A final note about how to prepare for seminars
In the previous posts, I have given you a couple of hints about how to read and prepare for seminars. When you are reading a text, you should not just read the book from front to back. Help yourself by learning about the context surrounding the text.
You should:
1. Learn what you can about the historical context in which the text was produced.
2. Learn what you can about the author and where this text fits into an author's work.
3. See if you can find some reviews of the book. No, I don't mean reviews on Amazon.com or other commercial websites. I mean published book reviews of the kind that you will have to write for this class. For instance, you can find the following review in pdf version at:
Bennett review of Deloria
Robert L. Bennett, Review of “Custer Died for Your Sins,”” By Vine Deloria, Jr., 1970 Wash. U. L. Q. 218 (1970)
A surrounding context for which the book was written is fascinating. Deloria, in chapter 3, focuses on the disastrous policy of termination. The "termination-era" in federal Indian law and policy is relevant to Hawaii. At the time (or shortly after) Deloria must have started writing the book, the federal government, thanks to President Richard Nixon, was on its way to changing its policy away from "termination" and in favor of "self-governance."
ReplyDeleteI'll summarize succinctly why termination was disastrous; it ended the political status tribes had with the federal government and required those tribes to build new political relationships with their respective states. The problem with this was that states, at times, apparently viewed state interests as in conflict with tribal interests. So, without a political relationship with the federal government, tribes couldn't rely on the federal government to act as an effective advocate for them in their conflicts with the states.
The "termination policy" is made relevant to Hawaii through the Hawaii Admissions Act providing statehood to Hawaii. While Deloria describes termination as ending federal services to federally recognized indigenous communities through the U.S. continent, in more contemporary times, it may be more useful to focus on the fact that federal services were made possible through political relationships between indigenous communities and the federal government. Essentially, the termination policy was one of ending the political relationships between I indigenous communities and the federal government.
Although
Through the Hawaii Admissions Act, the federal government ended its political relationship with native Hawaiian Homesteaders. When the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act was passed by the U.S. Congress in 1920, that act created a political relationship between the federal government and native Hawaiians lessees of Hawaiian Homes Lands. A review of the Admissions Act shows that as part of the agreement for statehood, the new State of Hawaii would accept the roles and responsibilities the federal government had under the HHCA. The Department of Hawaiian Homes Lands (DHHL) changed from being a federal government program and into a state government agency.