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Bio Logic/Cultural Logic: Native American Literature, Federal Indian Law, and the Politics of Indian Identity in the United StatesEric Cheyfitz Abstract This paper is very much a work-in-progress. It forms part of a chapter of a book I am writing entitled The Legal Construction of Indian Country, which is also the name of a seminar that I teach in the Law School. Two other chapters of the book have appeared in print: "Savage Law: The Plot Against American Indians in Johnson and Graham's Lessee v. M'Intosh and The Pioneers" is published in the Pease and Kaplan anthology The Cultures of United States Imperialism, (1993); and "The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute: A Brief History" is published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (vol. 2, no. 2, 2000). While "Savage Law" emphasizes literary methodologies in analyzing the relation of the beginning of the genre of the western and the beginnings of federal Indian law, the Navajo-Hopi piece is decidedly legal, and ethnohistorical in its approach. The current piece attempts to bring together or to juxtapose the literary and the legal/ethnohistorical in tracing the history of Indian identity in the United States as a site of political contestation, where understandings of Native identity as a cultural formation becomeincreasingly inflected by the emerging logic of biology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I think the three sections of this chapter, which comprise this paper, are self-contained. The reading of U.S. v. Rogers, 45 U.S. 567 (1846), which will compose the fourth section and to which the other three are a preface, could also compose, and may, another chapter. If you are interested in reading any of the legal cases I cite you can access them through the Franklin data base under LEXIS/NEXIS. |