Leonard Peltier was convicted in 1977 for the killing of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Despite allegations of governmental misconduct and questionable legal rulings, the conviction was affirmed on appeal by several federal courts. After nearly fifty years in prison, Peltier was granted clemency by President Biden in 2025 and allowed to finish his sentence under home confinement. This chapter recounts Peltier’s background, his involvement with the American Indian Movement, and the events surrounding the incident at Pine Ridge. His memoir, Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance, was published in 1999. The chapter examines the book’s experimental, transgressive form and its subversion of standard memoir style and structure. Prison Writings utilizes a nonlinear structure, multiple voices, surreal elements, and political and legal analyses, as well as the inclusion of poetry and photographs. Peltier also incorporates Native history and social issues as well as a critique of carceral standards in the federal prison system.

Chapter 2 explores how racial classifications within statutory law affected who gets to vote, immigrate to the United States, self-govern, or become citizens in the years after the Fourteenth Amendment. The chapter addresses current questions related to immigration and paths to citizenship, and also focuses on the criteria that have been used to determine both the qualifications for citizenship and the rights and obligations that come with it. Sovereignty and the ability to self-govern is the core question discussed in relation to indigenous peoples. The ways in which whiteness shaped the definition and exercise of citizenship and sovereignty are introduced, emerging more fully in subsequent chapters. The debates explored here demonstrate the centrality of the consistent demand for assimilation into “American culture,” with the concomitant justification of excluding those who cannot match our expectations of citizenship due to stereotypes of their culture and “race.” Students will reckon with the significance and intention behind the framing of a singular “American culture,” and the ongoing demands for and costs of racial and cultural assimilation.

Chapter 6 investigates the legal options to ameliorate historic approaches to race, allowing the United States to more closely align with its national ideals. Over time, different branches of government developed strategies to ameliorate the damage caused by institutionalized racism. However, courts have wrestled with the question of how these remedies might reify race – making it more central to American life – or destroy the unique aspects of communities, forged by their shared experiences fo race, in an effort to provide greater equality. The chapter asks if the law and Constitution require public institutions to be color-blind in their treatment of race, or does the racial history of the nation demand color-conscious remedies. The text traces the evolution of affirmative action, especially in education, as a means of compensating for generational exclusion and the Supreme Court’s changing perception on color blindness as a constitutional principle.. The treatment of those U.S. territories that have not been granted statehood, where the majority of the population are people of color is explored. Finally, recent expansions to Native sovereignty are examined and the reader is asked to consider the impact of such protections on Native equality.