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ERIC CHEYFITZ: For sure. I want to thank the library for inviting me to do this. I appreciate it, and thank you.
I decided that there were different things I could do, but I decided to read from the book because the book explains what I mean by the title of the book of The Colonial Construction of Indian Country and the relationship between Native literature and federal Indian law quite clearly and also situates me in that discussion. This is a PowerPoint that I use in class to talk about federal Indian law.
And so I may refer to it. I may not, but maybe in the question and answer period. It touches on the highlights of federal Indian law. I would just add to the land acknowledgment, which is, of course, is that Cornell itself was founded through the Morrill Act on Indian land that was stolen from Native Americans in the course of a national genocide and that the University still has investments on that land and from that land. And I think that's important to recognize as well.
So what I'm going to do is just read from sections of the book, talk a little. And then we'll have questions and answers. I think I'll probably set my stopwatch. That's a good idea. Time myself.
OK, here we go. So I'll read the epigraphs to the book. The first one is from Vine Deloria Jr., Standing Rock Sioux, who is really the Dean of Native American studies beginning in 1969 with his book Custer Died for Your Sins. And this is from Deloria, who was a scholar and a lawyer as well of federal Indian law.
"The lives of American Indians are interwoven with the federal government, federal ownership of tribal and individual lands, the expansive array of governmental services, the control and investment of tribal funds, the assumption of criminal jurisdiction. Lives of few tribal members are untouched by the Washington bureaucracy of the Interior Department," which is oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Deb Haaland is the first Native head of the Department of the Interior, and unfortunately, with the Donald Trump administration, she'll be going. And those tribal lands, sacred sites will be very, very vulnerable.
Second quote is from Linda Hogan, a poet, novelist. All of these people I teach in my classes. This is from a novel called Power about the environment. Here Hogan says, "It doesn't matter--" or her narrator says. "It doesn't matter what was decided in the marble buildings in the town. It doesn't matter what's written on paper. The old people are the ones who know the laws of this place. This world law is stronger and older than America."
And the last quote is from David Correia in his book, An Enemy Such as This. "Settler colonialism is a mode of sustained violence. The violence of colonial conquest requires a vast war-making infrastructure and a complex network of institutions for justifying, rationalizing, and extending colonial violence into an occupation. Among the most potent, persistent, and least acknowledged of these is law itself. The violence of colonialism is a violence inaugurated by law."
So as I tell my students, we don't want to confuse law and justice. They are two very, very different things. This comes just the first paragraph of the acknowledgments, and it lets you know a very important place that I've been situated.
"I came to the subject of this book because of my collaboration on the Navajo-Hopi land dispute with the Navajo Diné, women of Big Mountain, now Arizona. In particular, my wife, Darlene Evans, and I were invited into the home of Katherine Smith, at home now in the spirit world, a long time resistor to the US government's settlement of the dispute that displaced thousands of Navajos from their traditional lands, causing enduring trauma.
Katherine and two of her daughters, Marie Gladue and Mary Katherine Smith, remained on what was left of their land after the Hopi tribal government, in collaboration with the feds, imposed harsh limits on Diné life, taking control of what are known as the Hopi partitioned lands. Katherine, in her traditional attachment to the land, her steadfast caretaking for the holy people," as she phrased it, "remains a spiritual, educational, and political inspiration for me, a model of enduring teachings and resistance to the upholding of Diné values against the oppression of settler colonialism."
This is from the introduction to the book, which will lay out some of the topics and parameters. "In 2006, Columbia University published The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States Since 1945, which I edited. The guide encompassed a group of essays that read American Indian literary history from a colonialist point of view, thereby acknowledging in its collective topic that American Indian literatures fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction, represent the effects of ongoing colonialism on American Indians and, crucially, resistance to it.
In Chickasaw novelist poet and essayist, Linda Hogan, whose novel Solar Storms, the native narrator remarks, quote, 'For my people, the problem has always been this, that the only possibility of survival has been resistance.' By resistance, I, following Hogan and a range of Native writers, thinkers, and activists, do not simply mean reaction, though that is part of the definition, but also the alternative forms of sociality that have historically characterized Indigenous communities across the globe, which I will elaborate in this book." And the center of that sociality is a kinship relationship with the land and all that's living on it.
Give me a second. "From Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1968, to Tommy Orange's There There, 2018, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, the focus is clearly on these effects and resistance. The focus goes back to the first US native novel Joaquin Murrieta, the celebrated California bandit--" this was 1854-- "by the Cherokee author John Rollin Ridge, also known as yellow bird.
The focus can be read from various perspectives, this focus of resistance, in that novel's immediate successors, Wynema-- a Child of the Forest, 1891, by Muskogee author S. Alice Callahan, Cogewea, the Half Blood, 1927, by Okanagan author Mourning Dove, Humishuma, Sundown, 1934, by Osage author John Joseph Mathews, and The Surrounded, 1936, by Salish Kootenai author D'arcy McKickle. The progenitor of this literature of resistance is Pequot essayist and activist William Apess, who, from the late 1820s to the mid 1830s, was an eloquent advocate of Native rights. And I've written a lot about him in the last book I wrote before this one, The Disinformation Age-- the Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States.
