Perhaps because I had the pleasure last night to hear my former student Ezra Rosser, AU Washington College of Law, present his new book, A Nation Within: Navajo Land and Economic Development (Cambridge University Press) to the NALSA Chapter at Georgetown Law, I was primed this morning to notice here that Craig Green, Temple University James E. Beasley School of Law, has posted Indian Affairs and Administrative Law. Appearing originally on Notice and Comment, the blog of the Yale Journal on Regulation and the ABA Section of Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice, Green’s
brief essay, written for a Symposium on Racism in Administrative Law, highlights the significance of "Indian Affairs" for the history of administrative law, and raises normative questions about excluding such history from prevalent definitions of the field. To erase Native dispossession from the history of American administrative structures necessarily distorts images of United States law and the violence it has produced.I'll add that Rosser’s Nation Within, written from the vantage of a White who grew up on the reservation and then became a leading scholar of Poverty Law and Property while continuing to teach Native American Law, is chock full of legal history. For example, I had not previously understood how the Navajo’s distinctive experience with economic development, including devastating limits on sheep herding and the Nation’s own petroleum company, influenced its rejection of the Indian New Deal. And I particularly appreciated the illustrated "shout outs" Rosser gave to other law professors who write on Native American law at the start of his talk, if only because it signaled to the students in attendance that any work of scholarship is in fact collaborative, even though one person's name appears on the cover.
In A Nation Within, Ezra Rosser explores the connection between land-use patterns and development in the Navajo Nation. Roughly the size of Ireland or West Virginia, the Navajo reservation has seen successive waves of natural resource-based development over the last century: grazing and over-grazing, oil and gas, uranium, and coal; yet Navajos continue to suffer from high levels of unemployment and poverty. Rosser shows the connection between the exploitation of these resources and the growth of the tribal government before turning to contemporary land use and development challenges. He argues that, in addition to the political challenges associated with any significant change, external pressures and internal corruption have made it difficult for the tribe to implement land reforms that could help provide space for economic development that would benefit the Navajo Nation and Navajo tribal members.
–Dan Ernst
