In his recent book, Cooperation without Submission: Indigenous Jurisdictions in Native Nation-US Engagements (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Justin Richland examines the language employed by Native American Tribes and U.S. government agencies in meetings between them.  Richland shows how Tribes conduct these meetings using language that demonstrates their commitment to  nation-to-nation interdependency, while federal agents approach these consultations with the assumption that federal law is supreme.

For this seminar-format discussion, readings will be pre-circulated to attendees. Please email Dusty Hoesly (hoesly@ucsb.edu) to RSVP by Feb. 21.

Justin B. Richland is Professor and Chair in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine and Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. His research explores the language, culture and politics of contemporary Native American law and politics and their engagement with the US settler state. He is the author of three books, Arguing with Tradition, The Language of Law in Hopi Tribal Court (University of Chicago Press, 2008), Introduction to Tribal Legal Studies, 3rd Edition [with Sarah Deer] Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2015), and Cooperation without Submission: Indigenous Jurisdictions in Native Nation-US Engagements (University of Chicago Press, 2021). His essays have also appeared in scholarly journals including American Ethnologist, Annual Review of Anthropology, Discourse & Society, Law and Social Inquiry, and Law & Society Review. Since 2009, he has served as Associate Justice of the Hopi Appellate Court, the highest court of the Hopi Nation. In 2016, he was named a J.S. Guggenheim Fellow.

This event is co-sponsored by the UCSB Legal Humanities Initiative and the American Indian and Indigenous Collective.