Part one of the guide, The columbia Guide, which I wrote, is a book-length monograph titled The (Post)Cononial Construction of Indian Country-- post being in parentheses-- American-Indian Literatures and Federal Indian Law. The present volume is an update and thus a rewriting and significant part of that work, retitled The Colonial Construction of Indian Country-- Native American literatures and Federal Indian Law. I have changed posts in parentheses, Colonial to colonial. because, in rethinking this project in light of settler colonialism, which I write a lot about in this book, I no longer think that the post applies even in its parenthetical form, meant to ironize it in the first place.
I also altered the title of the current book so that it does not only reference Native literatures in the United States, although the primary focus of federal Indian law is the over 340 reservations in the lower 48 states, the territory legally defined as Indian country. Now the book references, crucially, Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk and Tlingit author Nora Marks Dauenhauer as well as Hawaiian scholar and activist Haunani-Kay Trask, while noting that the 228 Alaska Native villages come under a different legal agenda articulated in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.
And Native Hawaiians, while certainly a colonized population since the 1890s, have not formalized a legal relationship with the federal government. Further, I have included material from Indigenous communities in Mexico and Bolivia that bears on issues of sovereignty and law currently at play in both the United States and Canada, where the work of Yellowknives author Glen Coulthard is also important. And he's in the same series I'm in.
My reference to such examples is expressed in the title by Native American literatures, Indigenous literatures from across the Americas. Although, my primary focus is on American Indian literatures of the United States, the importance of this work from Canada and Latin America suggests that the study of Indigenous literatures is a comparative project, as the work of Chadwick Allen has articulated.
A lot of my work now focuses on Palestine, Israel, Palestine, and on Palestinian rights. Palestinians are the Indigenous people of that area. And I also acknowledge I am Jewish myself, that Jews are Indigenous to it as well. But indigeneity, for me, is not simply a "who was here first?" It has to do with a relation to the land that is not exploitive. And, of course, Zionism has turned that land into an exploited land and the people into an exploited and threatened people, as we know today. So I wanted to add that.
As with the first iteration of this work, this one is not intended to be comprehensive, an impossible task, in any event, given the breadth and depth of American Indian literatures and the hundreds of cases of federal Indian law, but exemplary, a method of reading both American Indian literatures and federal Indian law, which argues a necessary conjunction of the two. In arguing for this conjunction, I have organized the book to provide both exemplary close readings of literary texts, which I will give one, that critically represent federal Indian law, as well as an analysis of the history of federal Indian law that, while not tied explicitly to any literary text-- although, there are many instances in the book where it is tied explicitly to literary text-- is meant to provide an overall context for American Indian literatures.
I taught for some years at the Penn Law School, where I introduced federal Indian law. And I had all my law students reading novels by Native Americans so they could understand a critique of federal Indian law from a native perspective. And I have all my literature students reading federal Indian law when we teach Native novels so that they can understand the way those novels interact with that law and our criticism of it.
So Crow Creek Sioux scholar, novelist, and poet Elizabeth Cook-Lynn insists on the importance of federal Indian law in informing the fundamental context for Native American studies, emphasizing that, quote, "The study of the machinations of the government and the courts should be at the core of curricular development." And my dictate is without understanding federal Indian law, not only don't you understand the United States of America-- that's for sure-- but you cannot understand the colonization and the genocide that has gone on in this country.
So this is from chapter 1 of the book, which is called "The Colonial Construction of Indian Country." American Indians, who are the Native Americans living in the Lower 48 states, often get asked, is Indians a legitimate designation? And yes, it is a legitimate designation, literally legitimate. But it's also used by Indians. And of course, I come out of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program. People seem wary to use the word Indian. And they want to use Native American. But as I've explained and I'm explaining, Native Americans include Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians as well. And they are not Indians.
So American Indians, who are the Native Americans living in the Lower 48 states, are the largest part of the Native American population in the United States, and the only part governed by federal Indian law in terms of its largest provenance, which is land. Both Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians distinguish themselves terminologically from American Indians, where US federal Indian law provides the legal structure for colonialism as it operates in Indian country, which is both a legal, as I've said, and a colloquial designation for reservation lands and allotments still held in trust by the federal government.
The trust relationship is the basis of the relationship with Indians in the Lower 48 states. I'll go on to-- and the question of allotment will come up in something that I will talk about later. So the United States claimed a guardianship over Indian lands for the most part. Some of the reservations own their own land, but, by and large, the largest percentage is still owned by the federal government.
Since 1971, Alaska Natives have come under a different legal agenda with the instantiation of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which created regional and village corporations that hold the Alaska Native lands in free hold. So that land is no longer-- is not a trust relationship. As opposed to the trust relationship between Indian nations and the federal government in which the government holds, for the most part, reservation land and some allotments in a trustee relationship with the 347 federally recognized Indian tribes in the Lower 48 states. Though 20 of these nations, including the Gayogohono, by the way, do not have reservations.
For the most part, Native Hawaiians have no formal legal relationship with the federal government, so information about the group is not present on the Bureau of Indian Affairs website, which suggests an erasure of Native Hawaiians in the colonial history of the United States. However, both Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians are affected by colonialism, which is a fact across Native America, both the United States and Canada, where it is also structured by Canadian federal Indian law.
