Panel 2: Navigating Native Identity and Jurisdiction

Nancy O. Gallman
In 1826, a tragedy near the Oscilla River brought law to a crossroads in the Florida borderlands. A U.S. settler and an Indigenous man got into an argument which led to a multiple homicide that claimed the lives of the Indigenous man, a slave, and five U.S. settlers. Seminole, Mikasuki, and U.S. leaders reacted to the devastation by mobilizing law in mutual–but different–calls for justice. Investigations of the killings centered on new territorial boundaries between Florida’s Indigenous Nations and the United States and the life-threatening consequences for stepping out of bounds, taking animals, or stealing people. Unresolved conflicts over property rights in Africana peoples intensified the threat of settler-Indigenous violence. U.S. law, however, did not control slave ownership claims or the prosecution of murder. Indigenous leaders representing distinct polities of Hitchiti- and Yuchi-speakers practiced negotiation, reciprocity, and compensation in ways that divided them and influenced legal outcomes. In the early nineteenth- century Florida borderlands, contested questions of law set a precedent of legal ambiguity that determined how Indigenous peoples, U.S. settlers, and people of African descent defined and redefined the meanings of life, liberty, and property.

Jacob Lee
U.S. v. Rogers casts a long and odd shadow over federal Indian law. Since 1846, Roger Taney’s opinion in the case has shaped legal interpretations of Indigenous citizenship and sovereignty, but scholars have also long recognized that the justice’s opinion rested on a fabricated account of Native history. The peculiarities of U.S. v. Rogers began long before the case reached the Supreme Court. Following that case from its origins in Cherokee Nation through the U.S. federal courts in Arkansas to the Supreme Court, this paper examines the exercise of jurisdiction in Indian Territory and the construction of federal Indian law in the mid-nineteenth century.

Elena Telles Ryan
During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Native nations remained the primary authorities in the Southwestern Great Lakes region. With the War of 1812, the region became the frontlines of an imperial war which drew an influx of soldiery, firepower, and bureaucrats onto the land. After the war, emissaries of the United States empire struggled to harness the rich fur trade or to even determine who was an ally and who was an enemy. This paper argues that powerful trade families of Native and non-Native ancestry formed the connective tissue of the multinational Southwestern Great Lakes. It suggests that they set the terms of social and economic engagement in the wake of the war of 1812, eventually shaping the path to citizenship and local legal institutions.

Chair: Alan Shane Dillingham, Arizona State University; Stanford University