INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, LAW

This seminar will examine the history of Indigenous peoples and their legal status in some of the settler colonies of the British Empire, including the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. It will consider shared histories of Indigenous dispossession and struggles over land tenure, contests over sovereignty and the meaning of treaties, issues of citizenship and subjecthood, and efforts at the destruction of Indigenous culture through the criminalization of traditional religious practices and the forcible removal of Indigenous children; it will also explore histories of Indigenous resistance to settler policies. The course will conclude with a comparative survey of the law governing Indigenous communities in these settler states today, as well as ongoing struggles for Indigenous rights.