George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Dr. Jagodinsky will be sharing the introduction and chapter two, which focuses on Native petitioners, from her manuscript, “In the Hands of Many: Habeas Corpus in the American West, 1812-1924.”  She is preparing both for a book proposal that she aims to submit at the beginning of April.

Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky is a legal historian examining marginalized peoples’ engagement with nineteenth-century legal regimes and competing jurisdictions throughout the North American West.

Jagodinsky’s first book Legal Codes & Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946 explains the strategies of six women seeking to protect their bodies, lands, and progeny from the whims of settler-colonists in the tumultuous process of westward expansion and conquest. It is the first book in the prestigious Lamar Series in Western History from Yale University Press to make women its primary focus and it received the Armitage-Jameson Prize for Best Book in Women’s and Gender History of the North American West from the Coalition for Western Women’s History. The study expands the chronology of Indigenous women’s critique of colonial and exploitative legal regimes, illustrating both the longevity of laws making Indian women economically and sexually vulnerable, and the persistence of Native women’s innovative arguments against such oppressive legal systems.