Karen Tani – Turtle Talk

An excerpt:

Carpenter identifies several factors that contributed to Native Americans’⁴ early and robust use of the administrative petition. One factor was a pattern of congressional deference to the President in matters relating to Indian policy. Presidents, in turn, delegated great power to administrators within the War Department and, later, the Department of the Interior. A second important factor was that these administrators had no intention of leaving Native Americans alone, but rather embarked on prolonged campaigns of dispossession and subordination. In other words, Native Americans had every reason to want to influence administrative decisionmaking. A third factor, Carpenter argues, was a tradition of “complaint and supplication” among indigenous North Americans that was already well established by the time of the Founding. (P. 358.) According to this tradition, all types of authority (i.e., administrators as well as legislators) were appropriate subjects of entreaty.

Karen Tani on Indian Affairs from 1935-1954

December 18, 2014December 18, 2014Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Karen Tani has published “States’ Rights, Welfare Rights, and the ‘Indian Problem’: Negotiating Citizenship and Sovereignty, 1935–1954” in the Law & History Review.

Here’s the abstract:

Starting in the 1940s, American Indians living on reservations in Arizona and New Mexico used the Social Security Act of 1935 to assert unprecedented claims within the American federal system: as U.S. and state citizens, they claimed federally subsidized state welfare payments, but as members of sovereign nations, they denied states the jurisdiction that historically accompanied such beneficence. This article documents their campaign, and the fierce resistance it provoked, by tracing two legal episodes. In 1948, through savvy use of both agencies and courts, and with aid from former government lawyer Felix Cohen, reservation Indians won welfare benefits and avoided accompanying demands for state jurisdiction; the states, in turn, extracted a price–higher subsidies–from the federal government. Arizona officials re-opened the dispute in 1951, by crafting a new welfare program that excluded reservation Indians and suing the federal government for refusing to support it. The 1954 dismissal of the case was a victory for Indians, but also leant urgency to efforts to terminate their anomalous status. Together these episodes illustrate the disruptive citizenship claims that became possible in the wake of the New Deal and World War Two, as well as the increasingly tense federal-state negotiations that followed.

Subscribers may access the full article here.

Prof. Tani blogged about the article at the Legal History Blog.

Prof. Karen Tani Writes About “Remembering the ‘Forgotten Child'” in Light of Adoptive Couple at Jotwell

November 6, 2013Kate Fort

Here.

These revelations are sure to disturb any reader, but the point of Jacobs’s important article is not to expose adoption proponents as disingenuous or malevolent. It is to place an ongoing phenomenon—Indian children’s disproportionately high rate of separation from their families—in proper historical context. (P. 154.) “It is no coincidence,” Jacobs writes, “that the IAP arose during the era in which the federal government promoted termination [of tribal nations’ special status] and relocation policies for American Indians.” (P. 152.) Adoptions enabled the federal government to terminate its responsibilities, child by child, by shifting them to “the ultimate ‘private’ sector.” (P.154.) By extension, Jacobs argues, adoptive families also advanced the government’s long-term “effort[] to eliminate Indianness.” (P. 154.) This, Jacobs demonstrates, was the backdrop for the ICWA. When tribal leaders and advocacy organizations convinced Congress to enact the new law, it was a small victory in a long war. And when plaintiffs invoke the ICWA today, they raise a hard-won shield.

We agree that Margaret Jacobs “Remembering the ‘Forgotten Child’: The American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s” 37 American Indian Quarterly 136 (2013) is an excellent and important article.