Rong Kohtz, a historically minded attorney-at-law, has posted In re Lelah-Puc-Ka-Chee: A Case Study on the Americanization of Law in the Heartland, 1898-1908:
From 1899 to 1908 in Iowa, the Meskwaki people and their local allies repeatedly defeated forcible removal of their children to a federal Indian boarding school in a series of legal actions during the zenith of hostile assimilation. The case of Lelah-Puc-Ka-Chee was the first one of these cases. The Meskwaki’s legal victory unsettles the prevailing historical account that casts Indigenous peoples as passive and reactionary to the U.S.’s assimilationist Indian policies and calls for re-examination of Indigenous Americans’ role in the evolution of American law. By examining the power dynamics in the cases regarding Lelah-Puc-Ka-Chee, this essay investigates how far was the reach of the colonial administrative and judicial powers in the lives of Indigenous families and individuals, and what forces accelerated, slowed, or redirected the colonial powers in the domestic sphere at the local level. In this exploration, the essay finds powerful Indigenous forces in the Americanization of law, and Indigenous Americans role as progenitors of a pluralistic American polity.
Lelah Puc-Ka-Chee (SHSI via Wiki)
--Dan Ernst
