On August 1st, 2007, Indigenous nations from within the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand) signed a treaty to found the United League of Indigenous Nations. The Treaty of Indigenous Nations offers a historic opportunity for sovereign Indigenous governments to build intertribal cooperation outside the framework of the…

Repatriation in the United States today is synonymous with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Although repatriations of Native American ancestral remains and cultural objects certainly occurred--and continue to occur--outside of the purview of NAGPRA, this law remains the centerpiece of repatriation…

In this study, the author focuses on how Cowessess First Nation band members have constructed their identities over time, and the link between their identities and notions of kinship. Specifically, the author examines how Cowessess band members' continued adherence to principles of traditional law regulating kinship has undermined the imposition…

In this article, the author raises a few examples of incompatible concepts and languages in US federal environmental and cultural laws affecting the management of indigenous sacred lands. She explains these examples by describing the management of a selection of Navajo (Dine) sacred places and elsewhere. Through fundamental concepts rooted in…

In 1978 Congress passed an astonishing piece of legislation that gave Native American tribes a considerable amount of jurisdiction over matters of child custody and the adoption of their children. In 1976, the Association of American Indian Affairs gathered statistics relevant to the adoption of Indian children that Congress found "shocking…

The federal policy of termination against Native Americans was on a high roll from 1946 to 1954. The policy received explicit expression in House Concurrent Resolution 108, passed in 1953, which stated that "Indians should be made subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other…

In this article, the authors present results from a survey project that focused on the experiences of postsecondary American Indian (AI)/Alaska Native (AN)/Native Hawaiian (NH) students. They acknowledge that there are political and historical differences among and within these three broad categories of indigenous people; however, the research…

American Indian treaties and treaty law may seem to fall solely within the purview of legal methodology and critical analysis, yet the 367 American Indian treaties signed with the US federal government beg for the type of dissection and analysis generally associated with cultural and literary critical theory. The tools by which texts are dissected…

Hurricane Katrina traumatized the city of New Orleans and the Gulf South. It filled most Americans and global citizens with grief and rage in the late summer of 2005. As the world watched, feeling powerless to help the many thousands of suffering people, at first stunned and then furious over the ineptitude of government response to this…

Over the past several decades indigenous people in Canada have mounted hundreds of collective action events such as marches, demonstrations, road blockades, and land occupations. What the general public knows about these events and their causes overwhelmingly comes from the mainstream mass media. For this reason, media coverage of these events…

During the past century, dramatic changes have occurred in the way death is experienced in the United States. A death in 1900 typically occurred as a result of sudden illness and injury among the young at home. Today, Americans are more likely to die from long-term, chronic illness in later life, often in institutional settings. In addition to the…

In the spring of 1977, members of the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), along with the Coalition for Navajo Liberation, barraged the Secretary of the Interior and the chairman of the Navajo Nation with petitions calling for a halt to the proposed construction of several coal gasification plants on the Navajo Reservation in northwestern New…

Examines the complexities of the taxation issue in Indian affairs, both for American Indian reservations and adjacent local governments. Demonstrates the role of statutes and case law in the recurring struggle to balance tribal immunities guaranteed by the federal government with the expectations of non-Indian taxpayers. (SV)

American Indian adults have the highest smoking rate of any racial group in the nation. By the turn of the 21st century, smoking rates for the general adult population were reported to be 24%. Among adolescents in the United States, 34.8% of high school students reported they currently smoked in 1999. In comparison, American Indian adults report…

Even though there were tens of thousands of Native Americans who attended urban public schools between 1945 and 1975, historians have been rather slow to learn their stories. This is no small oversight, for by 1970 the number of urban Indians in the United States was nearly the same as the number of reservation Indians. Phoenix, the focus of this…