Harvard Law Review FOREWORD: THE CONSTITUTION OF AMERICAN COLONIALISM Maggie Blackhawk∗

One of the most prestigious opportunities in legal academe is to write the foreword to the Harvard law Reviews issue on the previous years term of the United States Supreme Court.

This year NYU Law Professor Maggie Blackhawk earned that place with her groundbreaking, exhaustive critique of the treatment in law of the indigenous peoples of what is now the United States of America.

- GWC

THE SUPREME COURT 2022 TERM FOREWORD: THE CONSTITUTION OF AMERICAN COLONIALISM Maggie Blackhawk∗ 

For my part I am not prepared for citizenship in the United States. I do not want it. . . . It takes greed of gain to make a successful citizen of the United States. — Walter Adair Duncan, father of the Cherokee social welfare system, in Statehood (1893)1 

Thus far [I’ve written] of the dependencies whose population is in a sufficiently advanced state to be fitted for representative government; but there are others which have not attained that state, and which . . . must be governed by the dominant country . . . . — John Stuart Mill in Considerations on Representative Government (1861) 2

INTRODUCTION The United States holds hundreds of governments in subordination. Not historically. Today.