Description
Crow's Dog Case is the first social history of American Indians' role in the making of American law. This book sheds new light on Native American struggles for sovereignty and justice in nineteenth-century America. The 'century of dishonor', a time when American Indians' lands were lost and their tribes reduced to reservations, provoked a wide variety of tribal responses. Some of the more succesful responses were in the area of law, forcing the newly independent American legal order to create a unique place for Indian tribes in American law. Although the United States has a system of law structuring a unique position for American Indians, they have been left out of American legal history. Crow Dog, Crazy Snake, Sitting Bull, Bill Whaley, Tla-coo-yeo-oe, Isparhecher, Lone Wolf, and others had their own jurisprudence, kept alive by their own legal traditions.
Chapter
Of red, black, and yellow: the relationship of U.S. Indian law to the legal oppression of other racial minorities
Legal history and legal doctrine
2 Corn Tassel: state and federal conflict over tribal sovereignty
State criminal jurisdiction over Indians
The Northeast and South, 1822-35
The North and West, 1835-80
Federal Indian law from Worcester to Crow Dog
3 U.S. Indian law and the Indian nations: the Creek Nation, 1870-1900
The legal status of the Indian Territory, 1865-1900
Creek legal culture, 1870-1900
The constitutional legal system of the Creek Nation
Spotted Tail and Crow Dog: Brule Sioux society in 1381
The killing of Spotted Tail
Early BIA attempts to prosecute Indians under state or territorial law
The Supreme Court's decision
Law for the Indians: the Major Crimes Act
5 Imposed law and forced assimilation: the legal impact of the Major Crimes Act and the Kagatna decision
A Klamath killing under U.S. law
State criminal jurisdiction after Crow Dog and Kagama
The jurisdictional problems of land allotment
Jurisdiction over railroad lands
Jurisdictional problems of liquor control
The racial geography of federal Indian law
Cultural geography: inherent limits of the reach of U.S. law into tribal cultures
6 Sitting Bull and Clapox: the application of BIA law to Indians outside of the Major Crimes Act
The arrest and killing of Sitting Bull
Courts of Indian Offenses
The writ of habeas corpus and reservation Indians: the legal significance of Standing Bear v. Crook
Bai-a-lil-le and the Indian Rights Association challenge to the "big stick" policy of Commissioner Leupp
The reservation as prison: forced confinement of Indians on reservations
7 The struggle for tribal sovereignty in Alaska, 1867-1900
Russian colonization and Tlingit sovereignty
U.S. legal jurisdiction over Alaskan natives
Tlingit law meets U.S. law
Tlingit law under the purview of U.S. courts
The accelerating imposition of U.S. law, 1886-1900
The development of an assimilationist policy for the Tlingit
8 The legal structuring of violence: U.S. law and the Indian wars
The legal recognition of Indian wars: the Indian Depredations Act of 1891
The Indian war as a criminal defense: the trial of Plenty Horses
U.S. law and Indian crime: the legal structuring of intra-Indian violence
The killing of authority figures
Toward an ethnolegal history of Indian law
Toward a new Indian legal history