Western United States - History - General & Miscellaneous, Native North American Peoples - Law, Politics, & Government, Native North American Peoples - General & Miscellaneous, Native North American History - Southwestern Tribes, Native North American His

Wild Justice

Name: Wild Justice
Author: Michael Lieder, Jake Page
ISBN: 9780679451839

by Michael Lieder, Jake Page

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Overview

Synopsis

In the long, anguished history of the American Indian, the events comprising the resistance of the Chiricahua Apaches against European encroachment and their subsequent punishment at the hands of the United States were the most heroic, violent, expensive . . . and tragic. As settlers swarmed into the Southwest, the Apaches were forced oV their ancestral lands. Led by the infamous warrior Geronimo and outnumbered by five hundred to one, a small group of renegade Apaches waged a fierce rebellion against the U.S. Army for more than a year. Finally surrendering in 1886, Geronimo and the rest of the Chiricahuas--including those who didn't participate in the insurrection and even those who actively assisted the Army--were held as prisoners of war for twenty-three years in far-off Florida, Alabama, and, later, Oklahoma.

After World War II, Congress felt obliged to establish a forum specifically to hear and remedy the complaints of Indian tribes against the United States, and, in 1947, Harry S. Truman signed into law the Indian Claims Commission. Focusing on the unique claims of the Chiricahua Apaches, Wild Justice examines the personalities involved in and decisions made by this extraordinary tribunal--the first time any national government established a court to redress grievances of its native people--and the efforts made by hundreds of other tribes to gain restitution.

Jake Page, who has written extensively on the South-west Indians, and Michael Lieder, a legal scholar, bring to light this little-known saga in American history. The Chiricahua were represented by an unlikely pair of lawyers: Israel Weissbrodt, born to illiterate Jewish emigrants from Poland, educated at Columbia University, and trained by William O. Douglas; and David Cobb, a Mayflower descendant and Harvard graduate. When the government misdated the taking of the Apache lands and left an opening for legal wrangling, this odd couple pounced. The result was a $22 million settlement, forty times what the tribe had asked for--a spectacular sum in total, but, divided among several thousand Apaches, it proved slim atonement, and it was at best a bittersweet victory.

Rather than negotiating the Indian claims and considering present needs, the United States insisted on battling over ancient grievances in the inherently adversarial Anglo-American legal system, which was incapable of grasping the Indians' way of life. The very concept of land ownership was foreign to the Indians, but payment to the tribes for loss of acreage was all the legal system could muster in recompense for decades of injustice. The destruction of religion, tribal sovereignty, and whole cultures remained unaddressed, and these issues plague U.S./Indian affairs to this day.

If "our treatment of Indians reflects the rise and fall of our democratic faith," Wild Justice is the remarkable history of that failure and the unbridgeable legal and cultural chasm at its heart.

About the Author, Michael Lieder, Jake Page

Michael Lieder has been a lawyer since graduating from Georgetown University Law Center in 1984. Now working in Washington, D.C., he has taught at the University of Toledo College of Law and published several articles in legal journals, including Analyses of American Indian Law.

Jake Page, a former editor of Smithsonian magazine, is a science writer and novelist whose fictional work includes The Stolen Gods, a Southwestern mystery concerning the theft of Indian religious artifacts. Called by The Denver Post "one of the Southwest's most distinguished authors," he has written numerous magazine articles on Indian affairs. With his wife, photographer Susanne Page, he wrote Hopi and Navajo, and is producing a forthcoming volume on American Indian mythology.

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Editorials

Lauren Bowen

This book, written by a journalist and a lawyer, tells the story of the Indian Claims Commission Act by focusing on one band of Apaches. The Chiricahua Apaches became prisoners of war after Geronimo's famous uprising in 1886. Detained by the government in Florida and then Oklahoma until 1913, the claim they filed for compensation under the provisions of the Indian Claims Commission Act organizes much of the book.
—Department of Political Science, John Carroll University

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

America's Indian Claims Commission was established by Congress in 1946 to hear historic tribal grievances with the federal government that grew out of the nation's expansion across Indian lands. By 1994, it had paid out $1.3 billion in settlements to Native American tribes, "a pittance," stress the authors of this highly subjective history of the Commission. Lieder, a Washington lawyer, and Page, a freelance writer, focus on a dramatic case in which the Chiricahua Apaches (Geronimo's people) succeeded in 1979 in winning a $22-million settlement after nearly three decades of courtroom wrangling. In the course of detailing this one legal battle, however, the authors also review briefly the history of U.S.-Indian relations since the mid-19th century, the imprisonment of the Chiricahuas after the defeat of Geronimo in the 1880s, the Washington maneuvering that established the Commission and typical cases the Commission has heard over the years. The Commission, the authors suggest, was rigged against the Indians by the very fact that the legal system is constructed to deal with individual justice, not group justice. They also discuss what they call the "real tragedy" of what happened after the Indians were dispossessed of their traditional lands, the destruction of the tribal way of life as typified in the mismanagement of the reservations. If the book is partisan, it is also highly effective in making its arguments. (Aug.)

Library Journal

It is well known that the relations between Native Americans and European settlers were conflict-ridden; what is not so well known is the story of the Indians Claims Commission, established in 1946 as a judicial body to hear the grievances of Indian tribes. Despite its good intentions, the commission had mixed results by the time it closed in 1978. Tribes had their day in court but few received substantial recompense. Lieder, an Indian legal affairs expert, and Page, a novelist and writer on Hopi culture, have written an excellent account using the case of the Chiricahua Apaches and the suit they filed with the commission. The authors are not trailblazers here; Harvey Rosenthal published the first account of the commission in Their Day in Court: A History of the Indian Claims Commission (Garland, 1990). Rosenthal's book is a more technical legal account, however, and gives much less coverage to the significant issue of Indian land claims than Lieder and Page's work. Highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries.Charles V. Cowling, Drake Memorial Lib., SUNY at Brockport

A well-shaped, detailed history of an Apache band tested in battle and in the courtroom.

Washington attorney Lieder and New Mexico writer Page offer a vivid history of the Chiricahua Apache, who inhabited what is now southeastern Arizona until 1886, when, after Geronimo's uprising, they were removed from their lands. Every Chiricahua man, woman, and child was treated as a prisoner of war, "whether or not they had participated in warfare against the United States or were then capable of doing so." Relocated to Florida, then Alabama, then Oklahoma, the Chiricahuas were finally merged with the Mescalero Apache band on a reservation in southern New Mexico. They were then forgotten, the authors write, and edged to bureaucratic extinction until the 1940s, when a federal commission met to consider Indian claims to lost territory. The Indian Claims Commission, established by order of President Truman in 1946, took its time in deciding whether the Chiricahuas had established "use and occupancy" in the lands that had been taken from them and in determining the value of those lands, the site of billions of dollars worth of gold, silver, and copper. Finally, in the late 1970s, the government awarded the Chiricahuas $22 million, "the seventh-largest award issued by the Commission in an aboriginal land claim," more than 40 times the sum the Chiricahuas sought—but a far smaller settlement, in the authors' view, than they deserved. Lieder and Page relate the complex story of the Chiricahuas' legal odyssey well, although they gloss over internal divisions within the band. (Some Apache leaders, for instance, wanted to lease the Mescalero Reservation as a nuclear-waste dump, a source of bitter controversy.)

A worthy addition to the history of the struggle for Native American rights.