Robert Williams attempts to write Indians back into Indian law by developing a greater appreciation for the contributions of American Indian legal visions and demonstrating how ancient treaty visions can speak to the modern, multicultural age. Prior to European colonization, in countless treaties, councils, and negotiations, American Indians had adhered to the principles contained in traditional rituals such as the Gus-Wen-Tah, the sacred treaty belt, for achieving justice between different peoples. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the survival of the European...

Exploring the history of contemporary legal thought on the rights and status of the West's colonized indigenous tribal peoples, Williams here traces the development of the themes that justified and impelled Spanish, English, and American conquests of the New World.

Robert A. Williams Jr. boldly exposes the ongoing legal force of the racist language directed at Indians in American society. Fueled by well-known negative racial stereotypes of Indian savagery and cultural inferiority, this language, Williams contends, has functioned "like a loaded weapon" in the Supreme Court's Indian law decisions.

Beginning with Chief Justice John Marshall's foundational opinions in the early nineteenth century and continuing today in the judgments of the Rehnquist Court, Williams shows how undeniably racist language and precedent are still used in Indian law to...