 184 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-4056-6; $55.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-8122-4056-6.

Reviewed by John Gesick
Published on H-Genocide (March, 2009)
Commissioned by Elisa G. von Joeden-Forgey

Nineteenth-Century Practices, Twenty-First Century Decisions

This seminal study of Cherokee race relations during the antebellum
and post-Civil War eras and their consequences in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries has broad applications across many
disciplines–not just to history or sociology or anthropology, but to
the legal and educational fields as well. The author has approached
this subject with sensitivity and pragmatic analysis. She has drawn
thoughtful conclusions based on the empirical analysis of a host of
available documents and of numerical data that she collected from
census records, marriage records, and other demographic sources.
Where the results might be inconclusive, Yarbrough offers avenues for
further investigation and analysis.
Continue reading →

Douglas Harris on the Boldt Decision in Canada

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Douglas C. Harris posted his paper,The Boldt Decision in Canada: Aboriginal Treaty Rights to Fish on the Pacific, part of THE POWER OF PROMISES: RETHINKING INDIAN TREATIES IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, Alexandra Harmon, ed., University of Washington Press, 2008. Here is the abstract:

The Oregon Boundary Treaty of 1846 established the forty-ninth parallel as the boundary between British and American interests in western North America. After 1846, Aboriginal peoples to the north of the border negotiated with the British Crown the terms of their coexistence with incoming settlers, those to its south with the United States. As a result, while some of the Coast Salish and Kwak’waka’wakw peoples in what would become British Columbia concluded treaties between 1850 and 1854 with the Crown’s representative, James Douglas, the tribes in the United States settled with the governor of the Washington territory, Isaac I. Stevens, in 1854 and 1855.

Continue reading →

Book Review of “American Indian Education”

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Greg Gagnon, a fine prof. at the University of North Dakota and a generous reviewer, has reviewed my book, “American Indian Education” and Loren L. Basson’s “White Enough To Be American?Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation” for the North Dakota Quarterly. Here is the review — ndq-review-of-race-and-fletcher-dec08

Minnesota Legal History Project: Minnesota Constitution in the Dakota Language

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From LHB:

Earlier posts have pointed to projects on the legal history of various American states, including Idaho and Connecticut. Here’s another. The Minnesota Legal History Project describes itself as “an archive of original and previously published articles and essays on the legal history of Minnesota.” It will “publish studies of subjects that relate in any way to the legal history of the State of Minnesota, including the state constitution, state courts, Indian treaties, tribal law and courts, significant litigation, the development of specific areas of the law, memoirs and biographical sketches of individual lawyers, judges and their support staffs, and law firm histories.”

***

The Minnesota project links to Stephen R. Riggs, “The Minnesota Constitution in the Dakota Language.”

Paul Spruhan on Blood Quantum at Navajo

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Paul Spruhan has published “The Origins, Current Status, and Future Prospects of Blood Quantum as the Definition of Membership in The Navajo Nation” in the Tribal Law Journal. Here is the abstract:

In this article, the author discusses the origin of the Navajo Nation’s blood requirement. Mr. Spruhan examines the intended purpose of the quarter-blood quantum definition and the role of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He reviews the current status, regulation, and recent attempts to change the quarter-blood quantum requirement. He discusses the future of the quarter-blood quantum requirement with respect to the Navajo Nation Council’s 2002 resolution known as the “Fundamental Laws of the Diné,” a resolution mandating the application of traditional law, customary law, natural law, and common law to the Navajo Nation Government and its entities. In this regard, Mr. Spruhan inquires as to the impact the “Fundamental Laws of the Diné” will have on the quarter-blood quantum requirement and future membership requirements.

MSU Working Paper 2009-03 — Carcieri’s Impact on Michigan Tribes

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

Novaline Wilson (MSU Law ’08) has written a nice paper on the impact of Carcieri v. Salazar on Michigan tribes, many of whom (8 out of 12) were not federally recognized in 1934. It is here. Note that she wrote this before Carcieri was decided. An excerpt:

The Supreme Court must consider unique historical circumstances of Michigan Indian tribes before effectively barring these administratively aggrieved tribes from the federal land-to-trust process. Michigan Indian tribes have a distinct political history as treaty tribes that were illegally administratively terminated in a “situation [that] is not simply an injustice of major proportions, it is a travesty of logic that boggles the rational mind.” Carcieri was correctly decided at the administrative appeals level, by the District Court, and by the First Circuit Court of Appeals. This case is not only without merit, it directly contravenes the BIA’s authority to fulfill their federally mandated trust obligations to tribes. The BIA has to administer the same general federal fiduciary obligations to all tribes, regardless of the year the federal government finally got around to “formally recognizing” tribes. As demonstrated through Michigan Indian tribal history, an outright bar on land-to-trust for those tribes not recognized in 1934 would not only eviscerate fundamental Indian law and administrative law principles, it would demonstrate deliberate ignorance of hundreds of years of American history between Indian tribes and the federal government.

Stuart Banner Talk Tuesday, March 24

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

The Indigenous Law and Policy Center is pleased to host Stuart Banner, a UCLA law professor and author of “Possessing the Pacific” and “How the Indians Lost Their Land” Tuesday, March 24, at 11 AM.

Prof. Banner will be talking about these two books. Michigan State Prof. Charles Ten Brink and U-M History VAP/ post-doctoral fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows Miranda Johnson will be serving as commentators after Prof. Banner speaks.

Prof. Banner’s talk is part of the Center’s spring speaker series, in which we bring in authors of recent books relating in some way to Federal Indian Law.

The talk is at 11 AM in the Castle Board Room, and a light lunch will be provided. Hope to see you there!