Tuesday, June 7, 2016

"Legal Codes and Talking Trees"

New from Yale University Press: Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women's Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946 by Katrina Jagodinsky.

About the book, from the publisher:
Katrina Jagodinsky’s enlightening history is the first to focus on indigenous women of the Southwest and Pacific Northwest and the ways they dealt with the challenges posed by the existing legal regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In most western states, it was difficult if not impossible for Native women to inherit property, raise mixed-race children, or take legal action in the event of rape or abuse. Through the experiences of six indigenous women who fought for personal autonomy and the rights of their tribes, Jagodinsky explores a long yet generally unacknowledged tradition of active critique of the U.S. legal system by female Native Americans.
Katrina Jagodinsky is assistant professor of history at the University of Nebraska and a former fellow of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU.

--Marshal Zeringue