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1 J. Gender Race & Just. 325 (1997-1998)
The Genocidal Premise in Native American Law and Policy: Exorcising Aboriginal Ghosts

handle is hein.journals/jgrj1 and id is 357 raw text is: The Genocidal Premise in Native American Law and Policy: Exorcising Aboriginal Ghosts Rennard Strickland This symposium comes on the anniversary of an overdue book manuscript. Ten years ago at the University of Kansas, I delivered the Langston Hughes lectures called Genocide at Law: An Historic and Contemporary View of the Native American Experience.' Although I promised the University of Kansas Press I would produce a book, it does not yet exist. The reason for the delay is that I am perplexed over the issues of genocide and law in the Indian community; I have no answers. The invitation from The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice to deliver this lecture provides an occasion to rethink the genocidal tendency. I have long been perplexed by a strange duality in American Indian law and policy. Over the years I have explored America's schizophrenic attitude toward Native peoples. Non-Indian citizens see Indians alternatively, and often simultaneously, as Savage Sinners and Redskinned Redeemers.2 The Indian is visualized as the devil incarnate and a new-age model for salvation? Historically for policy makers, there are two Indians--one good and one bad. In an oft-quoted passage, the novelist D.H. Lawrence describes the driven, frenetic American alienated from his surroundings and searching for cultural and political roots.4 Peace, Lawrence believed, would come only when white Americans came to terms with the continent's red roots.5 Lawrence noted that America is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts and concluded that one day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for. The ghost that haunts American Indian policy raises the question of how the nation can proclaim utmost good faith and trust responsibility while * Dean and Philip H. Knight Professor of Law, University of Oregon. This Article is an edited version of the transcript of Dean Strickland's presentation, The Genocidal Impulse in American Law: Native Peoples and the Contemporary Struggle for Survival, at The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice Symposium (Oct. 18, 1996). The style of the spoken word has been retained. I. Rennard Strickland, Genocide-at-Law: An Historic and Contemporary View of the Native American Experience, 34 U. KAN. L. REV. 713 (1986). 2. See RENNARD STRICKLAND, ToNTo's REVENGE: REFLECTIONS ON AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND POLICY xiii, 18 (1997). 3. See id. at 17-19. 4. D.H. Lawrence, Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Novels, in STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE 44,48 (William Heinemann Ltd. 1964) (1924). 5. Id. at 48-49. 6. Id. at 48; see also PHOENIX: THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF D.H. LAWRENCE (Edward D. McDonald ed., Viking Press 1964) (1936).

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