Equitable Pretrial Justice for Indigenous Accused? Exploring the Role of Gladue at Bail

Departing from narratives that simplify colonial law as a top-down imposition, this work reveals how middle-ranking British officials were pivotal in shaping a hybrid and strategically manipulative legal system within Sudan’s Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. Focusing on inspectors lacking formal legal training, the analysis highlights their crucial role in exercising wide legal discretion to selectively blend elements of British Penal Codes, customary law, and a distorted interpretation of Islamic law. This pragmatic approach, driven by the interests of colonial control, allowed for the selective application of certain Islamic legal principles, even within British criminal courts, by subsuming them under the vague term "Mohammedan Law." The case of Sir Harold MacMichael offers insights into this broader trajectory, illustrating how these middlemen, themselves shaped by the colonial system, wielded agency to transform legal frameworks. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how colonial legal systems were dynamic and contested sites where hybridity was a tool of control, shaped by the selective use of Islamic elements, extensive legal discretion, and a pragmatic focus on maintaining power.

Primary Health Care initiatives in colonial Kenya

This chapter tries to understand and analyse the impact of the British judicial system on the rights of Indian Muslim women in the late nineteenth century. Examining the problems faced by Indian Muslim women, it looks at the positive and negative aspects of the British judicial system, as well as the response of the Muslim community to it. Bernard Cohn stated, ‘It cannot be denied that in India the laws that exist today grew out of a colonial legal system, with its bipolarity of authority and norms that derived from the indigenous and the colonial systems.’ This chapter will also focus on the development of the Indian legal system, and its impact on women.

This article examines the complex interplay between colonial legal systems and Indigenous laws, using the legal challenges faced by Arabunna Elder Kevin Buzzacott as a focal point. Buzzacott's 2004 conviction for the reclamation of a bronze Australian coat of arms, an act he deemed a fulfillment of his legal obligations under Arabunna Law, underscores the colonial legal system's refusal to acknowledge Aboriginal laws and ways of being. The authors argue that the colonial legal framework operates as a ‘nomocidal’ regime, perpetuating physical and conceptual violence against Indigenous peoples by asserting a singular legal authority that erases ontological difference. Through analysis of the Buzzacott case, the article further exposes the colonial legal system's preoccupation with Eurocentric notions of justice, which undermine Indigenous law-ways by eschewing engagement with ontological difference in favour of a universalist claim to authority. By exploring alternative legal worlds and ontologies, the authors advocate for a decolonial approach to justice that acknowledges and respects the multiplicity of legal realities. This shift requires a re-evaluation of the legal system to accommodate ontological pluralism, moving towards a more inclusive and just legal landscape that provides space for Indigenous laws and ways of being. The article is a tribute to Uncle Kevin Buzzacott, highlighting his struggle for recognition and justice as emblematic of the broader challenges faced by Indigenous peoples in colonial legal contexts.

delictuosa de unos indios, 1813,” Archivo General del Estado de Yucatan, Merida (hereafter cited as AGEY), Colonial, Varios, vol. 1, exp. 17. Wherever possible, I have modernized the names of the towns I refer to. If there was any doubt about the identification of a town, however, I left its name as written in the documents. There were some towns that I have not been able to correlate with modern towns, either because their names have changed or because they no longer exist. A further note on terminology: I have chosen to use the word

