Monthly Archives: June 2019

Current Events

California’s Apology for its Treatment of Native Peoples

1 Comment

California Governor Gavin Newsom has issued an apology for his state’s historic treatment of native peoples. Because one in eight Americans is a Californian by birth or residence, this is a significant act.

Despite having spent twenty-four of the last twenty-nine years in New York, I still consider myself a Californian. I grew up not far from the Mission San Buenaventura. We traveled almost daily along the route followed by Father Serra as he began his march to establish California’s mission system. At the elementary school I attended we learned a bit about Spanish California. Every time I entered that school parking lot, I passed the mural that you see above, a historic text giving a very biased interpretation of the settlement of Spanish California. We learned in school that their was a series of missions in California, that the missionaries worked hard to establish them, that they were courageous and heroic figures. We learned nothing, however, about native peoples. The junior high schools in town all were named after Spanish explorers. But native peoples simply were not part of the story. The closest any of us got was, perhaps, reading Scott O’Dell’s The Island of the Blue Dolphins or, if we were particularly unfortunate, a staging of the Ramona pageant based upon Helen Hunt Jackson’s dreadful novel. Native Americans, we always were told when I was a kid in the 1970s and 1980s, were all gone.

Governor Newsom has taken an important first step. Apologies alone are seldom enough, but Americans have such a perverse unwillingness to confront their nation’s violent past. You can see this with the reaction to H.R. 40, a proposed piece of legislation that would establish a commission to merely study the possibilities and potential need for reparations for African Americans for centuries of racism. Those of us who teach Native American history are used to receiving a cold response when we suggest repartations (Try it some time. It’s fun! Next time you are at a gathering, try suggesting that the the United States ought to pay reparations to native peoples for the historic injustices they have faced. See how it goes, and report back!).

As Newsom said, what Californians did to Native Americans was a genocide. “No other way to describe it and that’s the way it needs to be described in the history books.” Thanks to the work of historians like Brendan Lindsay and Benjamin Madley, that story is already being told. Newsom’s announcement might have the educational effect of making more Californians aware of their state’s brutal past.

I wrote about California’s native peoples in the second edition of Native America. The entire book is filled with connections to places to which my family and I have connections–the Dakotas in Minnesota, the Crows in Montana, and the Caddos in Texas. And the Chumash in Southern California. I suppose that I am not alone in writing books that, whatever we might say they are about, are at least part of our own story, part of our efforts to make sense of our own past.

Nearly everywhere I speak, I make the point that nearly all white people in North America are the beneficiaries of specific policies like “Indian Removal”, and the larger generalized processes that resulted in Native American dispossession. The states where I have spent most of my time–New York and California–the country and the continent on which I live, could not have developed in the way that they did without a systematic program of Native American dispossession.

Governor Newsom apologized to California’s native peoples. In person. So many of his predecessors, and their supporters, would have exterminated Native Americans if they could have. Any look at the history books makes clear how hard they tried. An apology is a simple gesture that we often make difficult owing to our fears, our pride, or our lack of empathy. Newsom will take some heat for the apology, but the need for it is crystal clear.

Constitution, Current Events, Treaty Rights

Why I’m Worried About What Clarence Thomas Might Be Doing Right Now in Carpenter v. Murphy.

4 Comments

I have listened to the first two episodes of Rebecca Nagle‘s This Land podcast. If you are interested in Native American history, you should too. Nagle tells the story of Patrick Murphy, convicted by the State of Oklahoma for the gruesome murder of George Jacobs back in August of 1999. An Oklahoma court sentenced Murphy to death.

Both the murderer and his victim were members of the Muscogee Creek Nation. In a last ditch appeal designed to save his life, Murphy’s talented lawyer argued, among other things, that Congress had never explicitly disestablished the Muscogee Creek reservation and, as a result, that the murder took place in “Indian Country,” on Indian land. Because of the precise nature of this crime–one Native American taking the life of another Native American from the same community on that community’s land–and where it took place, the crime falls under the provisions of the federal Major Crimes Act. Oklahoma’s prosecution, conviction, and sentencing of Murphy was invalid because he can only be tried under law in a federal court.

