Category: Indigenous Law
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Are We All Americans?: Elk v. Wilkins and Native American Citizenship Before, During, and After Reconstruction
By Carolina Pardo — When Robert E. Lee went to negotiate his terms of surrender at the Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, he stopped at the sight of a brown man amongst the Union generals. Everyone held their breath…
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The Puzzle of Federal Indian Law: The Doctrine of Preemption in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta
By Carolina Pardo — In his concurring opinion in United States v. Lara (2004), Justice Thomas writes, “Federal Indian policy is, to say the least, schizophrenic.” Justice Thomas aptly characterized Federal Indian law as contradictory and inconsistent. Since Christopher Columbus…
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Hypocrisy vs. Sovereignty: Accounting for the Colonial Vestiges of Public Law 83-280 in Alaska
By Dane Lester — Over the past three hundred years, the United States has expanded from a series of British royalist colonies on America’s East Coast to a fully-fledged democratic nation taking up the third-largest land area of any country…
