Although the determinants of trust in governments have received significant attention in the literature on political trust, there has been no attention paid to whether environmental concerns affect governmental trust. Yet, if individuals are worried about local and global environmental degradation, they may think that the government has failed in…

Ranked as one of the great human rights tragedies since World War II, the Rwandan genocide, which left 800,000 dead in its wake, is commonly understood in the context of a tribal internecine conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis. The event that triggered the genocide is imputed to the shooting down of a plane carrying the President of Rwanda and…

This article is adapted from "Chew Heong v. United States: Chinese Exclusion and the Federal Courts", written by Lucy Salyer, associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, for inclusion in the Federal Judicial Center's project, "Federal Trials and Great Debates in United States History." In 1882, Congress…

On August 1st, 2007, Indigenous nations from within the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand) signed a treaty to found the United League of Indigenous Nations. The Treaty of Indigenous Nations offers a historic opportunity for sovereign Indigenous governments to build intertribal cooperation outside the framework of the…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) requires states and the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) to define and determine whether schools are making adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward the goal of 100 percent academic proficiency. To address tribes' needs for cultural preservation, NCLBA allows tribal groups to waive all…

Describes recent political and social activities aimed at preserving the culture of Native Americans in Alaska, Northern Canada, and Greenland. An annotated bibliography of sources for the Eskimo Aleut, Tsimshian, Haida, Athabascan (Athapascan), Eyak and Tlingit languages is provided. (CLB)

The historical involvement of the federal government in the education of the American Indian has always carried with it one clear and consistent underlying theme: the federal government has both explicitly and implicitly acknowledged that there is a federal responsibility to Indian education. Treaties between the United States Government and…

Social images of Indian/white relations, so typically born and nurtured in fiction, frequently seem impervious to fact, circumstance, perspective, or even argument. Despite a public that in record numbers consumed descriptions like the one that closes Dee Brown's 1971 book, for instance, official accounts of the massacre at Wounded Knee--like…

The year 2004 marks 40 years since Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and 50 years since the two historic Brown v. Board of Education cases. In recognition of the anniversaries, Americans are gathering to take stock of how much has been accomplished, and how much yet must be done to ensure equality for all. The substandard conditions in…

This study describes the civic and political behavior of the American public, with a special focus on youth ages 15 to 25. Using an extensive national telephone survey of 3,246 respondents, the authors describe what citizens are doing, and how often they are doing it. They look at a panorama of 19 core activities--ranging from voting to…