This was the basis of Murphy’s final appeal, and the federal circuit court agreed. The Supreme Court issued a writ of certiorari and heard arguments in the case late last November. Nagle listened to the arguments before the Court. Like many who watch and listen to the Supremes, Nagle attempted to discern from the justices’ questions how they might rule. Justice Gorsuch recused himself: he had heard the case when he served on the federal circuit. Only four votes are needed to overturn Murphy’s conviction.

Patrick Murphy committed a brutal murder. Nobody disputes that. If his conviction is overturned, surely the federal government will prosecute him and surely he will spend the rest of his life behind bars. But the case is far larger than Murphy, and overturning his conviction will have enormous consequences for the state of Oklahoma and the Indian nations whose lands lie within its boundaries. If the Court agrees that Congress never explicitly disestablished the reservation, then nearly 40% of present-day Oklahoma remains Indian Country, with the state powerless to prosecute major crimes committed by one Indian on another. There is much at stake.

Nagle is most worried about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Nagle is absolutely correct to point out that Ginsburg, despite her celebrity and her liberal bona fides on a host of issues, is no friend to native peoples. It is a point I made on this blog some time ago in response to all the lionizing of the “Notorious RBG.” Nagle mentions Ginsburg’s devastating ruling in the Sherrill decision.

Nagle said nothing about Justice Clarence Thomas, who rarely speaks from the bench. But the Murphy case seems like the sort of case Thomas has been waiting for, and that worries me greatly. Thomas could produce an opinion that lays waste to the entire foundation of American Indian law. Here is what I think might happen:

First, Thomas believes that much of the Court’s jurisprudence on Native American question lacks constitutional grounding. Indeed, Thomas on more than one occasion has questioned the constitutionality of the “Plenary Power” doctrine. That doctrine, which emerged in a series of cases over the course of the nineteenth century, holds that Congress derives from the “Indian Commerce Clause” (Article 1, Section 8) the power to act unilaterally in all areas of American Indian policy and diplomacy. Congress can basically do what it wants.

Thomas was uncomfortable with this. In the 2004 case of US v. Lara, Thomas said that he was troubled by the “premises and logic of our tribal sovereignty cases.”

Thomas felt that the court had not attempted to remove the important tensions between two assumptions that struck him as contradictory.  “First, Congress (rather than some other part of the Federal Government) can regulate virtually every aspect of the tribes without rendering tribal sovereignty a nullity.” It did so, however, at the same time that it maintained that “the Indian tribes retain inherent sovereignty to enforce their criminal laws against their own members.”

Thomas could not accept the Court’s assertion “that the Constitution grants Congress plenary power to calibrate the ‘metes and bounds of tribal sovereignty.’” He had read the Constitution, of course, and in it, he wrote, “I cannot locate such congressional authority in the Treaty Clause. . . or the Indian Commerce Clause,” which gave to Congress in Article I, Section 8, the right to regulate “commerce” with the Indian tribes. The phrase–“commerce”–had been defined too broadly.

Furthermore, Thomas questioned the constitutionality of the 1871 enactment through which Congress put an end to treaty-making, because “the making of treaties, after all, is the one mechanism that the Constitution clearly provides for the Federal Government to interact with sovereigns other than the States.”

Thomas reviewed the Lara reasoning, and that used by the Court in its antecedents: Oiliphant, US v. Wheeler (1978), and Duro.  He was skeptical.  In his conclusion, Thomas wrote,

The Court should admit that it has failed in its quest to find a source of congressional power to adjust tribal sovereignty. Such an acknowledgment might allow the Court to argue the logically antecedent question whether Congress (as opposed to the President) has that power.  A cogent answer would serve as the foundation for the analysis of sovereignty issues posed by this case. We might find that the Federal Government cannot regulate the tribes through ordinary domestic legislation and simultaneously maintain that the tribes are sovereigns in any meaningful sense.

In Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (2013), Thomas again considered the constitutional basis for plenary power, this time in a case involving the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act.  “Although the Court has said,” he wrote, “that the central function of the Indian Commerce Clause is to provide Congress with plenary power to legislate in the field of Indian affairs,” neither the text nor the original understandings of the Clause “supports Congress’ claim to ‘plenary’ power.”  The contested adoption proceedings at the heart of the Baby Girl case involved neither commerce nor tribes, and Thomas believed that “there is simply no basis for Congress’ assertion of authority over such proceedings.”

