Sunday, January 31st, 2016...7:27 pm
Echo-Hawk Chapters 12 & 13
These chapters detailed relatively recent Supreme Court decisions that further denied American Indians land rights. In the 1955 Tee-Hit-Ton decision, the court ruled that Tlingit Indians in Alaska were not protected from loggers’ encroachment on their land. This ruling was issued with references to the doctrine of conquest, despite the fact that no real conquest had taken place in Alaska. In the 1988 Lyng decision, the court ruled that sacred Indian land in California was not protected under the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom.
The Lyng case reminded me of the court’s stance on the Espionage and Sedition Acts in the 1910s. In each of these situations, the Supreme Court was willing to restrain fundamental rights as a means of protecting government power, and in doing so weakened the protections offered by the First Amendment. This further exposes a major flaw in the design of the Supreme Court. From the beginning, the justices of the Supreme Court have often been political allies of the executive branch, and have used their influence to bolster executive power. This was the case in the Lyng decision, which trampled on the rights of American Indians for the benefit of the U.S. Forest Service.
1 Comment
February 4th, 2016 at 4:31 am
I think you hit the nail on the head when you send the passing of the Lyng case “weakened the protections offered by the First Amendment.” It is unclear on every one of the cases discussed in Echo-Hawk’s book that it is more than possible for justices to perform surgery on the Constitution to make it lineup with whatever beliefs they personally hold. Before I read these chapters, I knew very little about Justice O’Connor, but was assigned to start the wiki page on her. I was very pleased to find out that the she was the first woman on the Supreme Court (not pleased about how late that occurred, of course), but now I find myself wishing she had had nothing to do with the court whatsoever. Reading excerpts from her majority opinion in the Lyng case was disturbing, and, like you said, fell directly under the beliefs of “conquest,” even though Alaskan Indian tribes were never conquered.