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Ambiguous Justice: Native Americans and the Law in Southern California, 1848-1890 (American Indian Studies)

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Whereas the Spaniards and the Mexicans aimed to control the Native Americans of California by converting them to Catholicism, the Americans when they took over the territory in the 1840s after the Mexican War and the Gold Rush aimed to control them by cynical use of the law and related means of incrimination and enforcement. Gunther sees the lighter sentences Native Americans were frequently given in the numerous legal cases she reviewed (cited both in the notes and the bibliography) as an indication that the law was used primarily as a means of harassment of the Native Americans. The other side of this practice of using the law as an instrument of coercion of the Native American population and advancement of the desires of the newcoming Anglos with respect to acquisition of land and finding manual labor, for example, was that Anglos implicitly and explicitly got preferential treatment. It wasn't until 1875 that a Native American could give testimony against an Anglo; though the Indians could file complaints as is evident from the author's extensive documentary research. Yet before and even after this date, patent crimes committed by Anglos usually went unpunished. In such circumstances, laws enacted to remove Indians to reservations seem altruistic and enlightened; when in fact, they were devised to clear the Native Americans out of an area more quickly and easily than the relatively slow-acting discriminatory legal means. Gunther--with a Ph.D. in Native American history--shows how the law especially was a tool used intentionally and systematically by Anglos with the cooperation of the courts at different levels as a hegemonic tool against the Native Americans to further the Anglos' designs while at the same time, as surely as the violence, disease, and alcoholism, it worked to disintegrate the traditional indigenous cultures.