Joanne Barker is a scholar of Native American studies-- elaborates, short quote, "Today, some understand Native American to include American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians. That is all of the descendants of the original inhabitants of what are now the 50 states. However, many Native Hawaiians reject this"-- excuse me-- "this inclusion, because they do not want to be placed under the administration of the Bureau of Indian Affairs as nations within the nation," which is the way federal Indian law defines native nations in the Lower 48 states, in fact, as domestic dependent nations, which is an oxymoron, if you think about it. "They prefer," the native Hawaiians, "to be recognized under the United Nations classification of Hawaii as a nation illegally occupied by the United States that qualifies for decolonization." And I would say this is true of all Native Americans.
In a speech given on September 8, 2000, at a ceremony on the 175th anniversary of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Kevin Gover-- he's the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs at that point-- a Comanche tribal member issued a formal apology, I'm quoting, "to Indian people for the historical conduct of this agency. The first mission of which," Gover stated, "was to execute the removal of the Southeastern tribal nations. By threat, deceit, and force, those great tribal nations were made to march 1,000 miles to the West, leaving thousands of their old, their young, and their infirm in hasty graves along the Trail of Tears. And so today," Gover says, "I stand before you committed-- I stand"-- excuse me-- "I stand before you as a leader of an institution that in the past has committed acts so terrible that they, in fact, diminish and destroy the lives of Indian people decades later, generations later," end of quote.
Diane Glancy's novel, Pushing the Bear, which is a great book, details through a representation of the voices of the Cherokees on the trail, the human suffering of those who walked the trail, and their consciousness of the laws that removed them there. Glancy herself, a Cherokee. All the novels I teach are by Native people themselves. All the literature I teach is by Native people themselves.
Let me see if I can-- yeah, so now the example from the text. I'm going to talk about the General Allotment Act here and about a very famous case in federal Indian law, the Cobell case, which was only settled recently, in which the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in a class action suit, brought by a Louise Cobell in the name of thousands of Indians-- I'll go into that here-- charged them with the mismanagement of allotment funds. These were lands that were "given," quote, unquote, to Indians in 1887, and then mismanaged over the years in terms of leases, money due them for these lands, particularly for the leases of these lands. But I'll explain that here. And then I'll talk a little about the novel that is connected to this mismanagement, which is Francis Washburn's The Sacred White Turkey, which I just got done teaching.
A major aspect of this mismanagement finally came to light on June 10, 1996, in a class action lawsuit brought in the District Court of the District of Columbia by Blackfeet tribal member Elouise Cobell and other Native Americans and Native American representatives against two departments of the United States government, the Department of Interior and the Department of the Treasury, for mismanagement of Indian trust funds created under the General Allotment or Dawes Act of 1887, itself an act of federal mismanagement performed in the name of, quote, "civilizing the Indians."
This act, quote, "authorized"-- I'm quoting from a legal book. "This act authorized the President of the United States, whenever, in his opinion, any reservation or any part thereof of such Indians is advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes to cause said reservation, or any part thereof to be surveyed or resurveyed, if necessary, and to allot the lands in said reservation in severalty to any Indian located thereon, in parcels ranging from 160 to 40 acres."
The result of this act was to reduce native communal land holdings by 90 million acres through the sale to non-natives of so-called surplus lands left over from the allotments, as well as through the sales of Native allotments, because they didn't have the money to manage those allotments.
The fact of the Allotment Act, then, was the massive impoverishment of Indian communities for the benefit of Western development. In pushing Congress to annul the Dawes Act, which it did in 1934 with the Wheeler-Howard Act, known as the Indian Reorganization Act, or IRA, John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs at that time, sent a memo to Congress that tabulated the native loss, quote, "Through sales by the government of the fictitiously designated surplus lands, through sales by allottees after the trust period had ended, or had been terminated by administrative act, and through sales by the government of airship land, virtually mandatory under the Allotment Act, through these three methods, the total of Indian land holdings has been cut from 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million acres in 1934," end of quote.
Collier noted in the same memo, which was incorporated into the IRA, approximately 1/3 of the Indians who as yet are outside the allotment system are not losing their property, and generally they are increasing in industry and are rising and not falling in the social scale. As Chippewa legal scholar Keith Richotte Jr. notes, quote, "Although many reservations were allotted, many were only partially so and some escaped the process altogether," end of quote. I will have much to say about this situation in what follows.
The federal government holds in trust today 55.7 million acres of land, 80% of which is reservation land. The remainder is in individual trust allotments still held in trust by the federal government. So this was a method of basically stealing more Indian land, to put it simply-- breaking it up, breaking up communal lands, trying to break up the communal native way of life, kinship, connections into nuclear families. And it brought with it the boarding schools, which resulted in the death and the punishment, mutilation, what have you, of thousands of Indian children, including my friend Catherine Smith, who was stolen to boarding school when she was nine years old, and whose sister died there when she was seven.
I have video of Catherine, which she granted to do. She wanted a collection for her own family, an archive of her life story. And in that life story, she talks about the boarding school years. And I show it to my classes. It's very powerful.
