26 research outputs found
Institutional Racism
Much of the activity in the 1960s revolving about civil rights reflected the belief that racism was a personal flaw which could be corrected by the proper adjustment of federal laws to give substance to the promises of citizenship. George Wallace, Lester Maddox, and Bull Connor all personified racism with their determined efforts to prevent blacks from achieving full citizenship rights and their excesses spurred them to action when it was believed that with the power of the federal government curbing the activities of a few die-hard racists discrimination would finally be conquered. The emphasis on personal attitudes obscured the deeply ingrained institutional views of race which had systematically discriminated against minority groups for decades. Correcting individual patterns of behavior, people believed, would also cure institutional practices since it was apparent to everyone that institutions were ultimately composed of people
Racial and Ethnic Studies, Political Science and Mid-Wifery
One of the major fallacies of Western civilization, according to Alfred North Whitehead,\u27 was the propensity of Western thinkers to assume that ideas generated within their intellectual landscape were indicative of reality itself. Although some phases of Western science, notably physics and philosophy, have transcended their parochial origins, aspects of the old medieval synthesis still remain in the Western worldview. The gradual fragmentation of the old categories of natural history and theology into the isolated sciences and disciplines of today has produced a myriad of separate bodies of knowledge complete with their professional priesthoods and has allowed considerable slippage in the ability of the Western scientific paradigm to generate adequate explanations for the multitude of problems we face as a society
Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations
Federal Indian law... is a loosely related collection of past and present acts of Congress, treaties and agreements, executive orders, administrative rulings, and judicial opinions, connected only by the fact that law in some form has been applied haphazardly to American Indians over the course of several centuries.... Indians in their tribal relation and Indian tribes in their relation to the federal government hang suspended in a legal wonderland.
In this book, two prominent scholars of American Indian law and politics undertake a full historical examination of the relationship between Indians and the United States Constitution that explains the present state of confusion and inconsistent application in U.S. Indian law. The authors examine all sections of the Constitution that explicitly and implicitly apply to Indians and discuss how they have been interpreted and applied from the early republic up to the present. They convincingly argue that the Constitution does not provide any legal rights for American Indians and that the treaty-making process should govern relations between Indian nations and the federal government.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1331/thumbnail.jp
[Introduction to] The Legal Universe: Observations on the Foundations of American Law
According to Deloria and Wilkins, Whenever American minorities have raised voices of protest, they have been admonished to work within the legal system that seek its abolition. This essential work examines the historical evolution of the legal rights of various minority groups and the relationship between these rights and the philosophical intent of the American founders.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1336/thumbnail.jp
TecnologĂa tradicional
El presente artĂculo realiza una crĂtica al reduccionismo presente en la racionalidad cientĂfica y tecnolĂłgica moderna. En la sociedad contemporánea, la articulaciĂłn entre este reduccionismo y el modelo cosmolĂłgico mecanicista ha llevado a un absolutismo objetivizante que simplifica la complejidad de la realidad. En este sentido, el proyecto de formaciĂłn de alto nivel para los pueblos indĂgenas, deberĂa evitar dicho reduccionismo, se sugiere entonces que las prácticas cientĂficas y tecnolĂłgicas indĂgenas sean revaloradas como fuentes válidas para un diálogo intercultural; en este los fines locales tienen un lugar privilegiado
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Secularism, Civil Religion, and the Religious Freedom of American Indians
In 1978, Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Resolution. At that time, most American Indians believed that the status of their right to practice their traditional religions was protected by that special legislation, even though in floor debate congressman Morris Udall had specifically stated that no major laws were being changed and no disruption of the existing state of affairs would take place. In the decade-and-a-half since then, Indian litigants have cited the religious freedom resolution as an indication on the part of Congress that it was federal policy, to be followed by all federal agencies, that the particular needs of traditional religious practitioners would be accommodated.
In 1988, the Supreme Court turned aside the Indians of northern California, refusing to prohibit the building of a minor logging road that would ruin the high country where they held vision quests and gathered medicines (Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Assn., 485 U. S. 439 [1988]). In the spring of 1990, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Oregon did not have to present a compelling interest in order to pass legislation that would have the effect of virtually eliminating a religion, in this instance the use of peyote for religious ritual purposes (Employment Div., Dept. of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, -U. S.-, 108 L. Ed. 2d 876 [1990]). The consternation that has arisen among American Indians since these decisions is genuine, and many people feel betrayed by both the Congress and the Supreme Court
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Alcatraz, Activism, and Accommodation
Alcatraz and Wounded Knee 1973 have come to symbolize the revival of Indian fortunes in the late twentieth century, so we hesitate to discuss the realities of the time or to look critically at their actual place in modern Indian history. We conclude that it is better to wrap these events in romantic notions and broker that feeling in exchange for further concessions from the federal government; consequently, we fail to learn from them the hard lessons that will serve us well in leaner times.
Activism in the 1950s was sporadic but intense. In 1957, Lumbee people surrounded a Ku Klux Klan gathering in North Carolina and escorted the hooded representatives of white supremacy back to their homes sans weapons and costumes. In 1961, a strange mixture of Six Nations people and non-Indian supporters attempted a citizens’ arrest of the secretary of the interior, and, sometime during this period, a band of “True Utes” briefly took over the agency offices at Fort Duchesne. The only context for these events was the long suffering of small groups of people bursting forth in an incident that illustrated oppression but suggested no answer to pressing problems. In 1964, the “fish-ins” in the Pacific Northwest produced the first activism with an avowed goal; continual agitation in that region eventually resulted in U.S. v. Washington, which affirmed once and for all the property rights of Northwest tribes for both subsistence and commercial fishing.
Indians benefited substantially from the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the ensuing doctrines concerning the poor, which surfaced in the Economic Opportunity Act and more particularly in its administration. The civil rights movement had roots in a hundred small gatherings of concerned attorneys brought together by Jack Greenberg and Thurgood Marshall to determine the legal and philosophical basis for overturning Plessy v. Ferguson. Concentrating on the concept of equality, a series of test cases involving access to professional education in the border states cut away the unexamined assumption that separate facilities for higher education automatically meant equality of treatment and equality of the substance of education