These People Have Always Been a Republic

Maurice Crandall's new book exposes one of the seeming paradoxes of Indigenous peoples' existence in the United States: their demands for civil rights and inclusion and their desire for separateness and tribal sovereignty. In this fine study, he correctly challenges traditional narratives about Indigenous electorates that follow a trajectory from exclusion to the “winning” of full voting rights in the twentieth century. He argues that in terms of voting and self-government, there is more continuity in this history than generally recognized. Early chapters trace the responses of the Yaquis, Hopis, Tohono O'odham, and Pueblos to Spanish-imposed colonial government structures. Each responded in different ways. In the case of the Yaquis, Tohono O'odham, and Pueblos, Catholic missionaries and Spanish officials forced non-Indigenous government institutions upon these peoples, with many forms enduring to the present. The Hopi's isolation and resistance, in contrast, allowed them to avoid this fate. The others created syncretic

Colonialism · Ethnology · Government (linguistics · Hopi · Inclusion (mineral · Indigenous · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Sovereignty · State (computer science · Voting · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Anthropology · Law · Philosophy · Public Administration