Department of Ethnic Studies

The 1882 trial of Crow Dog (Kangi Súŋka), for the murder in 1881 of Spotted Tail (Siŋté Glešká), a leader of the Sicangu/Brulé Lakota, had all of the hallmarks of a twentieth- or twenty-first-century celebrity trial. People came for miles around Deadwood, Dakota Territory and far-flung parts to the west in order to attend the trial and rub shoulders with the participants. From the point of view of government officials in the Bureau of Indian Affairs who engineered the trial, the goal was to wrest criminal jurisdiction from Indian governments on reservations. A number of drawings on paper, “ledger drawings,” produced by Crow Dog and other Lakota participants engulfed in the trial and related activities, show another colonial process at work—the appropriation and resignification of the Native voice within the public sphere. The confluence of national, regional, and local events swirling around Deadwood, Dakota Territory, and the legal case that becomes Ex-parte Crow Dog before the Supreme Court, resituates the historical significance of this genre of “Captivity Ledgers” both for Lakota and settler sensibilities during the post-Civil War and early reservation era.

How did we get here? What is the history of the land UCSD sits on? A look into UC San Diego’s land tenure and history, this work seeks to answer these questions. Tracing back the university’s land history reveals a prominent Kumeyaay village by the name of Ystagua alongside three military bases, two of which make up the land the university is now on. Further revealed are the various ways that the university erases its Indigenous past through the romanticization of San Diego’s Spanish past and the celebration of UCSD’s military history, as seen through the official university history book An Improbable Venture and the original site considerations. This thesis analyzes the processes through which Kumeyaay land is marked for national sacrifice, leaving a legacy of military and navy usage that continues until now–a celebration of militarism which attempts to erase UCSD’s Kumeyaay past.

Based on fieldwork at a transnational surrogacy clinic in India and analysis of assisted reproductive technology (ART) legislation under consideration in the Indian parliament, this paper examines how bodies become potentialized through a combination of technology and networks of social and economic inequality. In this process, the meaning that participants assign to bodies and social relationships mediated by bodies becomes destabilized in a way that allows some surrogates to imagine and work toward a connection to commissioning parents that will offer them long-term benefit. The politics that position the clinic to potentialize the bodies of surrogates-and as a result the relations between participants and their imagined outcomes-occur at a moment of global demand for ARTs. As such, they rely on differentiation of subjects culturally, geographically, and economically. This article examines how the potentializing of women's bodies as surrogates occurs at the nexus of political, medical, and social influences in one ART clinic and how the resulting social relations are negotiated between participants in the clinic. © 2013 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.