This study explores how American Indians use interest group strategies to block federal legislation. Unlike other disadvantaged groups, who have influenced public policymaking through descriptive representation, American Indians have turned to interest group strategies to protect their interests in Congress. Using original data collected from American Indian testimony at congressional hearings on 266 bills during five Congresses, this study tests interest group hypotheses about how and when active opposition affects bill enactment. It finds that American Indians can block federal legislation harmful to their interests when they unify against a bill and that members of Congress frequently respond to American Indian opposition by amending bills to alleviate American Indian concerns.

In the 1970s, Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues found that neighborhood policing works better than metropolitan policing. Though Ostrom articulated design principles for self-governance, the early studies of neighborhood policing did not. In this paper, we articulate the design principles for self-governing policing, which we term Ostrom-Compliant Policing. We then apply this framework to an understudied case: policing on American Indian reservations. Policing in Indian country generally falls into one of three categories – federal policing (by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Federal Bureau of Investigation), state policing (by municipal and state police departments), and tribal policing (by tribal police departments) – that vary in the degree of centralization. Our main contribution is to show that tribal policing as it is practiced in the United States, which claims to be self-governing, is not Ostrom-Compliant. Thus, our approach offers insight into why high crime remains an ongoing challenge in much of Indian country even when tribes have primary control over policing outcomes. This does not mean centralization is better, or that self-governance of policing does not work. Rather, our research suggests that a greater tribal autonomy over-policing and meta-political changes to federal rules governing criminal jurisdictions is necessary to implement Ostromian policing.

This research utilizes a valuable data source to explain voter registration and political knowledge by Native Americans, testing theories of the political engagement of minority populations. After taking account of socio-economic resources, American Indians exhibit lower rates of voter registration and political knowledge compared to Caucasians but similar to that of Hispanics. Relative to other racial groups, military service greatly enhances American Indian political knowledge and voter registration. This finding is especially noteworthy given American Indians' high rate of military service.

This article examines the production and promotion of popular entertainments by the German Sarrasani Circus during the interwar period and how they were used to establish specific national narratives in Germany and Latin America. Focusing particularly on its engagement of Lakota performers, it argues that the Circus acted as an active negotiator of national concerns within and beyond Germany’s borders, and presented the group as ‘familiar natives’ in order to appeal to local and national ideas of Germanness. At the same time, it shows that the performers pursued their own interests in becoming international and cosmopolitan performers, thereby challenging the assimilation forced upon their traditions and culture by institutions in the United States. Finally, it demonstrates how foreign propaganda built on the Circus’s national image in Latin America to restore Germany’s international relations after the First World War. Sabine Hanke is a lecturer in Modern History at the University of Duisberg-Essen. Her research examines the German and British interwar circus. She was recently awarded her PhD in cultural history, from which this article has evolved, at the University of Sheffield. A chapter based on her research is scheduled for publication in Circus Histories and Theories, ed. Nisha P.R. and Melon Dilip (Oxford University Press).

Property institutions should ideally provide economic actors with certainty that their local choices about investment will not be unsettled by shifting political economic equilibria. We argue that for this to occur, political autonomy, administrative and enforcement capacity, political constraints, and accessible legal institutions are each necessary. A comparison of the evolution of property rights for settlers and American Indians in the United States shows how political and legal forces shape the evolution of property institutions. American Indians, who had property institutions before Europeans arrived, could not defend their land from Europeans and later Americans due to lacking military capacity. Settlers' property rights were relatively secure because the government had sufficient autonomy and capacity to broadly define and enforce their rights, political institutions constrained the government from expropriating settlers' property, and legal institutions provided a forum for settlers to adjudicate and defend their rights in court. Native Americans, in contrast, had systematically inconsistent and often expropriative policy treatment by the government. Although tribes have technically been sovereign since the 1970s, tribal governments continue to lack sufficient political and legal autonomy and capacity to define and enforce property institutions in response to evolving local conditions.

Mexican Americans (MAs) and American Indians (AIs) constitute conspicuously understudied groups with respect to risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), especially in light of findings showing racial/ethnic differences in trauma exposure and risk for PTSD. The purpose of this study was to examine genetic influences on PTSD in two minority cohorts. A genome-wide association study (GWAS) with sum PTSD symptoms for trauma-exposed subjects was run in each cohort. Six highly correlated variants in olfactory receptor family 11 subfamily L member 1 (OR11L1) were suggestively associated with PTSD in the MA cohort. These associations remained suggestively significant after permutation testing. A signal in a nearby olfactory receptor on chromosome 1, olfactory receptor family 2 subfamily L member 13 (OR2L13), tagged by rs151319968, was nominally associated with PTSD in the AI sample. Although no variants were significantly associated after correction for multiple testing in a meta-analysis of the two cohorts, pathway analysis of the top hits showed an enrichment cluster of terms related to sensory transduction, olfactory receptor activity, G-protein coupled receptors, and membrane. As previous studies have proposed a role for olfaction in PTSD, our results indicate this influence may be partially driven by genetic variation in the olfactory system.

For generations, Mexican and American Indian populations reciprocally and ritualistically took captives from one another’s societies in what are today the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. These captive-taking wars breached the expansion of the American state into the west (1850s) and tested the ability of the American state to enforce law and policy in a frontier environment. This intriguing history, however, has yet to be addressed in legal and social science research on race. Our goal in this article is two-fold: (1) to determine whether the captive status of individuals taken in these endemic borderland wars is visible within surviving U.S. administrative materials (e.g., census); and (2) to determine whether close analysis of census materials can be used to ascertain whether federal liberators were able to abolish the captive-taking trade relative to their official mandate. The authors analyze a core sample of 1860s-era census materials from the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico—which has a documented history of Indian captivity and enslavement—as well as church records to determine whether these materials indicate the continuance of captivity even after federal liberators had the opportunity to abolish the trade.

Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk here discuss with Maria Shevtsova The Wooster Group's work with the Royal Shakespeare Company on Troilus and Cressida and the challenges posed for them by this joint venture. The project was initially proposed by Rupert Goold, but was brought to fruition by playwright Mark Ravenhill, his first directing experience. Troilus and Cressida was part of the World Shakespeare Festival, during which all Shakespeare's plays were performed by different companies from countries across the globe. The Festival, four years in the making and spanning eight months, was part of the cultural programme of the Olympic Games held in London in 2012. Troilus and Cressida was first performed at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from 3 to 18 August 2012, and then at the Riverside Studios in London from 24 August to 8 September. This conversation took place at the Riverside Studios on 30 August 2012, and pairs with the discussion of The Wooster Group's Hamlet, the company's first Shakespeare production, published in NTQ 114 (May 2013). Maria Shevtsova holds the Chair in Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London and is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly. Her most recent book is the co-authored Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (2013).

A sample of 20 right-handed Aruaco Indians (12 male, 8 female; age 8–30 years) from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Colombia) participated in this study. A brief neuropsychological test battery (visuoconstructive and visuoperceptual abilities, memory, ideomotor praxis, verbal fluency, spatial abilities, concept formation) was individually administered. In addition, a handedness questionnaire was included. In some neuropsychological tests performance was virtually perfect (Recognition of Overlapped Figures and Ideomotor Praxis Ability test), whereas performance in other tests was impossible (e.g., Block Design using a time limit). It was proposed that two types of variables were significantly affecting performance: (1) educational level; and (2) cultural relevance. Some tests appeared significant and meaningful whereas others were meaningless and even impossible to understand. The appropriateness of current neuropsychological instruments for cross-cultural assessment is discussed. (JINS, 2001, 7, 510–515.)