So January 23, 2007, summary of the Cobell case by John Ahni Schertow on the International Cry-- that's his website-- notes that the suit intended, and I quote at length, "to force the federal government to account for billions of dollars belonging to apparently 500,000 American Indians and their heirs, and held in trust since the late 19th century. Through document discovery and courtroom testimony, the case has revealed mismanagement, ineptness, dishonesty, and delay by federal officials, leading US District Judge Royce Lamberth to declare their conduct, quote, 'fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form.'"
Then Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, Assistant Secretary of the Interior Kevin Gover, already mentioned, and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin of infamy during the Obama administration and the whole housing crisis, actually, were held in contempt of Court in February 1999 by Judge Lamberth for the department's repeated delays in producing documents, destruction of relevant documents, and misrepresentation to the court in sworn testimony. I don't have to say that no one went to jail for any of this, just as they didn't for the housing crisis.
"In April, May 2005, a national tribal task force working group"-- and I'm still quoting from Schertow-- "formed to provide recommendations to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and the House Resources Committee, which oversees Indian Affairs in the House, including a settlement number of 27.5 billion to Congress in July of 2006. Senator John McCain, who was chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, proposed an $8 billion settlement." Now watch this figure come down. That's the end of the quote from Schertow.
Wikipedia summarizes the fate of Judge Lamberth. "On July 11," I'm quoting, "2006, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, siding with the government, removed Judge Lamberth from the case, finding that Lamberth had lost his objectivity," end of quote. "We conclude, reluctantly, that this is one of those rare cases in which reassignment is necessary," the judges wrote, end of quote.
The Court of Appeals judges acted here on the assumption, in accordance with the agonistic structure of Western law, that there are two sides to every story, and that Lamberth had been favoring one with his comments about, quote, "the racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago," end of quote.
But his words merely condensed the history of US Indian policy, a policy both implementing and rationalizing genocide. There is, in fact, no question about this history. So there are not two valid sides to this story. Thus, the agonistic format of Western law is inappropriate for framing this case. Rather, if the case had not been presented under the auspices of a colonial body of law, it should have been presented in terms of restorative justice, a traditional Indigenous mode of customary law, wherein those transgressed against meet with the transgressor, and negotiate the terms of restitution within which balance can be restored to the community. Of course, there was never any balance in the community whatsoever in terms of relationship with the United States-- no balance in the United States' relationship with the Indian community.
Legal scholar Brendan Tobin notes, quote, "The importance of customary law as an instrument for decolonizing inherited common and civil law regimes in the Cobell case, as the case with the totality of federal Indian law-- is the case with the totality of federal Indian law, restoring balance to the community through restorative justice would mean, as I will argue, complete decolonization. That is erasure of federal Indian law, which is the very structure of US colonial relations with Native nations."
If the United States had recognized even a modicum of restorative justice for its mismanagement of American Indian resources, then it would at least have accepted the award of 27.5 billion proposed by the Native task force in the Cobell case. But, as Richotte notes, quote, "Eventually Congress stepped in, and, with negotiations among the involved parties, crafted legislation to resolve the case, the issue. Passed in 2010, the Claims Resolution Act set aside $3.4 billion to accomplish a number of goals. The final total of the Claims Resolution Act was well short of the over 46 billion that some estimated the federal government owed the plaintiffs," end of quote from Richotte.
James Warren, in an article written at the time of settlement, around 1908, 1909, notes, quote, "The facts are these. Following the House's approval, the Senate is considering whether to approve a 3.4 billion settlement of a 15-year-old lawsuit alleging the government illegally withheld more than 150 billion from the Indians whose lands were taken in the 1880s to lease, to oil, timber, minerals, and other companies for a fee," end of quote.
Whatever the actual figures of the money missing from the accounts of hundreds of thousands of American Indians, 150 billion, 46 billion, 27.5 billion, or the 8 billion suggested by Senator McCain, 3.4 billion represents the typical shortchanging that is an emblem-- excuse me-- is an endemic part of the history of US Indian legal settlements, whether in treaties, most of which have been broken at one time or another, court cases, or statutes.
The United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, is built on stolen Native land. The worth of that land can only be assessed as being trillions upon trillions of dollars. But the cost in Native lives lost in defending it from invading settlers and the federal government is incalculable.
We're doing pretty good. So here's a short reading. The way I bring federal Indian law to bear in this particular-- the Cobell case with the Sacred White Turkey, a book-- I recommend all these books. They're great books, and not, unfortunately, taught widely enough.
The Sacred White Turkey, published in 2010 by Lakota novelist Frances Washburn, is centrally involved with the focus of the Cobell case. The mismanagement of Indian trust funds, individual Indian money accounts, as they're known. Though, in Washburn's novel, there is no doubt that the mismanagement is embezzlement, which may well have been the case, in fact, as well as fiction. Though, this angle, unsurprisingly, was not pursued by the government. So no one was ever held accountable for this. And no one knows where this money went, these billions and billions of dollars. And this is par for the course in Indian country in its relation to the government.
The novel, published in the same year as the Cobell settlement, never mentions the case. The novel's action takes place 33 years before Cobell in 1963 on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which is the poorest part of the United States of America, by the way-- it still is-- home of the Oglala Lakota. However, the action of the novel is narrated from the perspective of 2008, near the climax of the case by one of its two principal narrators, the granddaughter Stella, of the other principal narrator, Hazel, a skeptical practitioner of Lakota medicine who owns the allotment that is the focus of the novel's action.
