Embedded Racism in Indigenous Americans in the Legal System

Join professors Hillary Hoffmann and Monte Mills for a panel discussion on Embedded Racism in the Law. 

For far too long, the laws and policies of the United States have been premised on the erasure and exclusion of the continent’s indigenous peoples. From the pre-founding theories of George Washington to the wild Manifest Destiny expansionism of the late 1800s through the Termination era of the 1950s, the federal government often took actions that eliminated, marginalized, and silenced Native nations and their interests. Our presentation will discuss the history and context of cultural protection, with a focus on the underlying racist misconceptions that drove much of federal Indian policy throughout the nation’s first two centuries. We will then illustrate how Native nations are rejecting that history and beginning to write their own future of cultural protection.