Art historians have shown a great deal of interest in Indigenous conceptions of space and place and their representations of such in pictorial documents. Another, heretofore largely unrelated line of research in history has examined Indigenous uses of the colonial court system to protect their rights. In this new monograph, Ana Pulido Rull unites both these topics, examining how Mexican Native communities made maps and employed them as evidence in court battles to defend their lands from Spanish depredations. What results is perhaps the most revealing study yet not only on such maps but also on how Native Mexicans manipulated colonial law to protect communal claims.The initial chapters describe how the Spanish empire developed a system of land grants, or mercedes de tierras, to distribute Indigenous lands to Spaniards. Indians in central New Spain (Mexico) began to oppose the mercedes by presenting their own maps showing that such grants were unjust or harmful to their communal welfare. In doing so, Indigenous maps became accepted, and even requested, by Spanish judges as permissible evidence. Afterward, Pulido Rull proceeds to the core of her work: examinations of maps used to oppose mercedes (or to defend them when they favored Indigenous land claims). She also examines the transcriptions of testimony from these cases, to see to what extent such maps worked in protecting Indigenous territory, and how such litigation came to be resolved.The most fascinating aspect of her research methodology, yielding the most revelatory results, is her use of infrared light imaging and ultraviolet light photography to examine the preliminary sketches, revisions, and previous versions that lay hidden underneath the maps. Through such a technique, she reveals that these maps went through several changes that corresponded to changes in the arguments and legal strategies of litigants. The Indigenous legal representatives of their communities would alter maps to strategically appeal to Spanish law or to cast doubt on the allegations of their Spanish opponents, often in ways that did not accurately correspond to the topography of the landscapes in question. These maps, hence, rather than being timeless expressions of Native territoriality, were cleverly crafted with the intent of swaying Spanish judges.Her study also brings to light new information on Indigenous participation in the colonial legal system in general. This aspect should appeal particularly to historians of Latin America. Pulido Rull's combing through colonial case files reveals that the resolutions of many of these quarrels over land either were never recorded or appeared suddenly with little or no explanation. This, along with other telling signs in the documentary record, implies that there were considerable extralegal (and often illegal) negotiations between Native community representatives and Spaniards. The final word in many a legal dispute came down to backroom dealings only implied in the archival corpus. Ultimately, Pulido Rull finds that even if the Native peoples of New Spain did not always succeed in defending their lands in court (and many times they did not), their use of maps was creative, ingenious, and, more often than not, effective.Her treatment of preconquest cartography and justice, however, is unfortunately largely descriptive and uncritical, using modern language with little discussion of the risk of anachronism. She takes at face value information from nostalgic colonial histories that hearkened back to an unrealistically idealized preconquest justice system suspiciously similar to that of the Spaniards (but reportedly free of corruption), replete with Aztec imperial “judges,” “courts,” and “petitioners” (p. 2). Particularly glaring is her unquestioned use of the term map to describe traditional Mexican Indigenous pictorial representations of land. As Pulido Rull herself briefly notes, Indigenous people had no word entirely equivalent to the European category of map, and it is unclear if their ostensibly similar documents exactly corresponded to Western maps. Art historians have noted this, though Pulido Rull largely sidesteps this noteworthy matter by averring that, whatever their differences, Indigenous and Western maps had a “correspondence in meaning” (p. 75).Nevertheless, the book excels in its innovative treatment of colonial Mexican Indigenous mapping for legal ends. Moreover, Pulido Rull's work furnishes further evidence that mapmaking in any culture, contrary to Western notions, is never a truly objective process, something that scholars studying maps from other societies have also recently noted. Pulido Rull furthermore provides another example showing that Indigenous knowledge, rather than being simply exotic or inconsequential trivia made by peripheral people, was sought after and utilized by Europeans. Consequently, this work will appeal to not only art historians or other specialists of Mexico and Latin America but any scholar of cartography or Indigenous peoples.

