Impact Of Supreme Court S Ruling In Duro V Reina

Includes indexes.

In the 1970s the Quinault and Suquamish, like dozens of Indigenous nations across the United States, asserted their sovereignty by applying their laws to everyone on their reservations. This included arresting non-Indians for minor offenses, and two of those arrests triggered federal litigation that had big implications for Indian tribes’ place in the American political system. Tribal governments had long sought to manage affairs in their territories, and their bid for all-inclusive reservation jurisdiction was an important, bold move, driven by deeply rooted local histories as well as pan-Indian activism. They believed federal law supported their case. In a 1978 decision that reverberated across Indian country and beyond, the Supreme Court struck a blow to their efforts by ruling in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe that non-Indians were not subject to tribal prosecution for criminal offenses. The court cited two centuries of US legal history to justify their decision but relied solely on the interpretations of non-Indians. In Reclaiming the Reservation, Alexandra Harmon delves into Quinault, Suquamish, and pan-tribal histories to illuminate the roots of Indians’ claim of regulatory power in their reserved homelands. She considers the promises and perils of relying on the US legal system to address the damage caused by colonial dispossession. She also shows how tribes have responded since 1978, seeking and often finding new ways to protect their interests and assert their sovereignty. Reclaiming the Reservation is the 2020 winner of the Robert G. Athearn Prize for a published book on the twentieth-century American West, presented by the Western History Association.

Racial tension between Native American and white people on and near Indian reservations is an ongoing problem in the United States. As far back as 1886, the Supreme Court said that "because of local ill feeling, the people of the United States where [Indian tribes] are found are often their deadliest enemies." This book examines the history of troubled relations on and around Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota over the last three decades and asks why Lakota Indians and whites living there became hostile to one another. Thomas Biolsi's important study traces the origins of racial tension between Native Americans and whites to federal laws themselves, showing how the courts have created opposing political interests along race lines. Drawing on local archival research and ethnographic fieldwork on Rosebud Reservation, Biolsi argues that the court's definitions of legal rights—both constitutional and treaty rights—make solutions to Indian-white problems difficult. Although much of his argument rests on his analysis of legal cases, the central theoretical concern of the book is the discourse rooted in legal texts and how it applies to everyday social practices. This nuanced and powerful study sheds much-needed light on why there are such difficulties between Native Americans and whites in South Dakota and in the rest of the United States.