Prof. Daniel Sharfstein (Vanderbilt University) delivered the Chet Mitchell Memorial Lecture on Oct. 17, 2018:
“The Wilderness of American Power: Chief Joseph’s Advocacy in the Administrative State, 1872-1904”.
Watch the video here.
For more information on the Department’s Chet Mitchell Memorial Lecture Series, click here.
When homesteaders entered Oregon’s Wallowa Valley in the spring of 1872, a young Nez Perce leader known as Joseph took it upon himself to convince the federal government that it had made a mistake in opening up for settlement his band’s traditional territory. It was the beginning of decades of advocacy that established Joseph as one of the great dissenters in the post-Reconstruction United States and an inspiration for twentieth-century civil and human rights activists. While his substantive message about liberty, equality, and sovereignty has long been celebrated, his method of gaining an audience and attracting allies at the highest levels of authority is often overlooked. Thousands of miles from the capital, with the state nowhere to be seen, Joseph set out in search of American power. What he found was an early incarnation of the modern administrative state, a dynamic way of governing that stretched U.S. policies to the far corners of the continent. Over the course of decades, in peace and in war, Joseph developed insights that remain essential for today’s advocates who try to speak to the state and be heard.