The Social Construct Of Native American Criminality By Luana Ross

Narratives about captivity have often intrigued readers in Western culture. Mary Rowlandson and Olaudah Equiano’s stories helped pave the way for stereotypes within both European and white culture; teaching Europeans to see Native Americans as cruel and allowing whites to see the evil in the American slave market. In both “A Narrative of the Captivity” and “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,” Mary Rowlandson and Olaudah Equiano share their individual stories of being kidnapped and enslaved. Though the two narrators share similarities in their personal accounts of being held captive, either individual’s reaction sheds light on the true purpose of both Rowlandson and Equiano’s writing.

Within the pages of The Round House, Louise Eldrich tackles the reality of justice for indigenous American populations, specifically how the main character, Joe, decides to take justice in his own hands after the legal system fails him and his mother in rectifying and recognizing her rape, committed by the hands of a racist white male, Linden. Eldrich’s novel, while fictional, is rooted in the experiences of native peoples. With the help of Sarah Deer, a deeper analysis concerning the day-to-day realities of real life Native Americans versus Eldrich’s fictional characters. This analysis will cover the institutional laws put in place by those that are not in the respective tribes of America, due to either coercion or federal intervention. The benefits, as well as drawbacks, of Joe’s eventual decision over the fate of Linden, will also be considered within the analysis. Also, the analysis will confront how Joe’s decision puts his community at risk as well as the interests of the reservation at risk. Particularly, in the lack of justice for sexual assault survivors, including the institutional and societal failings of survivors concerning their race and tribal affiliation. For this reason, Joe is led down the avenue of extra-law actions, ultimately ending in murder.

In Deborah Miranda’s memoir “Bad Indians”, she uses documents, images, and drawings to expose colonial violence and provides evidence of a history of conquest. There are different types of colonial violence that are depicted throughout her memoir, such as: physical, emotional, sexual, and cultural violence. Additionally, Miranda exposes the nature of colonial violence by providing evidence by implementing particular sources to contribute in confirming the history of conquest throughout the lives of California Mission Indians.

The women then record these testimonies to their memory, because they have no writing system, and then instruct these lessons to their children (Franklin). Franklin then compares this structure to the House of Commons in England, where people are often yelling and causing disorder. This illustrates how the people that are called “savages” are more civil than the British. This means that the Native Americans are actually noble people and not savage.

The three main categories of women in this dangerous environment and social landscape were: (1) white convicts and young orphan girls; (2) free white settlers and military wives; and (3) Aboriginal native women (Macintyre, 2009).

In her novel, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, Deborah A. Miranda theorizes that the underlying patronage of her father’s violent behavior arises from the original acts of violence carried out by the Spanish Catholic Church during the era of missionization in California. The structure of her novel plays an essential role in the development of her theory, and allows her to further generalize it to encompass the entire human population. “In this beautiful and devastating book, part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir, Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone Costanoan Esselen family as well as the experience of California Indians as a whole through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems.” Patching together every individual source to create the story of a culture as a whole, Miranda facilitates the task of conceptualizing how Societal Process Theory could play into the domestic violence she experiences growing up as the daughter of a California Indian.

For decades, when a Native American woman has been assaulted or raped by a man who is non-Indian, she has had little or no recourse. Under long-standing law in Indian country, reservations are sovereign nations with their own police departments and courts in charge of prosecuting crimes on tribal land. But Indian police have lacked the legal authority to arrest non-Indian men who commit acts of domestic violence against native women on reservations, and tribal courts have lacked the authority to prosecute the men.

To begin understanding the issues Native Americans often face in the criminal justice system and why a comparison must be made. These comparisons are over concepts, the European-based laws and Native American perspective on law how it should function and its process. The European’s consists of a vertical style while the Native American’s way of thinking, religious norm, practice, and the law is intertwined into a horizontal model. Knowing the difference in perceptions concerning law and its structure plays a significant role in understanding all the disadvantages Native Americans have faced in the European’s vertical system. Native Americans horizontal perspective has multiple working and intertwined parts as a way creating their own justice system.

