JOTWELL recently posted my admiring
review of Katrina Jagodinsky's
Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women's Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946. Here's the first paragraph of the review:
In 2016, legal history is a capacious field – one with a catholic view
of what counts aslaw and a willingness to find legal significance in a
wide range of places. Katrina Jagodinsky’s Legal Codes and Talking Trees
challenges legal historians to be even more inclusive, especially in
the voices we seek to hear and the sources we mine. By pairing underused
state and territorial court records with oral histories, legends, local
newspaper records, and intricate genealogical research, Jagodinsky
offers an all-too-rare glimpse of the experiences and perspectives of
Indigenous women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as
they navigated formal legal systems that were not their own.
Read on
here.
