BOOK: Heidi BOHAKER, Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020). ISBN 9781442647312, USD 48.75

(Source: University of Toronto Press)

 

The University of Toronto Press is publishing a book on the Anishinaabe and clan identification markings on treaties and legal documents during the 17^th-19^th centuries.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Combining socio-legal and ethnohistorical studies, this book presents the history of doodem, or clan identification markings, left by Anishinaabe on treaties and other legal documents from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. These doodems reflected fundamental principles behind Anishinaabe governance that were often ignored by Europeans, who referred to Indigenous polities in terms of tribe, nation, band, or village – classifications that failed to fully encompass longstanding cultural traditions of political authority within Anishinaabe society.

 

Making creative use of natural history, treaty pictographs, and the Ojibwe language as an analytical tool, Doodem and Council Fire delivers groundbreaking insights into Anishinaabe law. The author asks not only what these doodem markings indicate, but what they may also reveal through their exclusions. The book also ooutlines the continuities, changes, and innovations in Anishinaabe governance through the concept of council fires and the alliances between them. Original and path-breaking, Doodem and Council Fire offers a fresh approach to Indigenous history, presenting a new interpretation grounded in a deep understanding of the nuances and distinctiveness of Anishinaabe culture and Indigenous traditions.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Heidi Bohaker is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

1. The Doodem Tradition

2. Family in All Four Directions

3. Anishinaabe Constitutionalism

4. Governance in Action

5. Doodem in the Era of Settler Colonialism

Conclusion

Bibliography

 

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BOOK REVIEW: Richard Jeffrey ROSS and Brian Philip OWENSBY (eds.), Justice in a New World : Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (New York: NYU Press, 2018), by Christopher TOMLINS.

(Source : NYU)

THE REVIEW : Christopher TOMLINS (Professor, Berkeley Law Faculty, University of California) is the author of the book review, published in The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 642–643, online access : https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz858

ABOUT THE BOOK :

Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross’s interesting collection Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America seeks to advance the history of European Atlantic empires by subjecting the legalities of colonizing to comparative assessment, specifically how encounters between Indigenous peoples and Iberian and Anglophone intruders were refracted by their idiosyncratic legal cultures. Comparison, say the editors, promises broadened conceptual purchase for historians of encounter wishing to interrogate the extent and limits of cross-cultural comprehension. Comparison will open up “new vistas on issues of jurisdiction, sovereignty, legal inclusion and exclusion, the quality and role of intermediation in structuring legal encounters and producing legal outcomes, and the intellectual foundation of justice as a guiding idea for legal engagement”.

Richard Jeffrey ROSS and Brian Philip OWENSBY (eds.), Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Pp. viii, 330. Cloth $89.00, paper $30.00. 

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BOOK: Dylan LINO, Constitutional Recognition - First Peoples and the Australian Settler S tate (Leichardt: The Federation Press, 2018). ISBN 9781760021818, $45.00

(Source: Federation Press)

The Federation Press has published a book on indigenous constitutional recognition in Australia.

ABOUT THE BOOK

When Australians today debate how to achieve a just postcolonial relationship with the First Peoples of the continent, they typically do so using the language of ‘constitutional recognition’. The idea of constitutional recognition has become the subject of community forums and nationwide inquiries, street protests and prime ministerial speeches. Dylan Lino’s book provides the first comprehensive study of Indigenous constitutional recognition in Australia.

Offering more than a legal analysis, Lino places the idea of constitutional recognition into a broader historical and theoretical perspective. After recounting the history of Australian debates on Indigenous recognition, the book presents an account that views constitutional recognition in terms of Indigenous peoples’ struggles to have their identities respected within the settler constitutional order. When studied in this way, constitutional recognition emerges not as a postcolonial endpoint but as an ongoing process of renegotiating the basic Indigenous–settler political relationship.

With First Peoples continuing to press for the recognition of their sovereignty and peoplehood, this book will be a definitive reference point for scholars, advocates, policy-makers and the interested 

public.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dylan Lino is a Lecturer at the University of Western Australia Law School. His research focuses on the rights of Indigenous peoples, constitutional law and theory, and legal history. He holds degrees in Arts and Law (with Honours) from the University of New South Wales, a Master of Laws from Harvard University and a PhD from Melbourne Law School. In 2017, Dylan worked as a legal adviser to the Commonwealth Government’s Referendum Council, whose work led to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword by Professor Megan Davis, Pro Vice-Chancellor Indigenous, UNSW
Acknowledgments 

