About the Event:  In earlier work, Professor Kinsella suggested that U.S.-Native Wars are not simply ‘an interesting case study’ for the laws of war, either contemporaneously or retrospectively, but that Native peoples and U.S.- Native wars were fundamental to the development of the laws of war. She did so through a reading of the 1863 General Orders 100, authored by Francis Lieber, which is taken to be the founding document of the modern laws of war. Professor Kinsella turns now to an analysis of the U.S-Modoc Wars (1872-1874) and the subsequent 1873 trial by military commission of six Modoc men who were accused of killing two members of a peace commission and severely injuring a third member. In granting jurisdiction to the Modoc military commission to try the six Modoc the U.S. Attorney General Williams referred extensively to General Orders 100 to conclude that the Modoc men could be and should be tried under the laws of war.  Building on the scholarship of  Jodi Byrd’s (Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma) and others, Professor Kinsella returns to this trial to root the U.S. laws of war in Native dispossession.

About the Speaker: Helen Kinsella is a Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities with affiliate faculty positions in the  Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the Human Rights Center at the Law School, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. She is also a Visiting Scholar, at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Professor Kinsella was previously an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and an affiliate in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2005 to 2018.

She held fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the New York University School of Law, and postdoctoral and predoctoral appointments at Stanford University and Harvard University. In Spring 2023, she was the Fulbright U.S. Friends of Queen’s University Belfast Distinguished Scholar focusing on the gendered legacies of the use of tear gas, building on her previous research on international humanitarian law and its gendered obligations, violations, and effects.