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View Our New Web Resource: Indigenous Law Web Archive

The Law Library collects and preserves legal materials for American law, foreign law, and sovereign Indigenous nations. Many governments, including Indigenous national, tribal and community governments, are transitioning from print to solely digital formats for publishing their laws. The Law Library is working to collect and preserve these materials. To further these collection and preservation aims, the Library has created the Indigenous Law Web Archive, a collection of constitutions, codes, executive orders, and court forms and information of sovereign Indigenous governments and courts of 578 federally recognized nations, communities, and tribes in the United States, as well as some Indigenous legal information from Canada, published online. The Library attempts to acquire the most comprehensive collection possible. Collected resources are embargoed for a year prior to release, and so the collection was launched this summer. It’s a useful starting point for comparative research, and we hope that this tool will assist practitioners and scholars of Indigenous law in their work.

 

Screenshot of the Indigenous Law Web Archive [viewed November 17, 2020]

John Ross: His Struggle for Homeland and Sovereignty

This post was co-authored by Jennifer Davis and Shannon Herlihy, Law Library Creative Intern. Saturday, October 3, was the birthday of Principal Chief John Ross (ᎫᏫᏍᎫᏫ) a member of the Cherokee Nation, of Cherokee and Scottish descent, who through his tribal leadership guided the Cherokee people through multiple legal challenges. Ross was educated at mission […]

From the Serial Set: Citizenship and Suffrage for Native Americans

Welcome to the final installment of suffrage stories from the Serial Set! Today, we will be looking at the history of Native American citizenship and how voting rights came into play. Despite the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, Native Americans were not guaranteed citizenship, nor voting rights, under the United States government. Reports from the […]

The Teaching Contract that Brought Sami Reindeer to Alaska

Today marks the National Sami Day in Sapmi – an area spanning the national borders of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russian Kola Peninsula. The Sami are a semi-nomadic people who have moved across national borders in Sapmi for hundreds of years. Similar to other people from the Scandinavian countries, they have also crossed the Atlantic in hopes […]

Chief Standing Bear and His Landmark Civil Rights Case

The National Statuary Hall of the United States Capitol has a number of statues of indigenous Americans—Will Rogers, Kamehameha I, Washakie, Po’pay, Sequoyah, Sakakawea, and the newest—Chief Standing Bear, just donated to the hall by Nebraska and installed in September 2019. If a legal scholar wanted to study an inspiring legal figure for Native American […]

Remembering the Ancestors for Indigenous People’s Day

Greetings from Piscataway/Pamunkey lands! As Indigenous Peoples Day approached, the blog team discussed writing about the holiday and a new program that is going to air soon. It seemed like a good time to remember some of the earlier residents of this country: the Ancestral Puebloans. Conservators have worked to preserve many of their dwellings in […]

The Murder of Penowanyanquis and the Trial of Arthur Peach, Plymouth, 1638

One of the most vivid criminal trials of seventeenth-century American history celebrated its 380th anniversary a few days ago on Sept. 4. On that day, in 1638, authorities in Plymouth Colony tried Arthur Peach, along with three codefendants, for the murder of a Nipmuc man called Penowanyanquis. The court found the men guilty and sentenced […]