Thursday, February 18th, 2016...9:35 am
Echo-Hawk Chapters 14 & 15, Afterword
These chapters reflected on the rest of the book, piecing together each detrimental Supreme Court decision to establish a comprehensive narrative of the Court’s role in oppressing American Indians. Echo-Hawk uses this saga to argue that the genocides perpetrated in the Americas were legal under international law in the early colonial period, and remained legal in the United States thanks to legislative and judicial agendas that either implemented genocidal policies or condoned genocidal acts. Echo-Hawk suggests eight measures that would help rectify this history, and cleanse the legal system of racist, colonial attitudes toward American Indians.
This book left me questioning the merits of the American judicial system. As Echo-Hawk demonstrates over hundreds of pages, judges cannot be counted on to rise above the prevailing racist and colonial ideologies embraced by a large segment of American society; as a result, their decisions almost inevitably reflect prejudice, rather than a faithful and impartial interpretation of law. My question is this: can there ever be a legal system that truly protects the rights of racial and ethnic minorities, and does not succumb to the prejudices of the society it serves?
1 Comment
February 24th, 2016 at 10:36 pm
That question is in the realm of Charles Wilkinson’s _American Indians, Time, and the Law_, in the sense that judges always have a menu of doctrines from which to fashion opinions, and the Worcester-based doctrine must always be on that menu. But we have to accept that it’s like leapfrog: only the last leap wins. So we have to keep going.