Reviewed by: Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico by Alex Hidalgo G. Rebecca Dobbs Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico. Alex Hidalgo. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. Pp. xv+166, color illustrations and maps, notes, index. $29.95, paperback, ISBN 978-1-4773-1752-5. Alex Hidalgo's Trail of Footprints is a handsome volume, richly illustrated in color on thick glossy paper, and quite readable. The author conveys a good deal of information about the intertwining systems within which the maps he examines were embedded during the centuries of Spanish colonial occupation in Mexico. His spatial focus is mainly on Oaxaca, though given the nature of these intertwining systems, some discussion necessarily extends to the Mexican colonial capital and even across the Atlantic to Spain. These systems include both indigenous and Spanish constructions of land tenure, social class, legal processes, information conveyance, religion, trade, travel, resource knowledge and use, the materiality of documents (including maps), and the power of archives. Hidalgo's overarching message is that the maps made by indigenous people in Oaxaca were key elements in the functioning of this system of systems, and that the changes observed in the maps over the time period were adaptations to increasing Spanish cultural, legal, and spatial hegemony. Hidalgo has done some things very well. For example, he leaves the reader in no doubt about how entwined the maps were with the colonial legal system. New maps might be made (or sometimes an older one copied) for the purpose of legally confirming a community's land holdings, or as part of a petition to colonial authorities for a grant of land. The map then was "authenticated" by one or more colonial officials; this was a complex process that altered the original map considerably and made it acceptable as evidence in the colonial legal system. Typically, the process involved officials, scribes, and translators traveling to the land in question, observing the land, walking the boundaries according to markers depicted on the map, listening to explanations, annotating the map with descriptions and comments, and finally affixing an official signature. By that point the document has become as much a colonial and textual one as an indigenous and visual one, and was stored with the rest of the (textual) documents for the case. Hidalgo also notes changes to visual styles and cartographic conventions in the indigenous maps over the colonial centuries, as well as some [End Page 153] that persisted. Emblematic of these changes is the title's "trail of footprints." Preconquest cartographic traditions in the area incorporated footprints to depict specific journeys or routes of travel more generally. Early colonial maps by indigenous mapmakers did the same, for instance, representing a walking of the boundaries of a community's land. With the increasing presence of Spanish settlers and the animals they brought, hoofprints were added to the symbology, typically presenting alternating human feet and horseshoe impressions. Later still, the whole convention was dropped as maps became more standardized to colonial legal parameters. Other changes along that trajectory are mentioned throughout the text, if not addressed collectively as a topic of focus. My personal favorite in the book is the chapter called Materials. This chapter engages with the materiality of the maps in fascinating detail and from both sides of the Atlantic system, covering inks, color agents, adhesives, paper, and document sizes. It seems that indigenous inks were superior to European inks of the time period; yet, as Spanish suppression of indigenous culture and knowledge proceeded, indigenous mapmakers adopted European iron-gall inks rather than the other way around. Similarly, whereas indigenous adhesives were highly effective and long lasting, allowing maps to be created on large composite sheets, over the colonial period mapmakers instead adopted the Spanish folio document sizing so that maps could more readily fit into legal case notes. Despite the satisfaction I experienced from learning about these things, however, the book overall has some weaknesses. It is repetitious, with insufficient unique content to effectively fill its pages. It could certainly have benefited from better editing to reduce overlaps, develop meaning, improve word choices, and correct spelling. More importantly, Hidalgo...