Hazel eventually uncovers an embezzlement scheme being run by George Wanbli, a tribal member and rival of Hazel's in the practice of medicine, who works for the BIA, Wanbli, as the bureaucrat in charge of the accounts of tribal members who are leasing their allotments to mostly white farmers, because, like Hazel, they, quote, "hadn't the money or the credit to buy the equipment that farming would take." And that's the history of allotment and why these allotments were leased, and then why these lease payments were not directed to the Indians, but taken somewhere.
But even before Hazel uncovers the scheme, she is primed to be suspicious because of the colonial situation of tribal nations and Wanbli's manipulation of this situation, blurring the line between medicine man and bureaucrat. And let me say that there is a strong critique in Native literature of tribal governments and the way tribal governments, not all of them, by any means, but the way significant tribal governments have adopted the same kinds of colonial maneuvers as the federal government.
So Native novels do not, like any great novel, idealize the situation that they're writing about. They look at it squarely in the face. But even before Hazel uncovers the scheme, she is primed to be suspicious, because of the colonial situation of tribal nations and Wanbli's manipulation of this situation, blurring the line between medicine man and bureaucrat. And once you say these tribal governments, to the extent they're corrupt, are themselves victims of colonization. This is not the way Indian governance worked prior to settler colonialism. In fact, it worked in a very egalitarian sort of way.
Of course, I do not trust your-- she says-- excuse me-- so the manipulation of the situation, blurring the line between medicine man and bureaucrat that she sees happening with this fellow, George Wanbli, working for the BIA, as well as being a tribal member. Hazel says, categorically, quote, "I do not trust the government, federal, state, local or tribal. Of course, I do not trust George either as the head and administrator of the lease program," end of quote. And the novel makes clear as a practitioner of medicine as well.
So when Wanbli decides to distribute the allottees' checks by mail instead of in person, and that's because he's been embezzling rises in lease payments, and he doesn't want people getting together to collect their checks, that they might talk to each other and find out what's been going on. So he decides to send the checks out in the mail. And Hazel says, no, no, no, I'm not going for that. And there ensues her uncovering of what's going on.
So when Wanbli decides to distribute the allottees' checks by mail instead of in person, Hazel remarks, "I was not even particularly upset about all this. Such things as this happen all the time when you are dealing with tribal officials or the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And nothing surprising about that, when you think that most tribal government systems are modeled after the United States federal system, and look at the breaking of the Christian Ten Commandments that goes on up there, even though until recently, a lot of those offices had an oversized display of those Ten Commandments displayed in a prominent place. You can hear the sound of words and ethics being smashed all the way to the moon and back. Our tribe does the same thing. We just do it bilingual, throwing in a little breakage of traditional spiritual practice, as well as Christian Commandments, which makes it iniquitous, illegal, immoral practices, doubley double dealing," end of quote from Hazel.
As this sketch of The Sacred White Turkey suggests, if readers want to understand the historical context of the novel, which is to say, if they want to understand the novel, they need to know the Cobell case and its context, which represents the colonial condition of tribal nations.
So pretty good, 38 minutes. That's my presentation. Settler colonialism does tremendous damage, as I've pointed out, and continues to do tremendous damage. Indians are still the poorest of the poor in the United States after all of this theft. They are the most incarcerated proportionately of any particular group, high rates of suicide, malnutrition, et cetera, et cetera, because of this is a condition of the poor.
And the federal government, Joe Biden will stand up and apologize for the boarding schools. But there's a great Lakota poet, Layli Long Soldier, who has written a phenomenal long poem about the Congressional apology of 1909. And she points out, there is no word in native languages for apology. Apology in and of itself is meaningless, empty, without restitution. And there has not been restitution, just as there has not been reparations for African-American slavery, lots of apologies and mea culpas, but nothing substantial.
So Native American literature is a testament, an ongoing testament to the ongoing force of settler colonialism and the situation that it's placed native peoples in. And resistance is strong. It's strong across the world. And I will be teaching a course next semester, which has gotten some controversy on Gaza indigeneity and resistance, because I look at Gaza as part of an ongoing global war against Indigenous peoples.
I don't know if you've seen the film The Territory about Native resistance in Brazil, but it's a very powerful film. And if you look around the world, the most assassinated people today are Native leaders of environmental resistance. They are being killed over and over again, but the resistance keeps going. So anyway, that's my presentation. That gives you an idea of what the book's about and the way I write. And so thanks for coming.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER: Thank you.
ERIC CHEYFITZ: My pleasure, really. Thank you.
SPEAKER: Eye opening doesn't do justice to what you were just talking about. It's kind of amazing. Are there any questions that anyone has for Professor Cheyfitz? I'll give you the microphone.
AUDIENCE: I don't know if this is so much a question, or perhaps just an invitation for you to comment on Cornell and how it's responded to the report about the Morrill Act and so forth, and where that might be going.
