Indigeneity In The Courtroom

This book is about how indigenous people are used in court and how their indigeneity is produced. It looks at four cases and how they use indigenous people to make a point.

The central question of this book is when and how does indigeneity in its various iterations - cultural, social, political, economic, even genetic - matter in a legal sense? Indigeneity in the Courtroom focuses on the legal deployment of indigenous difference in US and Canadian courts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Through ethnographic and historical research, Hamilton traces dimensions of indigeneity through close readings of four legal cases, each of which raises important questions about law, culture, and the production of difference. She looks at the realm of law, seeking to understand how indigeneity is legally produced and to apprehend its broader political and economic implications. Review: This collection of four essays, each of which probes and details the ways in which indigeneity is produced in court and in the discursive domains surrounding court, is theoretically very sophisticated, provocative, and stimulating. Readers will be rewarded for their close reading of Jennifer Hamilton's fine scholarship. -- Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 32, No. 2, November 2009 ...Indigeneity in the Courtroom is a welcome and useful contribution to this particular area of law and society scholarship. -- Canadian Journal of Law and Society