Tribal Crime and Justice was an interesting topic to research because this is something that one does not think about. One does not really hear about Native Americans in data or statistics, and if so, the percentage or numbers are relatively low or their Race is not even noted. This study was conducted to take a look into policing in Indian Nations to better comprehend their laws and to view a future cross deputization agreement between tribal policing and local, county, and state policing. This topic caught my attention because I notice that the reporting information can be misleading and the tribal police officers need to not only be involved in Indian Country but on non-reservation land too. Researchers must understand and into consideration

Canada may not be a good place for immigrants because the government is extractive. The take of the land from Indigenous people is ongoing. Many indigenous girls are murdered around Canada and the government does not do anything to stop that. Canada is committed to free trade, multiculturalism on paper, but these policies do not apply in real-life. Even today, the government is still extracting land “the crime of indigenous girl should only have been a crime with no social implications”. Are those girls murdered because they are part of the minority or just a regular crime of people? There is no possible reconciliation between indigenous people and the government. In 2002, a female indigenous had to fast for 6 weeks to have the attention of

King (2014) argues that settler Canada and the United States validated the genocide of Native Americans by fabricating the narrative that Indians are incompetent and underdeveloped in their way of life, but anti-Native efforts ultimately failed to eliminate “the Indian.” Indigenous traditions and demands for sovereignty and respect overcame early colonialism; North American Indians and their cultures remain dynamic and active to this day (King, 2014, p. 98). The best method to ensure respectful, sincere, moral, intelligent Native Americans, is to respect their rights to invest in their communities and determine their own lives. However, the U.S. and Canadian governments did not want respectful, self-reliant Natives; they wanted incompetent

Theories of race and racism have been used by sociologists to not only describe modern societies but also address issues of social injustice and achieve an end to racial oppression. Critical race theory is one of the most widely used for this purpose and provides the structure employed by Dwanna Robertson in her analysis of racism against Native Americans and the consequences they have experienced as a result. She uses the term legitimized racism to discuss the racialization of American Indians. By classifying Indians as evil and less than human, whites felt justified in using cruelty against them in order to appropriate their land and resources during the settlement of the Americas. As a result of this, the part Native Americans play is both pivotal and foundational in the economic and internal socio-racial reality of the United States. Their social and economic inequality is often blamed on a culture of alcoholism, individual laziness, and rural living while the fact that they are subject to racial oppression is ignored.

Several countries around the world continue to grapple with matters of Indigenous custom as law and modern criminal or other legal systems. For example, both Canada and the United States have instituted diversion courts for lesser criminal offences that can cater to Indigenous custom in terms of how an offender’s circumstances are seen to influence behaviour and how his or her Indigenous community of origin may assess a comparable crime or situation. Many cases are settled by community sentencing that includes cultural education, time with an elder or other reminders of how the offence is understood in customary law. A definite problem exists in variation as noted in Native American tribal and case law, diversion rules, and in customary provisions

American prisons have a disparity of minority inmate population, and one of the reasons this is so is because of the manner the judicial system operates. The investigator chose this topic because there are many African Americans and Hispanics that have been incarcerated for crimes they committed, as well as for crimes they didn’t commit, and because of their cultural background they were given severer sentencing. After performing the research the investigator found that many factors played a big part in the incarceration of minorities that included, ethnicity and gender. Although there is a high crime rate in minority areas, there are more

Other than discovering the world, some everyday activities of a european explorer include, a competition to see who can split a Native American man in half first, drowning young children for their own humor and burning native Americans alive to watch them agonize. During the Columbian Exchange, a time of trading goods and animals between the Americas and Europe starting in 1492, new landemasses were being explored and claimed in the Americas. These landmasses were explored by European explorers, including Conquistadors, Spanish explorers. Modern-day Mexico was the biggest target for these explorers. Although they discovered and explored many new landmasses, European explorers should be remembered as vile people because they brought gruesome diseases to the Americas, killing millions, they interrupted and took advantage of the Native Americans and their everyday lives, and the explorers were very violent towards them.