ERIC CHEYFITZ: Well, we have-- let me read it to you. We have on the American Indian Indigenous Studies Program underneath the land acknowledgment, and this was approved also by the Cayuga, about which we're not surprised, the Gayogohono, Cayuga Gayogohono.
The AISP faculty would like to emphasize Cornell's foundation was enabled in the course of a national genocide by the sale of almost 1 million acres of stolen Indian land under the Morrill Act of 1882. We got the most land, the most money of the 52 schools that were empowered under the Morrill Act. To date, the university has neither officially acknowledged its complicity to this theft, nor has it offered any form of restitution to the hundreds of Native communities impacted.
And then we have a large website, a blog in which there are lots of essays and work that talk about this particular-- the Morrill Act of 1882. Jon Parmenter in the history department has particularly been very, very, very diligent in doing research on this. Cornell apparently still has $70 million in the bank from this, and mineral interests in Anishinaabe land, Ojibwe land in the Midwest.
So I think Cornell has been-- and I haven't been quiet about this, nor has the AISP, as you can see. It's on our website-- has been totally derelict in its obligations. We had asked them-- it's very hard to get into Cornell. So we weren't asking Cornell to lower its standards. We were only asking them that any Native person from these lands that were appropriated through the Morrill Act, who now could get into Cornell, would get a free ride. And I will tell you how few that would be, given the actual social conditions in which Native folks are operating. But there are some, no doubt. We know that. We have Native students here who managed to be able to achieve within really negative conditions. And they just refused it.
And they've done nothing. What they do to me is quite exploitative in ways. I mean, so you can see Native figures on web pages and things like that. And Cornell will talk about their achievements here at Cornell, and fine, they've certainly achieved. Michael Charles was the latest who was on the web page from environmental science. And Michael does really good work in Native communities. And he's also a graduate of Cornell. And he was in the AISP.
But they'll do that. But there's, again, no acknowledgment of the university's responsibility and the way it was founded. There would be no Cornell without stolen Indian land and a national genocide. It just wouldn't be-- it wouldn't be here. So we're disappointed. That's, I think, putting it mildly. Yeah. Margaret.
AUDIENCE: There are state laws in terms of Indigenous people. I heard about a year ago that California was passing some laws in regard to the land that they had taken away from the Indigenous people in that state. So are there state laws? That's one thing. And then the other thing I was wondering about is, have you done any comparisons with federal laws in this country and Canada?
ERIC CHEYFITZ: I'm aware of Canadian federal Indian law. And I don't know in the detail that I know the law down here. But things like the Indian Act, which disempowered Native women until very, very recently, if they married out, they were just denied Indian identity. The identity laws here, by the way, from the federal government are very, very strict. And they rule out from federal recognition, really, millions, I would say, of Native people who aren't federally recognized or part of a federally recognized tribe, but are native. And the laws for getting a tribe recognized here as a federally recognized tribe are really, really draconian.
So I'm aware of the Canadian situation. They just recently-- the residential schools became a big topic of conversation in Canada. There's the Indian Act. And essentially, the land issues are the same. There's a lot of stolen native land and a lot of resistance to that.
And to the exploit-- the Idle No More movement, for example, is one of the leading environmental movements, which was started in Canada, then picked up here in the DAPL pipeline resistance, that sort of thing. So yeah, they both come out of British Indian law. So that's the common bond, the Indian Act of 1763, actually. Yeah, please.
SPEAKER: We've got some questions online, too. So we're going to go to one of our online commenters.
ERIC CHEYFITZ: OK.
AUDIENCE: What do you see as the impact of the upcoming Trump administration? The neo fascist attributes of Trump and his appointees do not bode well for Native Americans of all types.
ERIC CHEYFITZ: Yeah. Well, I think some things are pretty obvious. The drill, drill, drill, no matter what philosophy is going to be attacking native sacred lands that have been at least separated by Obama and Biden administrations and kept from drilling, even though much drilling is going on. I know that when Trump was first president, two sacred sites, he took them off the sacred register. So I think they'll just be going after native land wherever they can.
And this is a totally neo-- neoliberal is probably too kind of a word at this point for what's going on. But the privatization of everything, and the turning over of those goods and services more and more to the 1% who are wealthy. So Indians are in the bottom 1% as a community, as a whole.
And Trump's philosophy of-- let's say this. I think everybody knows this. He does not care about the environment except as a commodity. And Native people look at the environment still, by and large, traditionally as part of a kinship-- literally a kinship system, that the land is living, alive, and part of our community. And it is our job, just as it is to take care of our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, cousins, whatever, it is our job to take care of that land because it takes care of us.
This is a totally opposed, obviously, to any capitalist ideology in which the land is a commodity. And Trump's ideology, of course, just ups the ante, ups the ante, ups the ante. So this should not be good news.
On the other hand, I read-- and check me if I'm wrong on this-- that a majority of Native people who voted voted for Trump. And there's something very disturbing about that. And we could talk about who voted for Trump, I guess, at length. But that only means to me-- and I think everybody knows this-- the way colonialism works and the resistance to it is that it tends to divide communities around issues. And it tends to be a very strong, if you want any piece of the pie, to be a very strong converting force. It's out to make capitalists of us all. Let's put it that way.