Reviewed by: Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist by Joanne Barker Kara Roanhorse (bio) Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist by Joanne Barker University of California Press, 2021 US empire defines terrorism as the "unlawful" use of violence, fear, and intimidation, particularly against civilians, in the pursuit of ideological or political aims. The term primarily refers to intentional violence and is used most often in the context of war; however, terror and terrorism in relation to Indigenous people are reproduced differently under the US/Canadian settler empire. What does it mean to call Indigenous people terrorists on their own land? This is a question Lenape feminist Joanne Barker addresses in Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist, noting, "Indigenous People are identified and made identifiable by the state as terrorists in order to advance imperialist objectives" (p. vii). Two defining concepts she uses, the Murderable Indian and the Kinless Indian, are meant to be identifiers for how Indianness is "terrorism" and therefore justifies the genocide and Indigenous removal from their lands. The Indigenous feminist framework which Barker takes up disentangles settler policies, signifiers, and language used for antiterrorist laws and sentiments. Terror and the fear-driving discourses of settler empire reinforce a designation for settler justifications and weaponizing for harsher sentencing of the state's exploitation, policing, and violence under the systems of colonialism and capitalism. In the US and Canadian contexts, terrorism and terrorists are defined exclusively within settler political order. Thus, the "red scare" embodies the full spectrum of settler racism and xenophobic fear that justifies war-making against Indigenous people. The racism and fear further perpetuates into a belief that security and social stability [End Page 124] requires the extermination or genocide of Indigenous people. This is how they handle the so-called Indian problem. The business of utilizing fear in the name of order against Indigenous people is the basis of settler freedom: figures of terrorism created by state and capitalist industries authoritatively deem Indigenous movements as the ultimate threat to society. Barker is clear about the realities of contemporary Indigenous struggles like "NoDAPL" (No Dakota Access Pipeline), Wet'suwet'en land defenders, and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) movement. It is clear how violations of land and territory, the sexual and environmental violence are each intertwined with police violence, prompting many radicals to envision solidarity building as central to the state's historical and political contextualizing of "terrorism" under the US empire's neoliberal state. As Barker illustrates, companies of resource-centered extraction of gas and oil raise questions of identity by intentionally disavowing and challenging Indigenous territorial rights, sovereignty, and self-determination. The militarizing of police and increasing harm to the environment alongside the ongoing MMIW epidemic is why Indigenous feminists' critiques of the state and violence must be concise. Barker's succinct analysis of the political weaponization of identity fraud makes visible the ever-present conflicted and contradictory work of racist ideologies of cultural authenticity and rationalizations of state violence and suppression placed on Indigenous people. Figures of terrorism are made and remade by the United States and Canada to create order whereby Indigenous sovereignty and their movements threaten national security and social stability. Such threats are linked to all manner of protecting settler economic infrastructure and growth at any cost. Barker first introduces the figure of the "Murderable Indian" as "the first and last authentic Indian," crystalizing how Native people are subjected to a certain kind of criminalization, not just incarceration but of constant surveillance and other types of police violence from the state; they are "an affect of racist fears" and concerns for the settler public and thus require a national security response. The Murderable Indian serves to "license the state's counterterrorist, military, police, and vigilante responses to contain, punish, and deter" (p. vii). Barker asserts this Indian as one that is familiar because they are deemed too much of a threat, whereby the state responds to their terrorism with full force. The Murderable Indian faces the state's counterterrorist measures (including corporate security contractors, invasive surveillance, detention, interrogation, and incarceration), drawing from examples of police violence experienced by water protectors, land defenders, and the work...

This article gives general assessment and discusses approaches to the phenomenon of “colonial archaeology,” which has played an important role in studying ancient cultures of the Pacific region. Its content is closely related both to specific aspects of the colonial system and to the history of archaeology as a science. Until now there has been virtually no research on colonial archaeology in Russian historiography. A preliminary periodization may have the following stages: 16th – mid 19th centuries; mid 19th – early 20th centuries; the time between two world wars; 1945–1980, and the modern period. The authors argue that the reasoned criticism of colonial archaeology, which has begun since the 1980s, does not negate the pragmatic assessment of its many achievements – restoration projects, organization of museums and national systems for protecting the sites of cultural heritage, training scholars from the indigenous peoples in the European and American universities, attracting interest and investments in the study of the past through exhibitions and tourism, founding international scholarly organizations, and convening scholarly conferences and symposiums in the region. The authors identified a number of crucial issues in studying “colonial archaeology,” including the role of “colonial archaeology” in the colonial system of the Pacific region, early stages of archaeological research and forms of their organization; specific features and experiences of “colonial archaeology” from different countries (France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, etc.) and scholarly traditions, legacy of “colonial archaeology,” evolution of “colonial archaeology” after the colonial system began to collapse, and transition from “colonial archaeology” to “neocolonial archaeology” and further to “international cooperation.”

