Native Nations of North America: An Indigenous Perspective by Steve Talbot

Author:Steve Talbot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Marketing
Publisher: Pearson
Published: 2014-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

Theory: Criminalization of The Indian

Luana Ross (Salish) (1998), formerly professor of Women’s and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington, and now president of Salish-Kootenai College, proposes that American Indians have been criminalized by White society as a result of internal colonialism and a system of racial oppression that has steadily eroded the treaty rights of Indian nations and peoples. This was accomplished by the U.S. courts and Congress steadily eroding Native sovereignty (see Talbot 2002, 71–76). In this chapter we propose that the political struggle by the River People of the Northwest to protect their treaty right to fish may best be understood by Ross’ loss of sovereignty theory.

In Inventing the Savage, Ross contends that “Native American criminality is tied in a complex and historical way to the loss of [Indian] sovereignty” (Ross 1998, 5). In a section entitled “Colonization and the Social Construction of Deviance,” Ross points out that before White conquest, “Native groups all exercised legal systems founded upon their own traditional philosophies,” and there were no prisons (Ross 1998, 12–13). “Pre-contact Native criminal justice was primarily a system of restitution—mediation between families, of compensation, of recuperation” (Ross 1998, 14). The subsequent destruction of Native justice systems, and controlling of Indian people through Anglo-American law is inherently a product of colonialism. Westward migration, the greed for gold, and land speculation by the dominant society provided the motives for the criminalization of the American Indian. As Ross (1998) puts it, “criminal” meant to be other than Euro-American. Traditional tribal justice codes instantly became criminal when the United States imposed its laws, customs, and values on Native people. New laws were legislated as a means of social control that defined many usual, everyday behaviors and beliefs of the Indians as criminal offenses.

Ross’s loss of sovereignty proposition draws on colonial theory to explain the particular variant of structural racism that has historically been directed toward people of color in the United States. Colonial theory incorporates race, class, and historical processes to answer the question of why White ethnic groups have overcome their original disadvantaged statuses as immigrant populations, whereas American Indians, Native Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, Latinos, African Americans, and even Asians to a degree, have not. The theory contends that there is a fundamental difference between the experience of racial minorities and that of European ethnics in the American history. Racial ethnics—that is, non-Whites—have been treated much like colonial subjects. Furthermore, American Indian scholars argue that rather than being ethnics, American Indians are Indigenous peoples—mininationalities—with characteristics fundamentally different from those of U.S. ethnic groups. One can make the case that American Indians have been, and continue to be, victimized by a system of internal colonialism, of being oppressed in their own homelands.

In Chapter One of Inventing the Savage, Ross documents how Indian sovereignty has been steadily diminished over the last 175 years by Supreme Court decisions and Congressional laws, all of which have defined various traditional acts and beliefs as criminal, or have sought to extend social control over

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