AUDIENCE: So I recently was watching something on TV. I can't remember exactly what it was, but learned of the Doctrine of Discovery, 14th century Vatican, a doctrine about Native lands, and how it affected a 1980s decision here with the Haudenosaunee. And it might have been in connection with the Gayogohono and land rights. In March of 2023, the Vatican rescinded that doctrine formally-- a little late, but we'll take it. Do you see that having any potentially positive effect on land claims that even the Gayogohono, for example, could make?
ERIC CHEYFITZ: No. And I will tell you why. This is a papal doctrine from the Middle Ages, which divided the world between Spain and Portugal, and said, if you're a Christian, and there are pagans on that land, it's yours. Ruth Bader Ginsburg actually cited this in a case in 2005, City of Sherrill versus Oneida Nation as a legitimate legal citation. It is a racist doctrine. Obviously, it says Christians, yes. Anybody who's not Christian-- and that included Muslims, Jews, native peoples-- no. So that was promulgated by the Pope.
It's part of a primary case in federal-- I was trying to move the PowerPoint, but it doesn't seem to be-- maybe I can do it now. Here's the basis, the three primary Supreme Court cases that ground federal Indian law. They're called the Marshall trilogy John Marshall.
The first one is 1823, Johnson v. McIntosh, which cites the doctrine of discovery as the reason why it is legitimate for the United States to take Native land. And so there it is enshrined in the legal code. These laws are still on the books. They are still the basis of federal Indian law.
Robert Williams Jr. has written a really good book on the racist basis of federal Indian law. And it is a racist basis of federal Indian law, a capitalist basis, a racist basis. So the Doctrine of Discovery, the Pope taking it back will not implicate-- these laws will not be dropped. This reasoning will not be dropped. So it's a symbolic gesture is what it amounts to, not a substantive gesture.
And it's like apologies. I think Layli Long Soldier will probably write a poem weighing in on this as well. That's my feeling. It's a gesture at least. It says, this is what it is. Although, the Pope, I don't think, said it was racist, but at least says, this is a law that should have been dropped long ago, but it doesn't-- again, there's no restitution behind it, because what it says, really, if you take it seriously is we should return every bit of land that was taken under this doctrine back to Native people. And they do a better job of preserving them than we've been doing. That's for sure.
SPEAKER: Other questions?
AUDIENCE: What classes do you teach here? And how did you go about-- you've mentioned a lot your work just contradicts a lot of the governing philosophy of the school that you teach in. So how do you go about designing your syllabus and go about teaching your classes?
ERIC CHEYFITZ: Oh. Well, I'm from the American Indian Indigenous Studies Program. And ethnic studies, when it was founded in the 1970s, by the way, was founded in advocacy. It was founded in advocacy, trying to join scholarship and advocacy for the marginalized communities that it represented in the Academy.
And in fact, there was just a panel, just about a week ago, at Mann Library about Indigenous education, which talked about advocacy and education. I think all of us then are coming from that standpoint. We're trying to give also a native point of view, as I mentioned earlier in the talk, about Native philosophies that would really go a long way to offsetting the kind of environmental destruction that's going on-- philosophies of balance, philosophies of kinship, philosophies that are essentially redistributive in terms of wealth. The Native community shared wealth which was common, literally common wealth.
My courses, I'm interested in specific things. Federal Indian law is one of them. So I teach a course on Native literature and federal Indian law. I'm doing that this semester. And we read novels. And we go over the federal Indian law quite thoroughly in the first couple of classes to talk about its framework. And then we talk about how the law applies to these novels, how they criticize it, how it's embedded in the representations that they're carrying out.
I also teach a course called thinking from a different place, Indigenous philosophies. And so there I look at a range of Indigenous philosophies, both here, Canada, South America, Latin America, and in Palestine as well. And we talk about different ways of thinking about the world. Native philosophies are inherently anti-capitalist, inherent before capitalism. They're philosophies of wealth sharing, of, as I've said, kinship relationships to the environment and to your community. Governance systems were always consensual.
The Zapatistas, by the way, in Chiapas-- and I certainly teach the Zapatistas-- are trying to present a model of community based on K'iche' Mayan philosophies of balance and consensus of a non-hierarchical system in all senses of the word, which is opposed-- the antithesis of Western democracies, which are top down vertical. The Zapatista mode, which is an Indigenous mode, is of horizontal relationships, not vertical relationships.
So I teach a course thinking from a different place where we look at these different kinds of relationships. I teach a poetry-- the Indigenous poetry of resistance, in which we read poetry from Palestine, from North America, Canada, and the United States, and talk about resistance, what forms resistance can take. And the literatures that I teach and I think my colleagues teach are implicitly literatures of resistance and presenting an alternate way of thinking about the world and taking action in it. So that's how I designed my syllabus.
My particular specialties are federal Indian law and issues of land. I'm very-- because land is the fundament of Native-- it's a fundament of all our lives, except we don't realize it in the West, which is why we're destroying it. But it is the fundament of Native lives as well, and with a much different relationship to it, as I tried to articulate here. So that's how I do my curriculum.
And I think we have colleagues in art history. We have colleagues in natural resources, in anthropology, in human ecology. So people coming from different disciplines are looking at those disciplines from an Indigenous point of view. And it's a wide range of courses that are worthwhile.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
ERIC CHEYFITZ: Thank you.
