Fletcher on Anishinaabe Law and The Round House @MSULaw

Matthew L. M. Fletcher, Michigan State University College of Law, has published Anishinaabe Law and The Round House at 10 Albany Government Law Review 88 (2017). Here is the abstract.

This paper addresses the Indian country criminal justice system’s difficulties through the context of the Great Lakes Anishinaabeg’s traditional customs, traditions, and laws, and their modern treatment of crime. Louise Erdrich’s The Round House expertly captures the reality of crime and fear of crime in Anishinaabe Indian country, and offers a bleak view of the future of criminal justice absent serious reform in the near future.

Download the article from SSRN at the link or here from the journal's website.

Meyer on Legal Discourse and the Contemporary Native American Novel on the Indian Removal @UniOsnabrueck

Sabine N. Meyer, University of Osnabrueck, has published From Federal Indian Law to Indigenous Rights: Legal Discourse and the Contemporary Native American Novel on the Indian Removal, at 29 Law & Literature 269 (2017). Here is the abstract.

My contrapuntal readings of the indigenous rights debates that took place in the United Nations in the 1990s and two Native American historical novels on the Indian Removal published in the United States around the same time reveal that Native American literary production has been deeply inflected by the law. Robert Conley's Mountain Windsong: A Novel of the Trail of Tears(1992) needs to be read as a critique of the idea that Native American rights can be secured from within the United States’ legal order. Through the jarring juxtaposition of historical legal documents and a romantic plot, the novel deconstructs the idea of domestic law as an agent of change and introduces the language of human rights as an alternative normative framework for Native resistance. Diane Glancy's Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears (1996) engages with a question that figured prominently in the debates about indigenous rights, namely whether these rights can be realized within the context of a human rights regime that puts the individual center stage. On closer scrutiny, the novel opens up an alternative way of thinking about the relationship between individual and group rights. It thereby contributes to closing the theoretical gap between individual and group rights, which stymied indigenous rights debates considerably.

The full text is available by subscription. 

David Carlson's New Book on American Indian Law and Literature, Published by the University of Oklahoma Press

David J. Carlson, Professor of English, California State University, San Bernadino, has published Imagining Sovereignty: Self-Determination in American Indian Law and Literature (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016)(American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series; 66). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

“Sovereignty” is perhaps the most ubiquitous term in American Indian writing today—but its meaning and function are anything but universally understood. This is as it should be, David J. Carlson suggests, for a concept frequently at the center of various—and often competing—claims to authority. In Imagining Sovereignty, Carlson explores sovereignty as a discursive middle ground between tribal communities and the United States as a settler-colonial power. His work reveals the complementary ways in which legal and literary texts have generated politically significant representations of the world, which in turn have produced particular effects on readers and advanced the cause of tribal self-determination. Drawing on western legal historical sources and American Indian texts, Carlson traces a dual genealogy of sovereignty. Imagining Sovereignty identifies the concept as a marker, one that allows both the colonizing power of the United States and the resisting powers of various American Indian nations to organize themselves and their various claims to authority. In the process, sovereignty also functions as a point of exchange where these claims compete with and complicate one another. To this end, Carlson analyzes how several contemporary American Indian writers and critics have sought to fuse literary practices and legal structures into fully formed discourses of self-determination. After charting the development of the concept of sovereignty in natural law and its permutations in federal Indian policy, Carlson maps out the nature and function of sovereignty discourses in the work of contemporary Native scholars such as Russel Barsh, Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, D’Arcy McNickle, and Vine Deloria, and in the work of more expressly literary American Indian writers such as Craig Womack, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Gerald Vizenor, and Francisco Patencio.