Three years later, in the case of US v. Bryant, Thomas once again returned to these questions. Congress’s “purported plenary power over Indian tribes,” he wrote, rests on shaky foundations.  “No enumerated power–not Congress’ power to ‘regulate commerce…with Indian tribes,’ not the Senate’s role in approving treaties, nor anything else, gives Congress such sweeping authority.”  Thomas found the origins of this claim to power in the 1886 Kagama decision, which upheld the constitutionality of the previous year’s Major Crimes Act.  Native American weakness, in that case, justified the extension of federal power.  The government’s power, the Kagama court wrote, “over these remnants of a race once powerful, now weak and diminished in numbers, is necessary to their protection… It must exist in that government, because it has never existed anywhere else.” That seemed like a claim to power that was not supported by the Constitution and it was time, in Thomas’s view, to review these decisions.

And in an 2017 dissent in a case involving the Secretary of the Interior’s decision to take 13,000 acres of Oneida land in New York into trust, Thomas again criticized the Court’s Indian Commerce Clause rulings.  Allowing the federal government to take land within a state into trust on behalf of an Indian tribe, Thomas argued, could not be supported by any language in the Constitution, and it would have shocked the “Founding Fathers” to “find such a power lurking in a clause they understood to give Congress the limited authority to ‘regulate trade with Indian tribes living beyond state boundaries.”

If Congress had no legitimate constitutional authority to legislate for Indians (in this case, the legislation in question was the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act), and no acceptable justification for its claim to plenary power, Thomas believed that power must exist in some other entity.  For Thomas, it seemed to be with the states, a power reserved to them by the Constitution.   And that logic, if acted upon, would be toxic and destructive.  Leaving Indian tribes at the mercy of state governments would eliminate the nation-to-nation relationship between the United States and native nations, and produce a full negation of American Indian tribal sovereignty.

Thomas, in a manner entirely consistent with his earlier rulings, could rule against Murphy. He could argue that the Major Crimes Act is unconstitutional, because there is no justification for this extension of federal control over native nations in the sparse language of the Constitution. There is a lot of legal scholarship out there on the Supreme Court’s rulings on the scope or limits of the Indian Commerce Clause, and I have by no means read it all.  Matthew L. M. Fletcher, who Nagle interviews at length in This Land, and Gregory Ablavsky, have both written about the Indian Commerce clause, and they both flatly reject Thomas’s conclusions.  They believe that his interpretation of the Indian Commerce Clause is too narrow, too literal, and that Congress did have the power to enact protective pieces of legislation like the Indian Reorganization Act, or the Indian Child Welfare Act, or to take Indian lands within a state into trust.  There is a long thread of decisions they argue, where Congress protected Native nations from the encroaching power of the several states.  They have a point, I suppose.

I have only sampled some this scholarship, and I have a lot more to read.  But I am not sure Ablavsky, for instance, is absolutely right.  And what if Thomas is right?  At least in part?  A little bit? Thomas could spell out his beliefs fully in the Murphy case.

In other words, what if the Constitution does not give Congress plenary power over Indian affairs?  Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution says that “Congress shall have the power to regulate Commerce with foreign nations and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.”  Ablavsky notes that the Founding Fathers used the word “intercourse” far more often than they did the word “commerce,” and that this word has a wider range of meanings.  There is a lot of truth to that.  The first federal Congress, in order to flesh out the sparse language of the Constitution, enacted in the summer of 1790 the first of a series of “Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts.”  But look at the legislation.  The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act regulated those instances where native peoples and newcomers came into contact by limiting the actions of non-Indians: Americans could not trade with Indians without a license, for instance, and purchases of Indian land could be effected only by the national government.  In the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, one could argue that Congress asserted no power to regulate the internal affairs of any native nation.

Maybe plenary power is a lie, a fiction, or a fraud.  Maybe Thomas is right, in that the Court, over many years, has just sort of made stuff up to suit its purposes.

I have many friends who spend a great deal of time decrying the so-called “Doctrine of Discovery,” the notion that somehow the Europeans’ discovery of America gave them title to land on this continent.  Many of them are calling for a repeal of the doctrine, and for its repudiation by the churches who originally espoused it.   Is the notion of “plenary power” any less a fiction?  Can it be justified in any way from the sparse language in the Constitution which, Justice Thomas has asserted consistently throughout his career (whatever you think of him), truly matters?  Justice Thomas has pointed out that the Court’s Indian Commerce Clause rulings are built on a fiction, that they stand without justification in the Constitution’s language. 

