Contemporary Tribal Codes and Gender Issues

This paper makes three related points: first, that many of the present-day legal codes of U.S. Indian tribes are unexpectedly innovative and representative of contemporary indigenous viewpoints, especially in the ways in which individual rights are conceived; second, that the variability in the way the codes treat issues of special concern to women demonstrates the extent of the imprint of local tribal people on their own codes; and third, that analysis of the implications of tribal codes for Indian women is a valuable and hither to undeveloped avenue in clarifying women’s circumstances. I address these points by comparing the categories of code that eight western Washington tribes have created and by looking at a set of legal issues that particularly influence women’s lives. This essay is intended as a preliminary effort to make use of legal materials in the analysis of contemporary Coast Salish life. The codes of these eight tribes vary in their overall emphases, in their legal treatment of family networks, in the rights of parents, and in attention given to women’s issues generally. In 1985, William Rodman commented that legal innovation in small-scale societies “is a topic so few anthropologists have studied that a summary of relevant sources takes only a few paragraphs”; he noted further that “[llegal scholars use ’innovation’ exclusively to denote changes that the state introduces