Review of \u3ci\u3eCompact, Contract, Covenant: Aboriginal Treaty Making in Canada\u3c/i\u3e. By J.R. Miller.

In Canada, the term First Nations explicitly recognizes a nation-to-nation relationship between the Crown and the original inhabitants of North America that requires treaty making as the primary political and legal process for the taking of Indian lands and the incorporation of Indian nations into the multinational Canadian state. There are great political difficulties embodied in this process, including the continued impoverishment and marginalization of the First Nations, and the repeated failure of successive Canadian governments to carry out their responsibilities under these treaties, but the treaty process remains the required process. J.R. Miller, perhaps Canada\u27s leading scholar of Aboriginal history, takes on an ambitious project, a sweeping history of treaty making in Canada with the express goal of making this process understandable to all Canadians in order to promote interracial reconciliation. This is an ambitious book, the first history of treaty making in Canada intended for the general reader as well as for academic historians

Review of \u3ci\u3eCompact, Contract, Covenant: Aboriginal Treaty Making in Canada\u3c/i\u3e. By J.R. Miller.

In Canada, the term First Nations explicitly recognizes a nation-to-nation relationship between the Crown and the original inhabitants of North America that requires treaty making as the primary political and legal process for the taking of Indian lands and the incorporation of Indian nations into the multinational Canadian state. There are great political difficulties embodied in this process, including the continued impoverishment and marginalization of the First Nations, and the repeated failure of successive Canadian governments to carry out their responsibilities under these treaties, but the treaty process remains the required process. J.R. Miller, perhaps Canada\u27s leading scholar of Aboriginal history, takes on an ambitious project, a sweeping history of treaty making in Canada with the express goal of making this process understandable to all Canadians in order to promote interracial reconciliation. This is an ambitious book, the first history of treaty making in Canada intended for the general reader as well as for academic historians

Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Standing Bear Controversy: Prelude to Indian Reform\u3c/i\u3e By Valerie Sherer Mathes and Richard Lowitt

Standing Bear v. George Crook, an 1879 case brought in the Federal District Court in Omaha, is today little more than a footnote in United States Indian law. Yet this case, like thousands of other cases that American Indians brought to US courts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was an important effort by one group of Indians to define their relationship with the United States through law. The Ponca story is among the best known, but certainly no more tragic than many of the other Indian cases. The Ponca\u27s lands were given to the Lakota, without their knowledge or consent. They were removed to the Indian Territory after a negotiation process in which, since such terms as land, sale, and removal had no meaning in the Ponca language, they could not possibly have understood what was happening to them. In the Indian Territory they died by the hundreds, a result, in the view of the Office of Indian Affairs, to be expected whenever a cold weather tribe was moved to the south. Standing Bear walked back, carrying the body of the sixteen year- old son he had promised to bury in his own country. He was arrested by the army and held in Fort Omaha. With the help of white friends he challenged his imprisonment, arguing that an Indian had as much right to travel in the United States as did any other person. At stake was the whole question of the legal status of Indians, and Indian citizenship. The Standing Bear Controversy is a welcome addition to the steady series of books describing the legal history of Indians in the United States. More than any other population in America, Indians repeatedly went to the courts to seek redress for the injustice done them time after time. Each case is different, as each struggle takes a different legal form. Standing Bear nominally won his case, when the United States decided not to appeal, but the Ponca never got back their lands. Indian sovereignty and the entire question of the legal status of Indians was deeply rooted in the fundamental issue of who owned Indians\u27 land. The forced removal of Indians from their lands was the central fact of the development of the American West. This is an important study of one part of that history

Review of \u3ci\u3e American Indian Law Deskbook\u3c/i\u3e by Julie Wrend and Clay Smith

The problems with this book begin with premises set out in the Foreword. TheAmerican Indian Law Deskbook is a product of the Conference of Western Attorneys General. It was collectively written by the attorney general\u27s offices of Montana, Utah, Idaho, Washington, North Dakota, Montana, Nevada, and Colorado because these offices have long felt that they have been hampered [in their work] by the absence of a comprehensive and objective treatise on Indian law (p. xiv). Exacerbating the problem [of a complicated legal structure of Indian law] has been a relatively small amount of legal scholarship in the area of Indian law. While numerous books, treatises, and articles have been published, the attention given to this area of law has been small compared to other areas. And much of what has been published has been polemical rather than pure scholarship, not surprising given the emotion this topic often arouses (p. xiii)