Land Divided by Law: The Yakama Indian Nation as Environmental History, 1840-1933 - Softcover

Wester, Barbara Leibhardt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1610271408 ISBN 13: 9781610271400

Publisher: Quid Pro, LLC, 2014

Synopsis

Wester's environmental history of Yakama and Euro-American cultural interactions during the 19th and early 20th century explores the role of law in both curtailing and promoting rights to subsistence resources within a market economy. Her study, using original source files, case histories, and contemporary writings, particularly describes how the struggle to assert treaty rights both sprang from and impacted the daily lives of the Yakama people. The study is now widely available in this new paperback (and digital) edition, adding a 2014 foreword by Harry Scheiber, professor of law and history at Berkeley. This book, he writes, "is a masterful study of the complex, extended series of confrontations between the native Indian cultures of the Yakima region and the regime of the conquering white nation. Her analysis is based on a blending of materials from rich archival sources and from the literatures of legal history, administrative history, anthropology, ecology, and cultural theory. Most remarkably, the book makes important new contributions to all these fields of scholarship." "In her remarkable book "Land Divided by Law," Barbara Leibhardt Wester eloquently portrays the Yakama Indians of the Columbia River Basin as actors defending a threatened, living landscape from encroachments by settlers. Using federal officials and the courts to advocate for their rights, they reasserted a spiritual heritage of the earth as body, heart, life, and breath. Anyone interested in Native peoples and their interactions with Euro-Americans will want to read this lively, engaging account." - Carolyn Merchant Professor of Environmental History, University of California, Berkeley "This is a remarkable work that brims with insight about the inter-relatedness of nature, work, law, and culture. Wester blends expertise in several different academic disciplines with a superb gift for narrative into her analysis of the Yakama people's defense of their traditional way of life. The book is a te

About this title

About the Author:

Barbara Leibhardt Wester is an environmental lawyer and historian who works, writes, and creates textiles in northern Illinois, where she lives with her husband and a Siberian husky. She holds PhD and JD degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in history from Northwestern University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Quid Pro, LLC
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1610271408
• ISBN 13: 9781610271400
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300