the cabinet counter. I thought he’d gone crazy at last and watching him I could hardly speak.
Dad?
I’m going to illustrate this for you, son.
He sat down and waved a couple of forks at me. Then with cool absorption he laid a large carving knife carefully on top of the frozen casserole and all around it proceeded to stack one fork, another fork, one on the next, adding a spoon here, a butter knife, a ladle, a spatula, until he had a jumble somehow organized into a weird sculpture. He carried over the other four butcher knives my mother always kept keen. They were good knives, steel all the way through the wooden shank. These he balanced precariously on top of the other silverware. Then sat back, stroking his chin.
That’s it, he said.
I must have looked scared. I was scared. His behavior was that of a madman.
That’s what, Dad? I carefully said. The way you’d address a person in delirium.
He rubbed his sparse gray whiskers.
That’s Indian Law.
I nodded and looked at the edifice of knives and silverware on top of the sagging casserole.
Okay, Dad.
He pointed to the bottom of the composition and lifted his eyebrows at me.
Uh, rotten decisions?
You’ve been into my dad’s old Cohen Handbook. You’ll be a lawyer if you don’t go to jail first. He poked at the fuzzy black noodles. Take Johnson v. McIntosh. It’s 1823. The United States is forty-seven years old and the entire country is based on grabbing Indian land as quickly as possible in as many ways as can be humanly devised. Land speculation is the stock market of the times. Everybody’s in on it. George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. As well as Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote the decision for this case and made his family’s fortune. The land madness is unmanageable by the nascent government. Speculators are acquiring rights on treaty-held Indian land and on land still owned and occupied by Indians—white people are literally betting on smallpox. Considering how much outright grease is used to bring this unsavory case to court, a case pled by no less than Daniel Webster, the decision was startling. It wasn’t the decision itself that still stinks, though, it was the obiter dicta, the extra incidental wording of the opinion. Justice Marshall went out of his way to strip away all Indian title to all lands viewed—i.e., “discovered”—by Europeans. He basically upheld the medieval doctrine of discovery for a government that was supposedly based on the rights and freedoms of the individual. Marshall vested absolute title to the land in the government and gave Indians nothing more than the right of occupancy, a right that could be taken away at any time. Even to this day, his words are used to continue the dispossession of our lands. But what particularly galls the intelligent person now is that the language he used survives in the law, that we were savages living off the forest, and to leave our land to us was to leave it useless wilderness, that our character and religion is of so inferior a stamp that the superior genius of Europe must certainly claim ascendancy and on and on.
I got it then. I pointed at the bottom of the mess.
I suppose that’s Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock.
And Tee-Hit-Ton.
I asked Dad about the first knife he laid on the casserole, stabilizing it.
Worcester v. Georgia. Now, that would be a better foundation. But this one—my father teased a particularly disgusting bit of sludge from the pile with the edge of his fork—this one is the one I’d abolish right this minute if I had the power of a movie shaman. Oliphant v. Suquamish. He shook the fork and the stink wafted at me. Took from us the right to prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes on our land. So even if . . .
He could not go on. I hoped we’d clean the mess up soon, but no.
So even if I could prosecute Lark . . .
Okay, Dad, I said, quieted. How come you do it? How come you stay here?
The casserole was starting to ooze and thaw. My father arranged the odd bits of cutlery and knives so they made an edifice that stood by itself. He had suspended Mom’s good knives carefully. He nodded at the knives.
These are the decisions that I and many other tribal judges try to make. Solid decisions with no scattershot opinions attached. Everything we do, no matter how trivial, must be crafted keenly. We are trying to build a solid