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Place, Race, and Names: Layered Identities in United States v. Oregon, Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Plaintiff-Intervenor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Susan Staiger Gooding
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Extract

While Native American treaty rights are one of the strongest instances of legally protected rights to social and cultural particularity in the United States and internationally, treaties and treaty litigation are also deeply racializing forms of legal discourse. This essay explores the dynamics between law and culture in the United States and the contradictory role played by federal Indian law in the transformation of indigenous identities by examining a current treaty rights case: United States v. Oregon, Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Plaintiff-Intervenor. The essay sets the Colvilles' litigation into its historical and legal context through an analysis of the relationship between the group names, of legal and nonlegal origin, by which Colvilles identify themselves and about which this litigation is centrally concerned. The Colville Tribes have consistently layered their social identities onto a map of permanent places through intra- and intergenerational naming formulas that are used to establish identity and to negotiate historical change and colonization. Federal Indian law has consistently constructed identity in its naming of indigenous groups by decontextualizing and remapping identity to a fixed map of race. Thus, federal legal discourse precludes a consideration of the very aspects of Colville identity that are central to the recognition of the claims put forth in their current litigation.

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Law & Society Review , Volume 28 , Issue 5: Symposium: Community and Identity in Sociolegal Studies , 1994 , pp. 1181 - 1229
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by The Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This essay is part of an ongoing study of law and culture and the translation of tribal testimonies in the current treaty rights litigation about the off-reservation fishing rights of the Confederated Colville Tribes. I thank the Colville Cultural Resources Board, the Colville Tribal Council, and the attorneys for the Colville Tribes for their willingness to let this research proceed. I am also grateful to Benjamin Forest, who prepared the maps, and to Arthur McEvoyand Celia Brickman, who provided helpful comments on earlier drafts. Any errors of interpretive and historical detail are mine alone.

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