The Algebra of Federal Indian Law: The Hard Trail of Decolonizing and Americanizing the White Man’s Jurisprudence

The Algebra of Federal Indian Law: suggests that legal discourse inherited from a European perspective has helped to justify colonialism and perpetrate the ongoing subordination of Indian tribes. Because the common law was inherited from a system that treated non-Christian, non-White, indigenous peoples as inferior, judicial treatment of Indians can never reconcile competing worldviews. Instead, Williams argues for a rejection of European legal norms and the creation of an ‘Americanized’ approach to Indian law that reconsiders the origins of the power dynamic between Indian and European peoples to synthesize a new worldview.