Paper Short Abstract:

Based on my longitudinal study of Zuni and bringing in insights from other land claim cases, I plan to discuss the American efforts of reconciliation and lack of remorse for colonial violence against the native American People.

Paper Abstract:

I have been studying the Native peoples of North America since 1964 when doing fieldwork among the Ramah Navajo and the neighboring Zuni people of New Mexico. I focused on the study of the Zuni theocracy. Several anthropologists have studied the Zuni people since the late 1870s. Frank Hamilton Cushing, the first Anthropologist to study them, reported that the Zuni complained about the stealth and loss of their aboriginal land, but were never compensated by the US. Several students of Boas- Krober, Benedict, and Bunzel, among others, were also aware of the loss of Zuni land, reported in their field notes, but they hardly did anything about it. The United States government set up land claim courts in 1946 and asked the Native people to file cases if they wanted compensation. Several tribes, such as the Utes, the Hopi, and the Navajo, went to court, but the Zuni waited until the mid-1970s. Finally, they filed a case against the US government through a prestigious law firm, Boyden, Romney, and Kennedy. I was hired as an expert witness along with a team of archaeologists, historians, and legal scholars. The case was decided in 1990, and a settlement awarding the Zuni tribe some 50 million dollars ( Zuni in Court, University Press of Kansas, 1997).

Relying on my longitudinal study of Zuni and bringing in insights from other land claim cases, I plan to discuss the American efforts of reconciliation and lack of remorse for colonial violence against the native American People.