Crow Dog's Case: American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and United States Law in the Nineteenth Century

by Sidney L. Harring

• ISBN13: 9780521467155
• ISBN10: 0521467152
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-02-25
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Crow's Dog Case is the first social history of American Indians' role in the making of American law. This book sheds new light on Native American struggles for sovereignty and justice in nineteenth-century America. The 'century of dishonor', a time when American Indians' lands were lost and their tribes reduced to reservations, provoked a wide variety of tribal responses. Some of the more succesful responses were in the area of law, forcing the newly independent American legal order to create a unique place for Indian tribes in American law. Although the United States has a system of law structuring a unique position for American Indians, they have been left out of American legal history. Crow Dog, Crazy Snake, Sitting Bull, Bill Whaley, Tla-coo-yeo-oe, Isparhecher, Lone Wolf, and others had their own jurisprudence, kept alive by their own legal traditions.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. A High Pretension of Savage Sovereignty

2. Corn Tassell: State and Federal Conflict over Tribal Sovereignty

3. American Indian Law and the Indian Nations: The Creek Nation, 1870-1900

4. Crow Dog's Case

5. Imposed Law and Forced Assimilation: The Legal Impact of the Major crimes Act and the Kamaga Decision

6. Sitting Bull and Clapox: The Application of Bia Law to Indians Outside of the Major Crimes Act

7. The Struggle for Tribal Sovereignty in Alaska, 1867-1900

8. The Legal Structuring of Violence: American Law and the Indian Wars

9. Conclusion.