Attorney and activist Robert Coulter spoke last Wednesday as a part of the University of Arizona’s Vine Deloria, Jr. Distinguished Scholar Series, sponsored by the American Indian Studies Department. Coulter has spent the past 35 years advocating for Native American rights and played a key role in the writing and passage of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

In an impassioned speech, Coulter spoke of some of the challenges that Indian nations continue to face. “We are still suffering under a legal framework that is discriminatory, unconstitutional, irrational, and inconsistent,” he said.

Coulter added that the laws that govern Indian nations today are “analogous to Jim Crow laws and the Separate but Equal doctrine” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

(more…)

In The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929, historian David A. Chang examines understandings of nation, race, and land among what he calls “America’s historically foundational ‘races,’ ” who he defines as Indians, whites, and blacks. Chang begins by framing his discussion on land and how it can be racialized. This, he writes, had particular implications in the creation of the state of Oklahoma and the identities of those who lived there.

From the introduction:

“’Oklahoma’ means ‘red man’ in the Choctaw language, is run through by a ‘Black Belt,’ and has been claimed by some as ‘white man’s country.’ It has been termed an Indian homeland, a black promised land, and a white heartland. All these competing racial claims to one place seem extraordinary. This book suggests, however, that Oklahoma is really exceptional only because it encapsulates so much American history within its borders, revealing much about how the struggle over land has given shape to the way Americans – indigenous, black, and white – created and gave meaning to races and nations.

Phrases like the ones above mark Oklahoma with a race and tie that race to the land. Race is a way that we imagine differences between people and make hierarchies among them seem right and natural. So racializing a land (marking it with a race) really means tying it to a particular people, whether they be Creek Indians, African Americans, white Americans, or some other group we believe can be identified racially in some way. After all, speaking of “a land” is also a way of speaking of a country or a nation. The title of this book is an attempt to evoke this relationship between land, race, and nationhood. This book considers both the symbolic power people gave land in such terms as ‘homeland,’ ‘Black Belt’ or ‘white man’s country’ and the economic power that land possesses.”

Learn more about The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 and author David A. Chang at the University of North Carolina Press website.

“Chang explores how Indians and white Americans used race and nation to control access to land and dispossess those defined as ‘other.’ His ambitious and groundbreaking book is deeply researched, broadly engaged with important debates, and thoroughly convincing.”
–Claudio Saunt, author of
Black, White, and Indian:
Race and the Unmaking of an American Family

The recent settlement of the Cobell v. Salazar case has garnered significant media attention and mixed responses from Native communities. Many see the settlement as a victory and recognition of more than a century of questionable land grabs and allotment on behalf of the U.S. Government and the Department of the Interior. Others question whether or not this settlement goes far enough to acknowledge the centuries of hardship that resulted from allotment and seizure of Indian land.

We asked Kristin Ruppel, author of Unearthing Indian Land: Living with the Legacies of Allotment (University of Arizona Press, 2008) and assistant professor of Native American Studies at Montana State University to share her opinion on the settlement.

Cobell Settlement: Better than Nothing?
By Kristin Ruppel

A first take on the Cobell Settlement, with due and sincere deference to Ms. Cobell especially, but also to the legal team who worked so diligently and for so long on this case: The government got a heck of a deal; Indian landowners (and the Cobell team) will find some closure, but it’s obviously not a fair settlement for the Class. If the court endorses and congress authorizes implementation of this settlement, the US will say it is closing the chapter (“turning the page”) on a 122 years of financial mismanagement (an understatement) by paying pennies on the dollar for an accounting that only goes back to October 25, 1994 (when the Indian Trust Fund Management Reform Act was passed), and by limiting the Class only to those who had an IIM account open and had at least one cash transaction posted to it (as long as it wasn’t later reversed) between October 25, 1994 and September 30, 2009, and who are still alive as of the latter date. The descendants of those whose claims are being settled all the way back to 1887 (when the General Allotment Act was passed, thus creating the trust) will get nothing if they don’t fit into this very narrow window of time and “cash transaction”. We don’t yet know how many of the 300,000+ account holders represented in the lawsuit will actually benefit from the Historical Accounting claim settlement—that is, receive their $1,000 checks—after the attorneys and expert witness fees are paid out of the same fund. As in the Indian Claims era, and the treaty-making era before that, Indians, more than anyone in this country, pay as they go, even when they win.

Like I said, this is just a first take, and none of this is meant to detract from the historic work that Ms. Cobell undertook against a power that has unlimited means, and an abiding interest in doing whatever is cheapest when it comes to Indians. There’s much more to be said about the case that may well be the defining one of the so-called Era of “Self-Determination”.

Many thanks to Dr. Ruppel for voicing her thoughts on this matter. We look forward to seeing more scholarly treatment of this case in future books and journal articles.