Yaqui woman Lucía Martínez navigated the borderlands slavery regime of the Arizona-Sonora region in the second half of the nineteenth century and bore three children to a territorial Senator who had held her as a servant in his household between the ages of ten and eighteen. When Woolsey tried to keep her daughters from her in 1871, Martínez challenged him in court, becoming the first known Indigenous woman to file a claim in Arizona’s territorial courts. Her descendants nominated her to the Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame in 2021 and remember her as a champion despite her marginalized legal status.

Miscegenation laws banned inter-racial marriages throughout much of the United States prior to the Supreme Court ruling overturning those bans in the 1967 Loving v Virginia decision. Indigenous women who bore children with white fathers faced grave challenges in securing the futures of children deemed illegitimate under the law. Juana Walker, daughter of an Akimel O’odham mother and American father, and Rebecca Graham, daughter of a Duwamish mother and American father, both challenged such laws when they claimed inheritance rights to their father’s estates in 1892 and 1894. Their cases demonstrate the contentious views of Indigenous and non-Indian Westerners who shared both intimate relationships and animosities at the end of the nineteenth century.

Sauk Suiattle woman Louisa Enick secured a public domain allotment late in the nineteenth century that allowed her to live and raise her children on sacred and secure homelands between the peaks of the North Cascade Mountains in what is northern Washington today. Along with her Sauk Suiattle neighbors, Enick filed and maintained her claim into the early twentieth century, but shortly before her death, federal officials dismissed her land claims and surveyed Sauk Suiattle lands to establish the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Enick and her descendants struggled to retain title, but lost a bureaucratic battle with devastating consequences. Despite this blow, Enick’s relatives and tribe continue to persist in their homelands today and are seeking means to recover land claims like Louisa Enick’s in negotiation with the federal and state governments.

Standing Bear’s 1879 effort to return to his Ponca homelands in Nebraska after being forcibly removed to Indian Territory is a compelling story that casts a long shadow in Great Plains history. What has been overlooked in that shadow is that Standing Bear’s legal case had its precedent in the 1868 trial of Moses Keokuk, a Sac and Fox leader who successfully sued an Indian agent in Lawrence, Kansas for trying to keep him from leading a delegation to meet with officials in Washington, D.C. Standing Bear’s legal arguments echoed Keokuk’s nearly verbatim, but Judge Dundy failed to follow the standard script, ignoring nearly a century of federal Indian law and local legal practice that recognized Native people’s rights in American law when he instead asked himself whether Native people were human. After Standing Bear’s case, which recognized his human right to mobility but stripped him of his status as a Native person, other Native men similarly sued Indian agents for confining them to reservations. Standing Bear’s case is better understood in the light of cases before and after his, all of which reveal Indigenous people’s sophisticated leveraging of the law in the years immediately following the Civil War.

As the federal Indian boarding school system expanded across the American West after Carlisle was established in 1879, Native parents developed creative strategies to resist coercive child removal. In 1885, Tlingit parents successfully used habeas corpus to force Alaska boarding school officials to return their children. Judges found it difficult to justify compulsory attendance and other Native families followed suit, using habeas to challenge boarding schools in Washington, New Mexico, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska into the twentieth century. Although few Indian agents followed the letter of the law, Congress responded to these legal challenges by passing a law in 1895 that banned use of force and threats to compel attendance in off-reservation boarding schools. Each of these stories reveals that Indigenous resistance and legal sophistication prompted federal reform and brings new questions to bear on current investigations into boarding school policy and abuses.