SPEAKER: I think we've got time for one more question. Anyone else?
AUDIENCE: I'll try one. There seems to be an imperative to, if you're beginning a county council or a city council or a talk at Cornell, to start with a land acknowledgment.
ERIC CHEYFITZ: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I don't know if this is OK for me to say, but there also is the imperative that you start some of these with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. And I wonder if it's just mechanical, or perfunctory, or maybe even in this case at Cornell hypocritical for presentations, whether sympathetic like this one or others, for it to begin with a land acknowledgment.
ERIC CHEYFITZ: I don't disagree with you. It's like the apology. I think unless it's backed up-- there's a moment when it's good because it informs people at least. But I think the tendency is for most people, it just goes over their head, and they forget about it. And so I think it needs to be backed by restitution.
And so my rule of thumb is always Leyli Long Soldier who really eviscerates this perfunctory kind of agreement. Look. I was on a panel at Brandeis years ago with an ANC South African colleague of Mandela's who fought with the ANC. And we talked about truth and reconciliation commissions. And we both agreed-- although, he has a right to agree, and I'm just a bystander in this case-- that these truth and reconciliation commissions were not what was needed. What was needed was land redistribution, that what was taken from South African Africans was their land. They were impoverished by settler colonialism, in fact.
And so some sort of redistribution was what was in order. And without that, what you get out of a truth and reconciliation commission is an apology. But then what? People are still poor. People are still hungry. People still don't have the means to succeed in life. So I think your question is a good question.
And I would say, Cornell doesn't even have this land acknowledgement on their homepage, let alone the addendum that the AISP put on it. We have it on our home page. And I think we look at-- we understand what's not behind it. And I know the Gayogohono understand what's not behind it, but we say it because it at least brings up the issue.
And so, for instance, when I say it, I add the addendum, and then we can talk about how Cornell--
AUDIENCE: And then what?
ERIC CHEYFITZ: --how Cornell is founded. And at least somewhere, it will sink into some people's minds. We certainly do it in classes. But then in the classes, we really talk about what restitution would mean, why it hasn't been forthcoming.
And so students at least have a knowledge of what's going on, where they are, who they are. My feeling, what I tell my students, is if you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are. And so if you come into this university and you think that it was founded by the largesse of Ezra Cornell, you really-- part of your identity is being erased. You may not know that, but I think that that's true. I think identities are formed or erased or inhibited in ways by your knowledge of where you are and how you got here. So I thank you for the question.
SPEAKER: This is the very last one. You had your hand up for a while.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. I was recently in South Africa. And they are attempting land redistribution.
ERIC CHEYFITZ: Yeah, I saw that.
AUDIENCE: You might have better information than me on this. But they're proceeding very slowly. And a large part of the reason for that is because they know what happened in Zimbabwe. So in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe's government attempted to do rapid and precipitous land redistribution, taking land from white farmers who were growing, basically, tobacco very profitably, but they were essentially ostracized from-- this is the story I was given. They were essentially ostracized from the international community for attempting to do that. Robert Mugabe was demonized as somehow worse than other leaders and so forth. And so maybe you have insights or better information, but that was the story that I was led to.
ERIC CHEYFITZ: Yeah. No, I don't know that story in depth. I know the story. Clearly, it's very hard to go about something like this in a capitalist universe run by places like the World Bank, et cetera, et cetera, IMF. So I think if one goes about it, one is going to find conflict.
But nevertheless, it needs to be done. We've come a long road where capitalism as a world system is so entrenched at this point that I think any movements to change it, to alter it, to talk about redistribution-- I mean, look in this country. 40% of the wealth is in the top 1% of the country. And 68,000 people died last year because they couldn't get health care. And we can't even get a national health care bill, which is a way to redistribute, or child care, or education, things that they actually have in Western Europe, which are capitalist countries.
But I think it's so entrenched that when you start to alter that system, you're going to run into problems. So you have to figure out ways to do it, obviously, in consultation. And that may not-- I'm not a prophet. It may not be possible at this point, historically, but it's necessary. Let's put it that way.
If it doesn't happen, we're headed in a sort of bad direction anyway in terms of the climate. And I think we're headed in a bad direction in terms of rich and poor as well, in terms of inequalities across the board. But if we don't change that direction, I think things will not get better. Let's put it that way.
SPEAKER: Professor Cheyfitz, thank you very much.
ERIC CHEYFITZ: Well, thank everybody for coming.
SPEAKER: --for your insights. Thank you all for attending, both in person and online.
[APPLAUSE]
If the decolonization of Indian country is to be achieved, then federal Indian law must be replaced with independent Native nation sovereignty, says Eric Cheyfitz, Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters and professor of American Indian and Indigenous Studies. In this "Chats in the Stacks" book talk on his new book, "The Colonial Construction of Indian Country: Native American Literatures & Federal Indian Law" (University of Minnesota Press, December 2023) Cheyfitz mounts a pointed historical critique of colonialism through careful analysis of the dialogue between Native American literatures and federal Indian law, both arguing for illuminating how these literatures indict colonial practices, and providing a guide to the projected decolonization of Native America.