Perhaps, rather than placing that power in the hands of state governments, as Justice Thomas seems to suggest, it more accurately could be asserted that the Constitution recognized native nations as separate polities, over which it exercised no control and no authority, save for an authority superior to the states to regulate interactions between these native nations and the American people.  Congress, rather than the states, could regulate commerce and intercourse by regulating the activities of American citizens, but it could claim no power to do anything within and over native nations themselves, because no such power is stated in the Constitution.  If the Doctrine of Discovery is a racist sham, as its critics assert, then perhaps the Congressional plenary power doctrine is a falsehood, too, a misinterpretation of framers’ intent and a complete fiction that the United States ought to address if it wants honor its endorsement several years ago of the UNDRIP.  And if it is a fiction, we are left with one conclusion about the federal government’s claim to exercise absolute authority in the realm of Indian affairs:  that its claim to plenary power rests on nothing more, at the end of the day, than brute force.  Colonialism is alive and well.

We won’t get that far in Murphy. But what I do fear is that Thomas could hold that the entire plenary power doctrine is unconstitutional, that under the 10th Amendment, ” powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” And that could be catastrophic for native nations.

Discovery and Exploration, History and Historians, Liberal Arts

Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Revisited

1 Comment

Peter Feinman does important work promoting the study of New York history. It is important to give him his due. That said, a number of recent posts on his blog touching upon subjects relevant to Native American history struck me as particularly disappointing.

Over the past couple of weeks, Feinman has offered his thoughts on the Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day controversy. As many readers will no doubt recognize, a growing number of states, municipalities, and other organizations have replaced their celebration of Columbus Day with recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Drawing upon the language used in newspaper coverage, Feinman sees this process as insufficiently respectful. Columbus Day has not been replaced by Indigenous Peoples’ Day. No. It has been “dumped” and “ditched.” In the second installment, posted on May 30 and available here, Feinman describes the origins of America’s reverence for Columbus in myth, memory, and history. There is some useful information here. Feinman argues that “the issue of Columbus is very much connected to the culture wars that are currently dividing America.”

You almost get the impression that if Columbus had not sailed the ocean blue in 1492 that Europeans, smallpox, and genocide would never have occurred and that the United States would not even exist as a country, since there would have been no one here to declare independence from England.

There is in Feinman’s post the familiar expression of concerns about matters “politically correct.” For instance, Feinman writes that “just as it is now illegal to dance to the music of Michael Jackson, laugh at a joke by Woody Allen, or watch anything involving a #MeToo person,” so “Columbus is to be cleansed from our midst.” The message these efforts send, Feinman says, is that “it is incumbent on Americans to purify the country of its sins and the stains on the social fabric.” If you read my blog with any regularity, you know I find these arguments unpersuasive. To call something “politically correct,” it seems to me, is the intellectual equivalent of calling someone a Communist in the 1950s. It is an indication that you are not interested in debate and, too often, that you are uninterested in talking about the historical experience of peoples on the margins.

In the third installment, Feinman objects to uncritical use of the word “indigenous,” which he believes has conveyed “the message that there is a global people called Indigenous as if they are a single people.”

When I was growing up I don’t recall hearing the word ‘indigenous’ often. Peoples usually had real names. Sometimes they were their own names, sometimes they were the names other applied to them–Indians, Asians, Egyptians, etc. Now these Eurocentric names are to be banished from polite conversation. People are to be referred to as indigenous no matter where they are in the world. The word “Indigenous” has been weaponized by some white Americans in the culture wars against other white Americans, and imposed on people who had names for themselves and never used the word “Indigenous.” The result is a simpleminded, superficial, bogus term that produces strange results when removed from the American context that created it. Why did the politically correct unleash this weapon?

Uncritical language use is maddening. But I do not believe that this is as big a problem as Feinman says it is. “Indigenous:” the word is commonly used, as Feinman says, but its application is hardly mysterious and hardly mystifying. Its application to native peoples countering “settler colonialism” or good ol’ fashioned imperialism is a salutary development. And look at the language in Feinman’s post. There is talk of weapons unleashed, of prohibition and proscription, of banishment and censorship. I disagree with a lot of this. This is the language of a culture war, indeed. But as a white guy who has taught Native American history for a quarter-century, I have never felt the limitations that seem to run through what Feinman has to say here. I have had debates with many, arguments with others. But that is part of the game. The past is contested, and that includes the language we use to describe it. It is not a war. It is what we do.

