Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2014
Abstract
In this tightly argued and thoroughly engaging article, Gregory Ablavsky makes the case for a revisionist history of the U.S. Constitution that places Native American Indians at its center. While it isn’t hard to show that conventional constitutional histories largely neglect Indians, it isn’t easy to prove that such neglect is not benign. That is, it’s one thing to argue that standard accounts should include a discussion of Indians, but it’s another thing entirely to make a convincing case that core constitutional understandings would be fundamentally altered if historians fully and prominently integrated the history of relations with Indians into their narratives of the Constitution. Ablavsky aims for the latter, arguing that the history of the creation, drafting, and ratification of the Constitution should be rewritten with Indians in a leading role – and he does not miss the mark.
Disciplines
Indigenous, Indian, and Aboriginal Law | Law
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Christina Duffy Ponsa, In Plain View, JOTWELL (July 4, 2014) (reviewing Gregory Ablavsky, The Savage
Constitution, 63 Duke L.J. 999 (2014)), http://legalhist.jotwell.com/in-plain-view/.
Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/3241/