1.  Introduction

2. The Constitutional Politics of Indigenous Recognition in Australia, 1979–2018

3.  Conceptualising Constitutional Recognition

4.  Constitutionalising Indigenous Recognition

5.  The Incompleteness of Indigenous Constitutional Recognition: Learning from 1967

6.  Indigenous Constitutional Recognition and Racial Discrimination: Learning from 1975

7.  Constitutionally Recognising Indigenous Peoplehood: Towards Indigenous–Settler Federalism

8.  Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

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BOOK: Richard Jeffrey ROSS and Brian Philip OWENSBY (eds.), Justice in a New World : Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (New York: NYU Press, 2018). ISBN 9781479807246, $30

(Source: NYU Press)

NYU Press has just published a new book on the interaction between settler and indigenous laws in the New World.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A historical and legal examination of the conflict and interplay between settler and indigenous laws in the New World

As British and Iberian empires expanded across the New World, differing notions of justice and legality played out against one another as settlers and indigenous people sought to negotiate their relationship. In order for settlers and natives to learn from, maneuver, resist, or accommodate each other, they had to grasp something of each other's legal ideas and conceptions of justice.

This ambitious volume advances our understanding of how natives and settlers in both the British and Iberian New World empires struggled to use the other’s ideas of law and justice as a political, strategic, and moral resource.  In so doing, indigenous people and settlers alike changed their own practices of law and dialogue about justice.  Europeans and natives appealed to imperfect understandings of their interlocutors’ notions of justice and advanced their own conceptions during workaday negotiations, disputes, and assertions of right.  Settlers’ and indigenous peoples’ legal presuppositions shaped and sometimes misdirected their attempts to employ each other’s law.  

Natives and settlers construed and misconstrued each other's legal commitments while learning about them, never quite sure whether they were on solid ground.  Chapters explore the problem of “legal intelligibility”: How and to what extent did settler law and its associated notions of justice became intelligible—tactically, technically and morally—to natives, and vice versa?  To address this question, the volume offers a critical comparison between English and Iberian New World empires.  Chapters probe such topics as treaty negotiations, land sales, and the corporate privileges of indigenous peoples.  Ultimately, Justice in a New World offers both a deeper understanding of the transformation of notions of justice and law among settlers and indigenous people, and a dual comparative study of what it means for laws and moral codes to be legally intelligible.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian P. Owensby is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Intimate Ironies: Making Middle-Class Lives in Modern Brazil (1999) and Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (2008).

Richard J. Ross is Professor of Law and History at the University of Illinois (Urbana/Champaign) and Director of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History. He is the editor, with Lauren Benton, of Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 (2013).

The table of contents can be found here

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BOOK: "Legal Codes and Talking Trees. Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946" by Katrina Jagodinsky (2016)

Legal Codes and Talking Trees. Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946, by Katrina Jagodinsky

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Katrina Jagodinsky’s enlightening history is the first to focus on indigenous women of the Southwest and Pacific Northwest and the ways they dealt with the challenges posed by the existing legal regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In most western states, it was difficult if not impossible for Native women to inherit property, raise mixed-race children, or take legal action in the event of rape or abuse. Through the experiences of six indigenous women who fought for personal autonomy and the rights of their tribes, Jagodinsky explores a long yet generally unacknowledged tradition of active critique of the U.S. legal system by female Native Americans.

Katrina Jagodinsky is assistant professor of history at the University of Nebraska and a former fellow of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU. She lives in Lincoln, NE.

ARTICLE: "How Do Things Get Started? Legal Transplants and Domestication: An Example from Colonial New Zealand", by S. Dorsett

SHAUNNAGH DORSETT, University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Law on "How Do Things Get Started? Legal Transplants and Domestication: An Example from Colonial New Zealand"

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Abstract

‘Unearthing’ is a problematic task for historians. To some extent it assumes continuity between the past and the present, and that matters identified by whatever means as ‘traditions’ in the present were understood that way in the past. It is a backward looking task, rather than an exploration of understandings at a moment in time. Rather than ‘unearthing’, this article seeks to start at the beginning and to think about how things get going in colonies. It pays attention to foundations and to questions of institutional design. This article draws on literature on legal transplants, and examines one example of a legal transplant in New Zealand: the Resident Magistrates’ Court, focusing in particular on its civil jurisdiction. If not the ‘number eight wire’ approach, it is a recognition of pragmatism - the ways in which legal forms, both discursive and institutional, circulated Empire and are made and remade in new times and places in response to local circumstance.