Reviewed by: African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900-50 Maurice N. Amutabi Kanogo, Tabitha . 2005. African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–50. Oxford: James Currey; Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 268 pp. $24.95 (paper). In African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–50, Tabitha Kanogo utilizes archival sources and interviews to interrogate political and sociocultural structures and practices that shaped and controlled women's lives in colonial Kenya. She shows how colonial administration, missionaries, and indigenous customs variously used clitoridectomy, dowry, marriage, maternity, and motherhood to control African women. In the first chapter, Kanogo examines the dilemma of African women within the milieu of two oppositional legal frameworks—precolonial and colonial—and how women dealt with them, with varying degree of success. She casts women as victims whose morality, sexuality, and physical and socioeconomic mobility society sought to control. She implies that Europeans [End Page 118] and African elders seem to have conspired to oppress women legally, so that "under the colonial administration . . . virtually no one in authority . . . could express much satisfaction with the way that women's legal status was defined" (p. 17). The second chapter suggests that the colonial system allowed female agency to flourish. Kanogo shows how "the intervention of the formal procedures of colonial law influenced the cultural status of women and allowed them to find new avenues for self assertion and agency within the confines of [culture] and customary law" (p. 42). Contrary to previous studies, which have presented women in colonial spaces as helpless, hers finds that those in colonial Kenya had ways in which they negotiated against adversity, and even influenced diverse social processes. In the same chapter, she intimates at some gender conspiracy, of men against women—which neutralizes her previous representation of the colonial system as "liberating" and "privileging" to the agency of African women. Kanogo argues that in colonial Kenya, African women were oppressed and had a lower status than that of African men. Though this type of separation between men and women in studies of colonial projects in Africa has been seen as artificial (Oyewumi, 1997), through cases of the pawning of women, she shows how women surmounted obstacles to survive. Her examples suggest that it was women, and not men, who were pawned; however, there seems to be a thin line between pawning and forced marriage (pp. 50–55), to which distinction the author seems ambivalent. Discussing rape, she draws the conclusion that "social representations of the rape crime treated women as social capital, to the exclusion of their individual legal personhood" (p. 55). From the way fines were levied on rapists, she contends that women's "personal suffering was irrelevant" (p. 55). Did colonial laws rescue African women? Kanogo thinks they did when she says, "Colonial sensibilities tended toward the reworking of social hierarchies to the advantage of women" (p. 59). Though claims that men were privileged by the colonial system under paternalism have been rejected as inaccurate (Zeleza, 1997; 2003), Kanogo shows how African men continued to dominate knowledge-creation on various issues: they sanitized their gender while dragging that of women in sludge. In Maragoli, for example, she says "venereal diseases came to be referred to us urukuzu rwa avakali, women's diseases, after World War I" (p. 61), making it look as if men innocently contracted diseases from women, making men victims while female bodies are pathologically characterized as carriers of diseases. In the third chapter, Kanogo connects female circumcision with ethnic identity, gender reproduction, land claims, morality, sexuality, and patriarchal and state authority and religion, in interesting ways. She discusses female circumcision (using its technical name, clitoridectomy) and womanhood. She focuses not on the physical form (the surgery), but on the cultural function, where "the rite delineated right from wrong, purity from impurity, insiders from outsiders" (p. 74). She explains how the female body was positioned at the center of the refashioning of Kenyan societies that have [End Page 119] practiced female circumcision and still practice it, making the female body a site of negotiation, contestation, and prescription in the encounter between indigenous culture and modernity. Using case studies, she dramatizes the impact of female circumcision on Kenyan societies, often in fascinating ways...

Due to incomplete records from the colonial period, particularly regarding cases of infringement on indigenous rights that often went undocumented, research struggles to fully reflect the legal impacts of that era. Therefore, this study explores the profound influence of colonial legal systems on indigenous rights and analyzes how modern legal redress mechanisms address and compensate for these historical injustices. The article first outlines how colonial legal systems deprived indigenous rights in areas such as land ownership, judicial fairness, and identity recognition, drawing on relevant legal documents and historical literature. Subsequently, through case analysis, the study examines the specific impacts of colonial legal systems on indigenous rights across different periods, employing qualitative and quantitative analysis to assess the effectiveness of modern legal redress mechanisms in restoring indigenous rights, safeguarding cultural heritage, and promoting social justice. The findings reveal the depth and breadth of these historical impacts. Data indicate that indigenous land ownership during the colonial period rated only 2 out of 10. Additionally, economic restrictions imposed on indigenous populations disadvantaged them in competition with Portuguese merchants. The study shows that, through a comparative analysis of legal influences over different periods, the rating of indigenous land rights improved to 4 in the pre-reversion period but continued to face challenges in cultural protection, scoring only 3.

