Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Tani reviews Jagodinsky, "Legal Codes and Talking Trees"

JOTWELL recently posted my admiring review of Katrina Jagodinsky's Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women's Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946. Here's the first paragraph of the review:
In 2016, legal history is a capacious field – one with a catholic view of what counts aslaw and a willingness to find legal significance in a wide range of places. Katrina Jagodinsky’s Legal Codes and Talking Trees challenges legal historians to be even more inclusive, especially in the voices we seek to hear and the sources we mine. By pairing underused state and territorial court records with oral histories, legends, local newspaper records, and intricate genealogical research, Jagodinsky offers an all-too-rare glimpse of the experiences and perspectives of Indigenous women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as they navigated formal legal systems that were not their own.
Read on here.