The Problem of Justice: Tradition and Law in the Coast Salish World

Series Editors' Afterword

Series Editors’Afterword The “indigenous” is no longer tourism or artisanry, but rather the struggle against poverty and for dignity. Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Masks and Silences Few people working in native communities in North America at virtually any time in the last two decades, on reservations and beyond, have been able to avoid lengthy discussions of native justice systems. Where broad community mobilization and confrontation captured the headlines in the Red Power era of the 1960s and 1970s, indigenous justice systems have quietly but pervasively emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as alternatives to past efforts. Native courts are now, and for some time have been, a central focus of pragmatic efforts at reestablishing native “autonomy” at mobilizing and deploying a form of sovereignty that combines grassroots strategies of organizing with a view of what surrounding states are willing to tolerate, condone, and support. The stakes seem smaller in the current debates: semi-autonomous institutions largely framed and limited by external authorities, but which, nevertheless, seek and gain some control over the social life of their own communities. Yet in ways that are not always obvious, native court systems strike at the same issues and reflect the same tensions issues and tensions of poverty and dignity as did past projects, despite differences in form and scale. This is certainly the case in the communities discussed by Bruce Miller in The Problem of Justice an insightful title and a work that points to the fact that notions of justice are often a problematic element, a hurdle as it were, in people’s efforts to mobilize courts for larger community projects. As the events discussed in The Problem of Justice make clear, issues of justice and the study of native courts take us to the heart of characteristic , widespread situations and struggles in native communities over poverty and dignity (especially in North America, but we suspect elsewhere as well), and beyond these, to more abstract but in some ways far more relevant issues of power how a community or group 211 Series Editors’ Afterword lives with, avoids, and, in some instances, gains power in ways that are substantially different from those around them. A discussion of these topics poverty, dignity, and power, respectively quickly points us to some widely shared reasons that native courts are both central to contemporary strategies of native sovereignty, and why these courts are simultaneously so difficult to sustain over the long term. Poverty in native communities, to begin, ordinarily has different causes, some different consequences, and, especially, substantially different remedies or potential remedies among native people and for native communities than elsewhere in the surrounding society. Recently, the political right taking the historical products of its own long-term racism as the result of “natural” processes has begun to ask whether indigenous people are characteristically different from any other victim of prejudice, any other object of current discrimination, including (inevitably) poor whites? The traditional left has, likewise, posed what seems a different question, but one that is in the end very closely related. Pointing out that all peoples who are the objects of prejudice and discrimination are, as a socially and culturally constructed categoryofpeople,internallydifferentiatedintorichandpoor,employed and unemployed, politically connected and powerless to invoke just the simplistic polar differences, they ask: are the characteristic relations between the poor and the powerful among indigenous people really any different than they are among any other peoples? To start with a simplification: the answer to both questions is, most often, yes, despite the fact that both questions are posed in ways meant to ensure negative responses. And the reasons for answering yes, and hence the importance of The Problem of Justice, have to do with the fact that native peoples in the United States and Canada form communities with a too-small, but still significant, amount of sovereignty, particularly over their own people and some of their own resources. Further, it turns out that by lumping native individuals into very general categories, such as “Indian” or “persons of color,” the dominant society binds native individuals to their own communities in particularly poignant ways. For if, by way of example, an African American moves away from a small town in the South and goes to Chicago, he or she is usually still an African American once in Chicago. A Cherokee, Tewa, or Papago in Chicago usually becomes, socially and culturally, simply “Indian”; and in New York City he or she is often lumped in with that all-purpose 212 [18.226...