I have written about Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the past. As I wrote back in October of 2017, “in Native American history, there are lots of guilty parties, but Christopher Columbus is guiltier than most.” Columbus gets both more credit and more criticism than he deserves as an individual. That said, “there is absolutely nothing edifying in this story of avarice, violence, and religious bigotry, save for the native peoples who at times and places survived the carnage,” and “the continued celebration of Columbus Day does a historical injustice to the native peoples of two continents and the Caribbean.” Nothing Feinman wrote convinced me to change my mind on this matter.

Feinman says much of value about the origins of Columbus Day. He is absolutely correct in pointing out Americans’ uncritical reverence for Columbus, and he provides some interesting examples. Columbus always has been a symbol. He remain a symbol today. The Columbian Encounter, so-called, is the beginning of a horror story for the native peoples of the Americas, North, South, and Central, as well as the indigenous population of the Caribbean, who were quickly destroyed as autonomous peoples by the Spanish newcomers.  Columbus, his supporters might argue, gets too much of the blame.  He did nothing to native peoples in North America because he never set foot on the North American continent.  This much is true, but Columbus has become, and perhaps always has been, a symbol standing in for the “fundamental violence of discovery,” as I class it in the second chapter of Native America. Between the first and second editions of the textbook, one of the many books I read as I worked on revising was Andres Resendez’s excellent The Other Slavery which, among other things, described in detail the centrality of slavery in Columbus’s enterprise.  Columbus carried slaves back to Spain on each of his voyages, and promised the Crown “as many slaves as Their Majesties orders to make.”

Holidays come, and holidays go. Ask any historian. She will tell you that. Commemorating Indigenous Peoples’ Day does not belittle or demean the western tradition.  What it does do is allow us to pay attention to the experience of those native peoples whose losses were Europeans’ gain, and who have endured and survived through five centuries of discrimination, dispossession, and slaughter. If, after all, any number of people in our nation’s history had had their way, native peoples would be gone: They would have been wiped out by warfare and epidemic and chronic disease; or they would have been “removed” to make way for the “settlers” who championed the rise of Andrew Jackson in the first few decades of the nineteenth century; or confined on tiny reservations until the missionaries and teachers and government farmers wiped away any trace of their identity as native peoples; or assimilated into the American body politic; or “terminated” in the middle decades of the twentieth century, with the reality of their native nations erased by congressional statute.  Indians were supposed to disappear. If any number of people had their way, Native American people would not be here to call for an Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Columbus Day found its origins in discrimination against Italian-American immigrants. We were here from the beginning, Italian-Americans said, and we have as great a claim to this continent as any other group.  The holiday has seldom encouraged any significant and honest discussion of the consequences of the Columbian Encounter, a process which was, as historian Alfred Crosby showed a long time ago, much bigger than Christopher Columbus.  It is time for the bad history and the myth associated with this day to go away, and if recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day helps I am all for it.  Let’s talk about Columbus, to be sure, and the European invasion of America, but let’s do so with our eyes firmly upon those native peoples whose losses were Europeans’ gain, and who have endured and survived through five centuries of discrimination, dispossession, and slaughter.

Treaty Rights

How Does a Story End?

1 Comment

Driving from Rochester to Washington a couple of weeks ago, I saw this historical marker on Route 15, just north of the Pennsylvania state line. It commemorated the “final episode” of the Sullivan-Clinton campaign in 1779. American forces invaded the western Iroquois homelands and burned towns throughout the “Finger Lakes” region of western New York. I tell the story of the Sullivan-Clinton campaign in Native America. I have also written about it on this blog here and here. Because I cross the paths Sullivan’s army traveled frequently, I am familiar with many of the historical markers identifying key sites in the campaign.

But his one was new to me. The people who wrote it believed that the Sullivan-Clinton campaign ended near this spot. The soldiers completed their mission. The story began, and it ended.

