American Indian Culture and Research Journal

It has often been observed that, though the outcomes of US Indian law and policy have been consistently negative for Indian peoples, this consistency is belied in the rhetoric of judges and Indian-affairs officials. This article makes the further argument that this legitimatory rhetoric has received endorsement from a liberal-individualist style of historical and legal-studies scholarship that privileges judges’ and policymakers’ intentions, as inferred from their official utterances (the “intentional fallacy” of the article's title). This scholarship prioritizes expressions of individual intention over regularities of collective outcome, a perspective that effaces the USA’s continuing settler-colonization of Indian peoples. Taking the Marshall judgments as its central example, the article reanalyzes nineteenth-century Indian law and policy, demonstrating a strategic continuity both within the Marshall judgments and between those judgments and the late-nineteenth century doctrine of plenary congressional power from which they are conventionally distinguished. On this basis, the article critiques a range of recent and established Indian-affairs scholarship, contending that, in writing about Indian dispossession, this scholarship contributes to Indian dispossession.

This article discusses the meaning and magnitude of the exercise of off-reservation treaty hunting and fishing rights by describing specific changes in the Ojibwe tribal communities that resulted from that exercise. The article examines the period between 1984, when the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission was formed, and 2009, the Commission’s twenty-fifth anniversary, when it hosted a major retrospective symposium. It documents changes in harvesting activities and tribal civil society as well as institutional developments in the areas of tribal fish hatcheries, tribal courts, natural resource departments, educational programs, health and wellness programs, state-tribal relations, and the relationship of the exercise to tribal gaming. I demonstrate that recognition of the rights reserved in the treaties by the state and federal courts, and their subsequent implementation, has put the tribal communities into new and consequential political relationships with each other as well as with state and federal agencies. What has come about is a transformation of consciousness and practice that goes beyond self-determination to the realm of realizing the sovereignty that was first envisioned and enacted by the signatories of those treaties.

This article details the Yakama Nation’s century-long struggle to recover Mt. Adams, a major snowpeak in the Cascade Mountains of south-central Washington State, which was wrongly excluded from the Yakama Reservation by a series of erroneous boundary surveys. Known as Pátu (snow-topped mountain) and Xwayamá (golden eagle) in the Sahaptin language of the Columbia Plateau, the mountain has long been identified with the five sacred foods of the Wáašat religion. Between 1855 and 1972, when an executive order restored part of the peak to tribal ownership, it acquired new significance as a symbol of Yakama identity and nationhood due to its association with the tribe’s treaty and disputed reservation boundary. The story of the Yakamas’ quest to redraw that boundary and reclaim their sacred peak is in part a familiar tale of the federal government’s repeated failure to fulfill its trust responsibility to Indian tribes. On a deeper level, though, this history also offers valuable insights into the cultural construction of landscape, the production of oral tradition, and the tension between indigenous and colonialist ways of bounding space and remembering the past. Pátu visually reinforced and recalled memories that were produced and preserved through the spoken word, thereby sustaining an interpretation of the treaty that successfully challenged the maps and manuscripts of the dominant society.

This paper considers the economics of dam building and global-scale development in the Nez Perce watersheds of the Snake and the Columbia rivers. First, I link the expansion of global capitalism to the rise of industrial agricultural and dam building on Nez Perce territorial lands and traditional use areas. Dam building has contributed to the growth of a global economy in dramatic and unexpected ways, and dam building has presented enormous challenges to Nez Perce culture and history tied to salmon. Second, I examine powerful forces, including the role of China, with ties to Nez Perce land and natural resources. My argument in doing so is to make a call for new and innovate scholarship in the American Indian and Indigenous studies literature that “unbinds” local realities and shows the connectedness of dam building and other development projects from an historical global environmental approach.

This article examines the development of the outing system at Sherman Institute, an off-reservation federal Indian boarding school located in Riverside, California. Modeled after the program developed by Richard Henry Pratt at Carlisle Indian School, the Sherman outing system sent hundreds of young men and women to work for white households and businesses throughout Southern California. The outing system presented student-laborers with harsh working conditions and sought to prepare them for lives of menial labor. Yet, in many cases, indigenous students and their communities utilized the system for their own benefit, whether for money, work experience, or adventure. By examining the institutional design of the outing system and indigenous approaches to it, this study sheds further light on how Native students, families, and communities navigated government systems designed to eradicate their cultures.