Join us at MSU Law for Treaty Waters at Risk: Tribal Sovereignty and the Line 5 Challenge in the Great Lakes, a one-day conference on Friday, April 17, 2026, examining the legal and environmental stakes of energy infrastructure in treaty-protected waters.
Featuring a keynote by Whitney Gravelle, MSU Law and ILPC alumna and President of the Bay Mills Indian Community, the program brings together leading voices to discuss treaty rights, co-management, and the ongoing Line 5 conflicts at Bad River and the Straits of Mackinac.
The Navajo Nation stands as a sovereign nation, yet many families still lack access to electricity because of enduring historical, structural, and regulatory barriers. This Article identifies the legal and technical barriers that have hindered meaningful progress and argues that supplementing the utility grid with distributed energy resources, such as biodigesters, offers a viable path toward electrification, particularly for remote and rural communities within the Navajo Nation. Biodigesters convert organic waste generated through community practices, such as sheep raising, into biogas through an anaerobic process. This form of energy reflects circular economy principles while also aligning with Diné cultural practices of environmental harmony and stewardship. As a flexible and scalable energy source, biodigesters can be adapted to meet the diverse needs of these communities.
With these barriers in mind, this Article examines the Tribal Energy Act and the authority it grants the Navajo Nation to implement new regulations to encourage clean electrification. It further proposes targeted revisions to existing regulatory frameworks to facilitate the wider adoption of distributed energy resources and promote greater energy access across the reservation.
Some locations within Indian Country make up the most dangerous places in the United States. Remoteness, extreme poverty, and complex federal jurisdictional rules, combined with a paucity of law enforcement resources, have given some Indian reservations reputations as safe havens for lawlessness and organized crime. Crime in Indian Country is often associated with violent offenses, drug running, and human trafficking. Indian Country faces a less well known, but equally pernicious threat from white-collar crime. The federal government directs billions of dollars to Indian Country every year to fund Tribal projects, grants, and contracts. Indian Tribes operate and have interests in many highly profitable gaming operations and resource extraction industries. The vast sums of money flowing through these businesses are an attractive target for fraudsters and opportunists. And the same circumstances that contribute to high rates of violent crime in some parts of Indian Country create fertile conditions for white-collar crime, particularly federal program fraud, embezzlement, public corruption, money laundering, and tax evasion. These crimes cause more than pecuniary losses in Indian Country: monies lost to fraud and corruption in this context are often earmarked for public services and desperately needed infrastructure for residents of Indian Country, thus undermining the ability of Tribal governments to address acute needs in some of the most underserved and poverty-stricken communities in the United States. The jurisdictional and legal contexts in which crime in Indian Country is investigated and prosecuted in the United States are sui generis and unstable. Yet criminal justice issues as they impact residents of Indian Country as well as the self-determination and sovereignty interests of Tribes are overlooked and underexamined in legal education and discourse. This is especially true of white-collar crime in Indian Country, a topic that receives virtually no attention in legal scholarly publications and textbooks. This Article is directed at this void in the academic and pedagogical literature. Its goal is to provide white-collar crime teachers and researchers with background, resources, and encouragement to add Indian Country issues and topics to their repertoire.
Turtle Talk 
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