I find myself these days spending a lot of time talking history with what some might call “amateurs”–people who are interested in the past, who enjoy reading history, even if they do not study it systematically. One of the things that strikes me about these conversations is that we have not been as effective as we might have been in describing what it is that we do, and why we do it. We have not, among other things, explained how much choice is involved in the historical enterprise. We choose the stories that we want to tell. We determine what questions we want to answer, how we can best answer them, and how best to present the results of our research. We determine the scope of our work geographically–how much space we are going to cover, and chronologically. He have to decide where in time our stories begin and end.

According to this marker, the story of the Sullivan Campaign, ended “with the advance of Col. Van Cortland’s brigade up the Canisteo River to this area two miles beyond the Tory-Indian town of Painted Post burned by Capt. Simon Spaulding’s riflemen, September 28, 1779.” Joseph Fischer, in the most thoroughly-researched military history of the invasion, says it began in July and ended in September.

But did it?

The soldiers went home. Or they went to fight elsewhere. Some of them later returned to New York, settling on lands seized from the Iroquois. But the expedition was, as Fischer calls it, a “well-executed failure.” That apt title implies that despite the invasion, the Indians remained. They resisted. Their towns burned, the fields destroyed, the orchards cut down, they settled at the refugee haven around British-controlled Fort Niagara, or along Buffalo Creek. They suffered through a brutal winter. They fought on. And when the British abandoned them, they faced the onslaught of settlement encouraged by private land companies, the state, and the United States. They signed treaties and formal deeds of cession. New York’s rise as the “Empire State” could not have occurred without Iroquois dispossession.

But after the campaign the Senecas remained in New York. That much is obvious. They resisted their complete dispossession. They obtained security for some of their lands at Canandaigua in 1794, sold much of their homeland in 1797, and in 1802, 1815, 1826 and 1838 as well. But they are force still in western New York. Their gaming enterprises in Niagara Falls, Salamanca, and Buffalo are significant. They have survived, even though they continue to contend with the obtrusive power of the state. Perhaps the story of the Sullivan-Clinton campaign, which its planners hoped would lead to “civilization or death” to the American “savages,” has yet to end.

New Publications

What You Need To Read, June 2019

Leave a comment

Anderson, Gary Clayton. Massacre in Minnesota: The Dakota War of 1862, The Most Violent Ethnic Conflict in American History, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).

Arnott, Sigrid and David L. Maki., “Forts on Burial Mounds: Interlocked Lanscapes of Mourning and Colonialism at the Dakota-Settler Frontier, 1860-1876,” Historical Archaeology, 53 (March 2019) 153-169.

Barman, Jean. Iroquois in the West, (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2019).

Beck, David R. M. Unfair Labor: American Indians and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019)

Bigart Robert and Joseph McDonald, eds, ‘Sometimes My People Get Mad When the Blackfeet Kill Us”: A Documentary History of the Salish and Pend d’Oreille Indians, 1845-1874, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).

Bjork, Katharine. Prairie Imperialist: The Indian Country Origins of America Empire, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)

Blee, Lisa and Jean M. O’Brien, Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit, (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2019)

Booss, John, “Survival of the Pilgrims: A Reevaluation of the Lethal Epidemic Among the Wampanoag,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 47 (Winter 2019), 109-133.

Catalano, Joshua Casmir. “Blue Jacket, Anthony Wayne and the Psychological and Symbolic War for Ohio, 1790-1795,” Ohio History, 126 (Spring 2019), 5-34.

Cipolla, Craig N. et. al., “Theory in Collaborative Indigenous Archaeology: Insights from Mohegan,” American Antiquity, 84 (January 2019), 127-142.

Clow, Richmond L. “Crossing the Divide from Citizen to Voter: Tribal Suffrage in Montana, 1880-2016,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 69 (Spring 2019), 34-54.

Colwell, Chip. “Can Repatriation Heal the Wounds of History? Public Historian, 41 (February 2019), 90-110.

Conner, Thaddeus, et. al., “20 Years of Indian Gaming: Reassessing and Still Winning,” Social Science Quarterly, 100 (May 2019). 893-807

Dixon, Bradley J. “‘His One Netev Ples’: The Chowans and the Politics of Native Petitions in the Colonial South,” William and Mary Quarterly, 76 (January 2019), 41-74.

Donis, Jay. “No Man Shall Suffer for the Murder of a Savge: The Augusta Boys and the Virginia and Pennsylvania Frontiers” Pennsylvania History, 86 (Winter 2019) 38-66.