This article traces the history of the punishment of sexual assault cases in South Africa's Eastern Cape region from the late pre-colonial period through the turn of the twentieth century. Sexual assault crimes provide a revealing perspective on practices of punishment because they could be, and were, adjudicated through any of the broad array of legal systems – formal and informal, customary and Roman-Dutch, civil and criminal – which characterised the legal landscape of the colonial Eastern Cape. When British administrators created a colonial legal system in the Eastern Cape in the 1850s, they faced the task of governing a Xhosa-speaking population with substantially different ideas about punishment. Compensation payments, reckoned in cattle, were the standard punishment for most wrongs in pre-colonial Xhosaland. Discipline within the family might take the form of corporal punishment, but public punishments generally did not. The reliance on compensation payments harnessed kinship obligations to the maintenance of public order. British legal thought, however, considered compensation payments appropriate only in civil cases. Even fines (payable to the state) were appropriate only for minor crimes; major crimes required imprisonment, corporal punishment, or death. This difference posed a problem for administrators attempting to secure the legitimacy of the colonial legal system. In order to induce Africans to use the colonial legal system, they needed to satisfy expectations of compensation payments. The compromise that emerged consigned compensation payments to civil disputes, where customary law was recognised, and minor criminal cases. Unwilling to trust kin networks to rein in their unruly members, British administrators insisted on punishments whose weight was born by the individual – at least in the case of ‘serious’ crimes. However, allegations of forcible, even violent, non-consensual sex continued to be adjudicated within the customary (civil) court system, where they were labelled ‘seduction’ or ‘adultery’.

Indigenous justice has been practiced by Indigenous peoples in Oceania and North America since time immemorial. These practices have been disregarded, disrespected, and displaced by Eurocentric principles of criminal law and procedure—a system that has been forced upon Indigenous peoples without their consent. As a result of colonization, Indigenous peoples have endured a system that not only has used its laws to erase the existence of Indigenous peoples but also has failed to recognize and honor Indigenous peoples’ systems and principles of laws. At the present time, the colonial systems of laws have begun to recognize Indigenous laws and justice; however, the state has still tried to control how, what, and where Indigenous laws and justice can be utilized. There continues to be a lack of understanding of Indigenous justice, because most education systems are not required to teach it. This is slowly starting to change, but we are nowhere near the actual recognition and practice of Indigenous justice systems. Indigenous peoples continue to practice their laws despite the colonial systems and processes, and in the future, Indigenous justice will be fully recognized with its own jurisdiction and with Indigenous peoples making healthy and respectful decisions about their own peoples.

So different, yet so alike, Canada and Australia, the land of wilderness and the land of bushes respectively, are two nations that go back thousands of years with their culture, practices, traditions, and the natives’ deep and sacred relationship with the land. The arrival of the Europeans disrupted the peace and the pattern of their lives, resulting in loss of indigenous lands, languages, cultures, and misplaced identity. Kenneth T. Williams, in his play In Care, draws attention to the flaws and loopholes in the system that trap natives like spider-webs. The second play taken up for study is Aliwa! by Dallas Winmar, an Australian play that recounts the journey of a mother, who strives hard to escape the clutches of the system trying to break her and her children up. While much research has been done on the sufferings and trauma of the native people, what really transpires on the other side is mostly kept in the dark. This paper examines how the colonial systems in Canada and Australia mirror each other in multiple aspects. It also draws attention to the systems established in colonial Canada and Australia, which aimed at obliterating any and all vestiges of Aboriginality, under the pretext of ‘civilizing’ the uncivilized. The paper utilises a play from each nation to validate the central objective of the paper, with a particular emphasis on the act of taking Aboriginal children away from their parents, a strategy used by the colonizers in both nations.

“Another thing to live for”: Supporting HCV treatment and cure among Indigenous people impacted by substance use in Canadian cities