Title: Internationalism and the American Indian Scholar: Native Studies and the Challenge of Pan-Indigenism
Abstract: At the end of the Revolutionary War, the Cherokees had already become skilled diplomats in treaty negotiations with European nations. Like many past American Indian leaders, Corn Tassel employs the rhetoric of law to oppose the encroachment of white settlers and to protect Cherokee land and life. Corn Tassel and other Cherokee leaders invoke an international relationship by adjudicating among laws, between those humanitarian laws that Cherokees believe should transcend national borders—Natural Law and the Law of Nations—and those laws, such as the Right of Conquest, that shall not.1 Such adjudication is a fact of legal discourse, and Native nations have worked through the centuries to better shape international law, or as it is called, "federal Indian law," with the United States of America. Like other countries, Indian tribes have long rooted their sense of nationhood and identity in land, and maintain these through the recognition of territorial borders and property: "We are a separate people!," Corn Tassel exhorts. "[Our game] is … as much our property as other animals are yours …." Such cries of American Indian nationhood, territory, and property might surprise scholars in the humanities unfamiliar with Indian law. Though theory decries the "essentialist" exclusions of "borders" in Postcolonial Studies, Indian law has, and continues to recognize national borders as a necessary and productive legal reality.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 16
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