Why Australia will not recognize Indigenous customary Law

From The Conversation

While the Australian Law Reform Commissions’s 1986 report on the use of customary law for Aboriginal people was a great initiative, it was, in hindsight, a notion well before its time. Although 30 years have elapsed since the report was published, its recommendations have, by and large, been ignored.

Few in Australia understand the context and true meaning of customary law. Denials of its validity are often based on ignorance or on specific examples devoid of context; the severity of “spearing” for example, as being contrary to human rights norms.

This is akin to rejecting the common law based solely on, say, the use of lethal injections to execute prisoners in the United States.

Continued here

Book Review: The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America

Book review by Genevieve Valentine of

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andres Resendez

"In 1839, Captain John Sutter arrived in California and began acquiring Native American slaves from several nations to work the land he purchased. He eventually owned several hundred "Indian slaves," whom he treated notoriously badly even by the standards of fellow slave-owners. The circumstances that let Sutter keep these slaves in an ostensibly free territory are part of the complex political and social forces that Andrés Reséndez sets out to unpack in The Other Slavery. But if the book makes anything clear, it's that the single organizing force was simple: greed, and an absence of empathy that meant a slow genocide for the victims."

Continued here: http://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/471622218/horrors-pile-up-quietly-in-the-other-slavery