Month: April 2010

Malinda Maynor Lowery on The Politics of Lumbee Recognition

Matthew L.M. Fletcher2 Comments

Cross-posted from First Peoples Blog:

Historian and First Peoples author Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee) writes for us about her tribe’s federal recognition struggle and how recent moves by the Lumbee Tribal Council highlight the fact that every tribe, recognized or not, is still a political entity.

Who’s Pulling the Strings in Today’s Lumbee Recognition Process?
By Malinda Maynor Lowery

I’m a big fan of the Godfather (there are a lot of metaphors that explain Indian politics in those movies) and so recent events with Lumbee recognition have reminded me that someone else is always pulling the strings.

My book Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South (University of North Carolina Press 2010) explores federal recognition and identity formation between the 1870s and the 1950s, a critical period when the Lumbees’ formal political organization developed in the presence of brutal pressure from white supremacists at both local and federal levels. My community responded to this pressure by dividing into strategic factions, and each party developed its own way of dealing with the capricious and subjective identity definitions that Congress and the BIA articulated. These identity definitions revolved in part around stereotypes of Indians, but they also involved comparisons to African Americans. We had to convince outsiders that we were not black, and therefore worthy of separate recognition.

During this period, our political system developed essentially two tiers—a formal, elected leadership, and an informal, unelected leadership. The unelected leaders were the puppeteers, pulling the strings behind the scenes. They were often the most literate members of the community, the ones with the closest personal and political ties to whites, and they believed that they understood the “system” and could make it work for us. To a degree, walking this tightrope between black and white forced these brokers into political compromises that worked against our interests. But the brokers also had their own reasons for making these compromises; often they wanted to shore up their own power and authority within the Indian community by delivering on a promise, and they wanted to increase their clout with the white elites, locally and nationally, who were giving lip service to our recognition efforts.

What these leaders never grasped was that the more you squeeze out of the system, the more autonomy it squeezes out of you, and we are left with compromises that ultimately get us nowhere (the two previous instances of recognition, in 1938 and 1956, are cases in point). So how will it turn out this time?

Continue reading →

Opening Materials in Navajo Fifth Amendment Takings Claim in Land Dispute

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here:

Navajo Opening Brief – without Appendices

Federal Court of Claims Opinions

GTB Election Postponed; Three Candidates Removed from Ballot

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the Traverse City Record-Eagle:

PESHAWBESTOWN — Three candidates for Tribal Council were booted from the ballot, and the election is postponed until next week.

Three council positions are open for the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, those held by incumbents Rebecca Woods, Connie TwoCrow and Sandra Anderson. Tribal election officials removed Woods from the ballot, along with candidates Gail Diaz and Angela Shinos, for election rules violations.

Tribal documents show the Election Board removed Woods from the ballot because she didn’t sign the bottom of her absentee ballot application. The board removed Diaz and Shinos for not submitting absentee ballot applications at all, as election rules require.

Continue reading →

NPR on Wilma Mankiller

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here:

Wilma Mankiller, whose life encapsulated some of the traditions and the changes that are part of contemporary Native American culture, died on Tuesday. She was 64.

In 1985, Mankiller became the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, a position she held for a decade. As chief, she headed the Tribal Council, the ruling body of the 72,000-member Cherokee Nation, and was principal guardian of Cherokee customs and traditions.

During her tenure, membership in the Cherokee Nation tripled and its budget grew to $150 million a year. Mankiller put much of that money back into health care and educational resources for the tribe.

In a 1993 interview on Fresh Air, Mankiller described how a 1979 car accident that nearly killed her completely changed the way she viewed her own life. She says that accident helped her adopt the Cherokee approach to life.

