Place, Race, and Names: Layered Identities in United States v. Oregon, Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Plaintiff-Intervenor

Abstract

While Native American treaty rights are one of the strongest instances of legally protected rights to social and cultural particularity in the United States and internationally, treaties and treaty litigation are also deeply racializing forms of legal discourse. This essay explores the dynamics between law and culture in the United States and the contradictory role played by federal Indian law in the transformation of indigenous identities by examining a current treaty rights case: United States v. Oregon, Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Plaintiff-Intervenor. The essay sets the Colvilles' litigation into its historical and legal context through an analysis of the relationship between the group names, of legal and nonlegal origin, by which Colvilles identify themselves and about which this litigation is centrally concerned. The Colville Tribes have consistently layered their social identities onto a map of permanent places through intra- and intergenerational naming formulas that are used to establish identity and to negotiate historical change and colonization. Federal Indian law has consistently constructed identity in its naming of indigenous groups by decontextualizing and remapping identity to a fixed map of race. Thus, federal legal discourse precludes a consideration of the very aspects of Colville identity that are central to the recognition of the claims put forth in their current litigation.