Search Results (4)

The Doctrine of Christian Discovery is a series of fifteenth-century papal bulls that served as the theological and legal justification for the colonization of the world and the enslavement of the Original Free Nations, starting first on the African continent before spreading across the globe. In the 1800s, these bulls and other documents like The Requerimiento and colonial charters would be codified and enshrined together in U.S. law as the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, becoming the foundation of property law and international law. Also, considering what Peter d’Errico calls Federal Anti-Indian Law, we will trace and document how this framework of domination began with the Catholic crowns of Europe and transformed into the dominion theology found within Christian nationalist theologies today. Our research highlights how the Doctrine became enshrined and encoded within Protestantism and the imagined “secular” of the U.S. and Canada, countries who rhetorically espouse separation of church and state while justifying land theft, treaty violations, and the abuse of Indigenous nations and peoples through the Doctrine. We craft a genealogy of Christian domination by carefully analyzing primary sources, especially the colonial charters. We will conclude by juxtaposing the domination framework and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s principles of the Gayanashagowa (Great Law of Peace). Full article

In 1978, the United States enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) “to protect the best interest of Indian Children and to promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families by the establishment of minimum Federal standards for the removal of Indian children and placement of such children in homes which will reflect the unique values of Indian culture.” The ICWA was codified to address centuries of genocidal government policies, boarding schools, and coercive adoptions that ruptured many Native families. Now one of the strongest pieces of legislation to protect Native communities, the ICWA was designed to ensure that Native foster children are placed with Native families. Implementing the ICWA has not been smooth, however, as many non-Native foster parents and state governments have challenged the ICWA. While the ICWA has survived these legal challenges, including the recent 2023 Haaland v. Brackeen Supreme Court case, the rise of non-Natives claiming Native heritage, also known as self-indigenizers or “pretendians,” represents a new threat to the ICWA. This Article presents a legal history and analysis of the ICWA to unpack the policy implications of pretendians in the U.S. legal context. This Article demonstrates how the rise of pretendians threatens to undermine the very purpose of the ICWA and thereby threaten the sovereignty of Native peoples. By legally sanctioning the adoption of Native children into non-Native pretendian homes, the ICWA can facilitate a new era of settlers raising Native children, rather than preventing this phenomenon as intended. In response, this Article offers concrete policy recommendations to bolster the ICWA against this threat. Full article

Communities throughout the United States have come to rely upon agriculture as a pillar of their political integrity, economic security, and health and wellbeing. Climatic conditions in the western portion of the United States necessitate most lands be irrigated to be arable. As a result, a major portion of the economy of the United States, and by extension the world economy, is driven by the continued viability of western United States water law and policy. Furthermore, due to the strong interrelationship between anthropogenic consumptive uses, streamflows, and wetland/riparian area ecology, irrigation demand has a strong effect on stream morphology, quality, and biology for aquatic species. Western water management is a complex mosaic that is controlled by western state, federal, and tribal governments. Each of these systems of law have vulnerabilities to climate change, which is well understood to cause increasing water supply scarcity. This articledemonstrates the risks climate change poses to our management of irrigation water demand, as well as the interrelationship between water supply and demand. Due to the shared nature of the resource, this article addresses both tribal reserved rights and state-based rights using data from Indian reservations that either contain and/or are closely adjacent to non-tribal agricultural communities. Those data are used in a systems–dynamics model to integrate crop–water requirement estimation techniques with climate change estimates and a Monte Carlo analysis to assess how irrigation demand could change because of changing temperature, precipitation, incoming radiation, and wind speed caused by climate change. Results indicate that climate change will cause increases in irrigation requirements at most locations. Further, climate change is expected to significantly increase seasonal variability in many locations. The model provides a useful tool based upon publicly available data that will allow individual water users to make conservation decisions necessary to preserve their water rights as the climate changes. Full article

Religion and public policy are interconnected across a variety of issues. One aspect where this linkage has been understudied is religion and Indigenous sacred sites protection. This article aims to address this gap by analyzing how Indigenous women’s activism advances this cause. The focus is on how Indigenous Peoples, specifically women, use grassroots activism to provoke change on public policy in the context of the protection of Indigenous sacred sites. Two case studies are used to illustrate this concept: the American “Women of Standing Rock” and the Canadian “Idle No More” grassroots social movements. My analysis draws from interpretative methods. Interpretative research revolves around the concept of individuals as active producers of meaning. The women-led grassroots social movements at issue highlight a fundamental lack of awareness of the historical and current struggles of Indigenous Peoples, both in the US and Canada. Modern technologies and social media provide democratic means for grassroots social movements to be heard and empowered. The growing movement by Indigenous women to assert their rights, and their quest for self-determination in land use and sacred sites protection create a positive discourse that advances Indigenous women’s position in crossing the obstacles onto “institutional places of privilege,” hence influencing public policy. Full article