CENTERING
INDIAN LAW IN THE
CONSTITUTIONAL CANON on research by
M AG G I E B L AC K H AW K Assistant Professor of Law
In a groundbreaking article recently published in the Harvard Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Maggie Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe), argues for a paradigm shift in American constitutional law that would place Native Americans, federal Indian law, and American colonialism at the center of how lawyers and the public understand our constitutional framework. The article, “Federal Indian Law as Paradigm within Public Law,” marks the first time in nearly 15 years that the Harvard Law Review has published an article on federal Indian law. Blackhawk, an Assistant Professor of Law, researches and teaches in the fields of constitutional law, federal Indian law, and legislation. Her recent projects examine the ways that American democracy can and should empower minorities, especially outside of traditional rights and courts-based frameworks. “At the heart of constitutional law is the question of how best to constitute, distribute, and limit government power,” writes Blackhawk. “Although there is much to learn from this Nation’s tragic history with slavery and Jim Crow segregation, resting our public law on a single paradigm case that is defined by the black/white racial binary has led to incomplete models and theories. This Nation’s tragic history with colonialism and the violent dispossession of Native lands, resources, culture, and even children offers different, yet equally important, lessons about how to distribute and limit government power.” Unlike the law of slavery and segregation, Blackhawk argues, American colonialism has not been overruled, meaning the federal government can use as justification the same doctrines it used to detain and dispossess Native people. For example, the last three presidential administrations have used the Indian Wars as precedent to justify action in the War on Terror. More recently, this doctrine, which underlay the government’s actions in forcing Natives onto reservations and taking Native children from their parents to place __ 4
