| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory. By Christian W. McMillen. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xx, 284 pp. $38.00, ISBN 978-0-300-11460-7.)
How is the validity of a people's history determined? What impact do those decisions have on the legal, political, and social frameworks that govern their existence? In Making Indian Law, Christian W. McMillen analyzes United States v. Santa Fe Railroad (1941), one of the most important cases involving indigenous land claims ever decided. The author contends that the case hinged on conflicting constructions of the past and led to the creation of ethnohistory as a field of scholarly inquiry.	1
Nomadic cultures such as the Hualapai of the Grand Canyon region, attempting to gain title to their ancestral domains have historically been unable to meet the legal standard of "occupancy established by the Supreme Court in the early nineteenth century" (p. 89). Congress granted much of the Hualapais' homelands to the Santa Fe Railroad Company in 1866. The U.S. Army removed the Hualapai to the lower Colorado River in 1874, and a year later they returned to find their lands, including key water resources, occupied by ranchers and miners. President Chester A. Arthur established the Hualapai Reservation by executive order in 1883, adding a final layer to the morass of conflicting land claims.	. . .

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