"Beyond Words on the Island of Noepe: Mediating Power, ‘Blood,’ and the ‘Law’ in Indigenous New England" by Jacquelyn L Grey

Jacquelyn L Grey

Deposited 2008

Abstract
Broadly speaking, this dissertation seeks to demystify the naturalized workings of "juridical discourse" in the regulation and suppression of Native American rights. The notion of "juridical discourse" is represented in this project as formal processes of legal interpretation and less than formal articulations of public opinion—newspaper commentary and loose "talk," for instance. The study thinks about how juridical discourse performs as regulator and disciplinarian in the containment of aboriginal agency and power.
More specifically, the project focuses on the primacy of texts in legal interpretation. "Case law" is a prime example. In a textual practice known as "precedence," interpretation in the case law tradition is derived from other places, other historical moments, and, in this project, other tribes. Of concern is how this privileging of distance can marginalize and occlude the contextual ground of the original "presence" of a case—the local events, acts, actors, circumstances, and histories that created the situation in the first place? Too much local nuance, too much facticity, arguably gets left out in case law. To what extent does the marginalization of local materiality and local particularity undermine tribal acts of self-determination, under the "law"? More pointedly, to what extent do juridical propensities and processes consort with hegemony's will to power in the handling of tribes?
The fieldwork and archival research on this topic focuses on tribal assertions of self-rule in southern New England. The field study extended year-round from 2000 to 2004. The dissertation concentrates on a court case, a land case, that was litigated during this same period on the island of Noepe, better known as "Martha's Vineyard." Noepe has long been a popular New England haven of moneyed leisure and social eclecticism but, more significantly, it is the ancestral home of the Aquinnah Wampanoags, a small, federally recognized tribe at the southwestern tip of the island.
In 2001, tribal leaders encountered a block of local and state resistance when the tribe insisted on establishing their own zoning and building rules on tribal land. Fearing the tribe someday would build a casino on "Martha's Vineyard" and upset the balance of power, the governing regime of the island sued the tribe, claiming that the tribe had violated the terms of a 20-year-old settlement agreement, a juridical text. Four years later, the Aquinnah Indians lost the case in the Massachusetts state supreme court, when the state court overruled a local decision to dismiss the suit.
The Narragansetts, during this same period, clashed with state police in neighboring Rhode Island over the issue of selling tax-free cigarettes on their tribal land. State police raided the Narragansett "smoke shop" in mid-July 2003, after a judge issued a search warrant authorizing the confiscation of the shop's tobacco items. Narragansett resistance turned physical, and in the aftermath of a skirmish, each side sued the other in court. Like the Wampanoags on Noepe, the Narragansetts lost their case in the state's high court.
In addition to the court cases themselves, the project critiques the published commentary of lawyer-scholar Alan Dershowitz, who offers public counsel on how to "criminalize" the violation of the disobedient island Indians. The same chapter examines how the Narragansetts mobilize news conferences to penalize state authorities in the aftermath of the raid. Yet another chapter considers the resistance of aboriginal silence in the midst of hegemonic scorn. The very first chapter underscores the way epidemic death contextualizes the colonization of New England Indians who turn toward literacy and Puritan missionaries in confusion and distress. Finally, the project exams how "blood talk" would politically disenfranchise the mixed-heritage island Wampanoags as "not real Indians" and "not a real tribe."
In sum, this project seeks to interrogate the naturalized propensities of juridical discourse in a troubled relationship with Native American tribes. But it also considers some of the ways in which discourse resists discourse.