Making Indian Law : The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory

by Christian W. McMillen

• ISBN13: 9780300114607
• ISBN10: 0300114605
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2007-02-28
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

In 1941, a groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court decision changed the field of Indian law, setting off an intellectual and legal revolution that continues to reverberate around the world. This book tells for the first time the story of that case,United States, as Guardian of the HualapaiIndians of Arizona, v. Santa Fe Pacific Railroad Co., which ushered in a new way of writing Indian history to serve the law of land claims. Since 1941 the Hualapai case has traveled the globe. Wherever and whenever indigenous land claims are litigated, the shadow of the Hualapai case falls over the proceedings. Threatened by railroad claims and by an unsympathetic government in the postWorld War I years, Hualapai activists launched a campaign to save their reservation, a campaign which had at its center documenting the history of Hualapai land use. The book recounts how key individuals brought the case to the Supreme Court against great odds and highlights the central role of the Indians in formulating new understandings of Native people, their property, and their past.

Author Biography

Christian W. McMillen is assistant professor of history and American studies, University of Virginia. He lives in Charlottesville, VA.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	xiii
Maps	xix
Part I: Keeping the Country Whole
1. The Hualapais	3
2. The Conflict	12
3. The Hualapai Awakening	17
4. The Government Versus the Hualapais	36
5. Taking Hualapai Land	50
6. Writing Indians out of Their Land	59
7. The Hualapais and History	71
8. Land and Law	86
9. Saving Hualapai Land	104
Part II: Making Indian Law
10. Building a Case	125
11. The Case in Court	144
12. The Supreme Court and the Power of History	159
13. In the Wake of Hualpai	166
Notes	185
Index	271