Skip Navigation

Scout Archives

Home Projects Publications Archives About Sign Up or Log In

Browse Resources

Indians of North America -- Legal status, laws, etc.

Resources

American Indians and Crime

This report, released in 1999 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, measures and characterizes the rate of violent crimes experienced by Native Americans in the US, who as the report concludes, are victimized by violent crime at more than twice the rate of US residents in general. The data collection was garnered from a variety of government sources and presents statistics on the involvement of...

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/aic.pdf
Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, Volume II

Oklahoma State University Library has recently announced the digitization of Volume II of Charles J. Kappler's Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, originally published in 1903-04. Unlike some digitization projects, which though valuable and worthwhile have a limited audience, Kappler's seven-volume set of government documents is in high demand by various users, such as Native peoples, researchers,...

https://dc.library.okstate.edu/digital/collection/kapplers
International Indian Treaty Council

The International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) is "an organization of indigenous peoples from North, Central, South America, the Caribbean and the Pacific working for the sovereignty and self determination of indigenous peoples." To achieve their broad goals, the IITC works to support networks of indigenous peoples around the world through their policy work in areas that include global trade,...

https://www.iitc.org/
National Congress of American Indians

Founded in 1944, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) was organized in an effort "to inform the public and the federal government on tribal self-government, treaty rights, and a broad range of federal policy issues affecting tribal governments." As the NCAI is the primary group lobbying on behalf of Native American groups in the United States, the Web site contains information about...

https://www.ncai.org/
Office of Tribal Justice

Interactions between the United States and various American Indian tribes have, at times, been quite contentious. For laypeople it can be difficult to understand some of the various nuances of the legal relationships between these different groups. Fortunately, the website of the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Tribal Justice (OTJ) contains answers to some of these questions. It also provides...

https://www.justice.gov/otj
SAIIC-L: South and Meso American Indian Rights Center Mailing List

The South and Meso American Indian Rights Center sponsors an announcement mailing list for news items and urgent-action alerts to promote its goal to link Indian peoples of the Americas.

http://saiic.nativeweb.org/saiic-l.html
The Avalon Project at Yale Law School: Treaties Between the United States and Native Americans

Since 1996, the Avalon Project at the Yale Law School has provided a number of thematic collections of various important legal documents such as those dealing with German-American diplomatic relations, the Federalist Papers, and Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. This particular new collection is dedicated to providing the full text (in the HTML format) of approximately 30 treaties...

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/ntreaty.asp
U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs

In 1984, the U.S. Senate voted to make the Committee on Indian Affairs permanent, and the basic mission is "to study the unique problems of American Indian, Native Hawaiian, and Alaska Native peoples and to propose legislation to alleviate these difficulties." Visitors can learn a bit more about the Committee and its members in the "About the Committee" section. After reading through the brief...

https://www.indian.senate.gov/