Christine Zuni Cruz has posted her great paper, “ Shadow War Scholarship, Indigenous Legal Tradition, and Modern Law in Indian Country “, published in the Tribal Law Journal, on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

This article documents the purposes and reasons for the development of the Tribal Law Journal, the University of New Mexico School of Law’s electronic journal created to promote scholarship on tribal law and the Indigenous legal tradition. It discusses the use of the internet for the work of the journal and of the need to increase an understanding and awareness of the law of Indigenous peoples. The diversity of indigenous peoples, in and of itself, requires unique approaches to the discussion of tribal law. The article considers how the Zapatista Movement in Chiapas utilized the internet. The Zapatista’s engagement of the Mexican government has been described as a “shadow war” for its engagement in conflict in “symbolic rather than real terms.” This early exploitation of the internet allowed the Zapatista to get their position across without having to rely on gatekeepers. The article describes how the Journal follows the same strategy in respect to tribal law. The important developments occurring in law at the tribal level require Indigenous Peoples’ awareness of trends among Indigenous peoples in the United States and across the world. Electronic communication has significantly facilitated this. The article concludes with a discussion of the limitations that challenge electronic communication among Indigenous Peoples.