Indians experience violence at twice the rate of any other racial group in the United States. Violence against Indian women is particularly severe; in fact, Congress stated the rate of violence against Indian women has become an “epidemic.” Aside from its prevalence, violence against Indians is unique because, unlike other racial groups, the majority of crimes committed against Indians are perpetrated by non-Indians. The high rate of crimes against Indians is attributable to Indian country’s peculiar jurisdictional rules. Most notably, tribes cannot prosecute non-Indians. This limitation is not a product of the 1700s or 1800s; rather, it is a result of the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe. Oliphant has been widely critiqued in legal scholarship, but it remains the law. Jurisdictional limitations are compounded by Indian country’s geographic isolation, meaning tribes rely on law enforcement agents that are often located more than 100 miles away. Not only are state and federal law enforcement far away; they have little incentive to prioritize Indian country crime. Consequently, criminals have been known to target reservations.

This chapter considers the unobtrusive words, the conjunctions, and the grammar of Victorian realist prose, drawing on examples from Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and Anthony Trollope. The styles of Victorian realist fiction are shown to lodge within their very grammar a psychology of style; they register in the turns and returns of their sentences, in their ‘forms of retardation, inference, and backwards-reappraisal’, thinking and reflection from within the midst of narrated experience.

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.