Events

Event Description

Ruth Bloch Rubin, associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago, presents "Alternative Histories of Rights-Making: Congress and the Making of American Indian Law."

Rights-making, we tell ourselves, begins with the people: aggrieved individuals, a social movement, protests that sway public opinion, and a victory won in the halls of power by visionary leadership. But the history of rights-making in the United States is richer and more varied than our mythology permits. Between 1924 and 1978, Congress enacted four landmark laws, and many smaller ones, explicitly addressing "Indian affairs."

The talk is based on Legislating Rights: Congress and the Making of American Indian Law, which tells a different set of stories about how rights are made in America. Its subject is the fraught relationship between Congress and the country's Indigenous peoples — "Indian affairs" being a term frequently used by policymakers to describe the relationship between the United States and its Native peoples, and one used here. Deviating from the conventional arc of civil rights history, the politics of these landmark laws offers important lessons for rights-seekers and rights-defenders today.

Combining archival and interview data, Bloch Rubin's current work explores how divisions within political parties drive congressional development and structure lawmaking; challenging existing theories of party power in Congress, she highlights the role of intraparty organizations in shaping both substantive and procedural change. She is also at work on a project examining Congress's provision of health services to American Indians. She came to the University of Chicago from Harvard, where she was Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research, and earned her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2014.