“I think the Cherokee approach to life is being able to continually move forward with kind of a good mind and not focus on the negative things in your life and the negative things you see around you, but focus on the positive things and try to look at the larger picture and keep moving forward,” Mankiller explained. “[It] also taught me to look at the larger things in life rather than focusing on small things, and it’s also awfully, awfully hard to rattle me after having faced my own mortality … so the things I learned from those experiences actually enabled me to lead. Without those experiences, I don’t think I would have been able to lead. I think I would have gotten caught up in a lot of nonsensical things.”

Five years after the car accident, Mankiller first ran for office in the Cherokee Nation tribe. She says that during that election, which she lost, her gender played a large role.

Continue reading →

United States v. Montour Indictment Dismissal Motions Denied

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

Here are (some of) the materials in this Contraband Cigarette Trafficking Act prosecution:

DCT Montour Order

Motion to Dismiss Counts 7-16

Vagueness Motion

Kenneth Hill and Peter Montour Motions to Dismiss

Kiowa Casino Operating Authority Dismissed from Contract Arbitration

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

The case is Swanda Brothers Inc v. Chasco Constructors Ltd LLP (W.D. Okla.). Here are the materials:

DCT Order Dismissing KCOA

KCOA Motion to Dismiss

Chasco Response

KCOA Reply

Bethany Berger’s History of Williams v. Lee

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Bethany Berger has posted “Williams v. Lee and the Debate over Indian Equality,” forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Williams v. Lee (1959) created a bridge between century-old affirmations of the immunity of Indian territories from state jurisdiction and the tribal self-determination policy of the twentieth century. It has been called the first case in the modern era of federal Indian law. Although no one has written a history of the case, it is generally assumed to be the product of a timeless and unquestioning struggle of Indian peoples for sovereignty. This Article, based on based on interviews with the still-living participants and examination of the congressional records, Navajo council minutes, and Supreme Court transcripts, records, and justice’s notes, reveals an unexpected complexity in both Indian and non-Indian contributions to the case and the era in federal Indian policy from which it emerged.

This history shows that both Williams and the policy developments that surrounded it emerged from consensus about the need for Indian equality and equal opportunity in the 20th century, but Indian and non-Indian debate about whether equality meant full assimilation and termination of the special legal status of tribes, or continued respect for the ability of Indian peoples to govern themselves. It makes this debate concrete through the story of the Williams family, for whom the state collection action and the resulting seizure of the family sheep herd struck at the heart of Navajo lifestyle and culture. It further connects the case to the momentous debates over African American integration generated with Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Cooper v. Aaron (1958). Ultimately, I argue, Williams v. Lee and the self-determination movement that followed it represent a choice by American Indians to insist that respect for tribal status was necessary to ensure Indian equality in the modern era. This history and its results provide an important lesson today as federal Indian policies are increasingly attacked as fundamentally inconsistent with fairness and equality.

Defamation Claim by Former Exec. Director against Anishinabe Legal Services Dismissed

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

Here: Klinkhammer v Anishinabe Legal Services

NNABA Annual Meeting Agenda for TODAY

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

NNABA ANNUAL MEETING NOTICE

DATE:            Wednesday April 7, 2010

TIME:            4:00-6:00pm (Changed from 1:00-5:00pm time in Fed Bar agenda)

LOCATION: Fed Bar Conference/Buffalo Thunder Resort and Casino, Sante Fe, NM

ROOM:          Mesa A-B

AGENDA
(1) National Legislative and Litigation Update
John Dossett, General Counsel, National Congress

(2) NNABA Native Identity Fraud-“Box-Checking” Initiative Update/LSAC Minority Enrollment Updates
Mary Smith, Obama Nominee AAG DOJ Tax Division
Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, President-Elect NNABA

(3) Obama Administration Nominations/Judicial Nominations/“Tribal Liaison” Positions
Heather Dawn Thompson, Past-President NNABA

(4) Discussion of Newly Proposed NNABA Resolutions

Continue reading →

United States Petition for Rehearing in In re United States

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here: In re United States Petition for Rehearing

Recall that the question involved is whether the United States can avoid producing certain documents in the Jicarilla Apache v. United States case (materials here).