American Indian Culture and Research Journal

American Indian Legal Status: A Review of Recent Interpretations Walter L. Williams David H. Getches, Daniel M. Rosenfelt, and Charles F. Wilkinson. Cases and Materials on Federal Indian Law. St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1979. 660 pp. $18.95. Russell Lawrence Barsh and James Youngblood Henderson. The Road: Indian Tribes and Political Liberty. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. 301 pp. $14.95. While the literature of Indian-white relations is immense, Americans seem more interested in the dramatic conflicts of the frontier era than in what has happened to native people after the frontier period ended . This is particularly so regarding Indian legal status in the United States despite the crucial importance of questions of tribal sovereignty and treaty rights. The complexity of Indian-related treaties, statutes, administrative policies, and court decisions by it self has deterred scholarly analysis. Codification of United States Indian Law (ordered by Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier) was completed in 1942. The Handbook of Federal Indian Law, by Felix Cohen, became the bible of the field, relied upon by lawyer and judge alike. A new revision of the handbook will soon be published, under the general editorship of Rennard Strickland, to update Cohen and incorporate the mass of new material which has made United States Indian law practically a separate field unto itself.