Ebright, Malcolm. Pueblo Sovereignty: Indian Land and Water in New Mexico and Texas, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).

Estes, Nick. Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, (New York: Verso, 2019).

Farley, William A., et. al., “A Quantitative Dwelling-Scale Approach to the Social Implications of Maize Horticulture in New England,” American Antiquity, 84 (April 2019), 274-291.

Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. As Long as Grass grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, From Colonization to Standing Rock, (Boston: Beacon, 2019).

Goetz, Rebecca Anne. “The Nanziatticos and the Violence of the Archive: Land and Native Enslavement in Colonial Virginia,” Journal of Southern History, 85 (February 2019), 33-60.

Hart, Siobhan M. and Paul A. Shackel. Colonialism, Community and Heritage in Native New England, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019).

Herrman, Rachel B. To Feast on Us as their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic, (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2019).

Hipp, Martha Louise. Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).

Johnson, Miranda. “Case of the Million-Dollar Duck: A Hunter, his Treaty, and the Bending of the Settler Contract,” American Historical Review, 124 (February 2019), 56-86.

Kristofic, Jim. Medicine Women: The Story of the First Native American Nursing School, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019).

Lambert, Michael. “How Grandma Kate Lost Her Cherokee Blood and What This Says about Race, Blood, and Belonging in Indian Country,” American Indian Quarterly, 43 (Spring 2019), 135-167.

Landrum, Cynthia. The Dakota Sioux Experience at Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).

Legg, James B., et. al., “An Appraisal of the Indigenous Acquisition of Contact-Era European Metal Objects in Southeastern North America,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 23 (March 2019), 81-102.

Madley, Benjamin. “California’s First Mass INcarceration System: Franciscan Missions, California Indians and Penal Servitude, 1769-1836,” Pacific Historical Review, 88 (2019), 14-47.

Methot, Suzanne. Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing, (Toronto: ECW Press, 2019).

Miller, Douglas K. Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century, (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2019).

Nassaney, Michael S. “Cultural Identity and Materiality at French Fort St. Joseph, (20BE23) Niles, Michigan.” Historical Archaeology, 53 (March 2019), 56-72.

Newman, Andrew. Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities, (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2019).

Nickel, Sarah. “Reconsidering 1969: The White Paper and the Making of the Modern Indigenous Rights Movement,” Canadian Historical Review, 100 (June 2019), 223-238.

Osburn, Katherine M. B. “Strategic Citizenship: Negotiating Public Law 280 in Arizona, 1953-1968,” Ethnohistory 66 (January 2019).

Poorman, Elizabeth. “White Lies: Indigenous Scholars Respond to Elizabeth Warren’s Claims to Native Ancestry,” Perspectives on History, 57 (March 2019), 9-11.

Schneider, Tsim and Lee M. Panich, “Landscapes of Refuge and Resiliency: Native California Persistence at Tomales Bay, California, 1770s-1870s,” Ethnohistory, 66 (January 2019).

Schneider, Tsim D. “Heritage In-Between: Seeing Native HIstories in Colonial California,” Public Historian, 41 (February 2019), 51-63.

Simek, Jan F., et. al., “The Red Bird River Shelter (15CY52) Revisited: The Archaeology of the Cherokee Syllabary and of Sequoyah in Kentucky,” American Antiquity, 84 (April 2019), 302-316.

Spencer, Jasmine, “The Buffalo, the Chickadee, and the Eagle: A Multispecies Textual history of Plenty Coup’s Multivocal Autobiography.” American Indian Quarterly, 43 (spring 2019), 168-203.

Sussman, Naomi. “Indigenous Diplomacy and Spanish Mediation in the Lower Colorado-Gila River Region, 1771-1783,” Ethnohistory, 66 (April 2019), 329-352.

Sweet, Jameson. “Native Suffrage: Race, Citizenship, and Dakota Indians in the Upper Midwest,” Journal of the Early Republic, 39 (Spring 2019), 99-109

Tone-Pah-ote, Jenny. Crafting an Indigenous Nation: Kiowa Expressive Culture in the Progressive Era, (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2019).

Wellington, Rebecca. “Girls Breaking Boundaries: Acculturatin and Self-Advocacy at Chemawa Indian School, 1900-1930s,” American Indian Quarterly, 43 (Winter 2019), 101-132.