The road of US Indian law and policy, like its companion to hell, is paved with good intentions. Critics of its generally diabolic outcomes have had little difficulty demonstrating the moral chasm between the appealing rhetoric in which a policy or judgment was framed and the oppressive consequences to which it practically conduced. With a nod to…

Change due to natural disturbances and disasters, population growth and decline, economic crises, and environmental and climate change creates significant cultural challenges. Rapid change and the transformation it brings also involve complex relationships between sovereign tribes, resources, and the global system. This article explores how salmon…

This essay examines the depiction of Native Americans by the US Information Agency (USIA), the bureau charged with explaining American politics to the international public during the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, the USIA broadcast the message that Americans had begun to acknowledge their nation's history of conquest and were working to…

In this article the author is concerned with the intersection of two congruent phenomena: (1) an increasing number of references to borders in contemporary Native American art; and (2) an increasing occurrence of border-rights conflicts between Native nations and the governments of the United States and Canada. Focusing on the period roughly 1990…

This article discusses the effect of Arizona's language policies on school districts serving Native American students. Although these policies were designed to restrict the access of Spanish-speaking immigrant and citizen students to bilingual education programs, their reach has extended into schools and school districts serving Native Americans.…

The West Comprehensive Center (WCC) is working with the Arizona Department of Education (ADE), the Nevada Department of Education (NDE), and the Utah State Office of Education (USOE) to assist districts and schools that are implementing activities to improve outcomes for Indian students. As a first step, WCC staff reviewed state and national law,…

This article provides an overview of the three-volume reference set, "Treaties with American Indians: An Encyclopedia of Rights, Conflicts, and Sovereignty" published by ABC-CLIO. This reference work is edited by Donald Fixico, Arizona State University, and dedicated to the people of his tribes: (1) Shawnee; (2) Sac and Fox; (3) Seminole; and (4)…

This paper reports on findings from an interpretive policy analysis of the development and impacts of landmark federal legislation in support of Native American languages: the 1990/1992 Native American Languages Act (NALA). Overturning more than two centuries of federal Indian policy, NALA established the federal role in preserving and protecting…

Biased and inaccurate information about Native Americans continue in children's resources and remain in many of today's curriculum centers. While Native American students remain a minority in schools, accurate information is vital for understanding contemporary society and our history by both Native and non-Native students. Many states including…

Twenty-five years ago a "perfect storm" of economic, environmental, and social conditions swirled in northern Wisconsin and battered attempts by the Ojibwe to exercise their treaty-based fishing rights. This article examines the socioeconomic, political, and cultural factors that contributed to the spearfishing crisis twenty-five years…

Fort Belknap Indian Reservation's food system typifies that of many rural communities. Most food is grown and processed hundreds or thousands of miles away and transported long distances before it reaches the local grocery shelf. Like oil and gas, food prices are largely determined by international commodity markets driven by global supply,…

Public education discourse is dominated by nostalgia for an idea of humanity, which has existed more strongly in high culture discourse than it has in public schools. Political liberal and conservative discourses agree that the process of compulsory public education is an expression of the state as it works to justly distribute "life…

Indigenous communities have engaged in needs and resources assessments for thousands of years. By blending CBPR/TPR approaches with community-driven assets and needs assessments, academic and community based researchers can work together to better understand and identify community strengths as well as issues of concern in Native communities. This…

This article examines the ways American Indian authors, particularly three contemporary Anishinaabeg writers, engaged with the question of Native American origins during the racially polarized project of "imagining" the nation of the United States throughout the 19th century. In this article, the author argues that American Indian…

Arming themselves with "manifest destiny" rhetoric, which claimed divine Anglo-Saxon superiority as justification for the conquest of Indigenous and Mexican peoples and the land they occupied, white settlers forcefully pushed into California territory. The two-year-long Mexican-American War resulted in the acquisition of the present-day…