One hundred and fifty years ago, the US House of Representatives added a rider to an appropriation bill, which legally ended the recognition of individual tribes within the United States as independent nations “with whom the United States may contract by treaty.” This dramatic act brought to an end nearly a century of treaty making between the federal government and Indigenous nations. This issue features a roundtable examining the history and legacy of this momentous but often forgotten event in American history. Moderated and organized by Joel Helfrich, the form features an exchange between historians Kevin Bruyneel, Michael Oberg, Julie Reed, and Alaina Roberts that ranges from the impact treaty making had on Indigenous nations to the recent ruling of the US Supreme Court in McGirt v. Oklahoma.
The issue also features five articles. It begins with the SHGAPE Graduate Student Essay Prize winning article by Mark Boxell, which explores the process through which white settlers in Oklahoma seized control of oil-rich land during the early twentieth-century allotment of Indigenous-owned land there and, in the process, advanced what he terms a “white-supremacist oil-field politics.” Our examination of issues revolving around Indigenous sovereignty and legal rights in the Unites States continues in an article by Laurence Hauptman that reconsiders the often-neglected importance of the US Supreme Court case Elk v. Wilkins, which denied Indigenous peoples birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. Cristina Stanciu continues this line of inquiry in her article by examining the anomalous position “the Indian” occupied in the legal history of naturalization leading up to the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. We then turn to a pair of articles that deploy visual material in creative ways. Deborah Varat investigates visual representations of Jews in the illustrated popular press of the Gilded Age and discovers, surprisingly, a generally positive attitude toward Jewish immigration. Finally, Joshua Schwartz examines how Life magazine’s lavish illustrations were appropriated by advertisers without the publication’s permission, resulting in a legal and financial struggle over intellectual property and copyright of images. The result is a visually entertaining issue that we hope you will enjoy. We end, as always, with a rich and informative collection of book reviews.
