Kate Fort

Regional Tribal Consultations on Cobell to Start in Billings on July 15th

June 13, 2011Kate Fort

From the DOI press release:

First Regional Tribal Consultation on Cobell Trust Land Consolidation Program Announced

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Deputy Secretary of the Interior David J. Hayes today announced Billings, Montana as the location for the first of six regional government-to-government tribal consultations regarding the Trust Land Consolidation component of the Cobell Settlement.

“These regional consultations will provide valuable input in developing an implementation strategy that will benefit tribal communities and help free up trust lands,” said Deputy Secretary Hayes. “The consultation process is fundamental to respecting our government-to-government relationship with the tribes and I look forward to meeting with Tribal Leaders from the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains regions.”

On May 27, 2011, U.S. Senior District Judge Thomas F. Hogan granted communication between representatives of the United States and Cobell class members only in regards to the Trust Land Consolidation component of the Settlement.

The dates and locations for the remaining five regional tribal consultations will be announced in the coming weeks. For additional information on the First Tribal Consultation, please click
here.

BACKGROUND:

The Cobell settlement was approved by Congress on November 30, 2010 (Claims Resolution Act of 2010) and signed by President Obama on December 8, 2010. The $3.4 billion Cobell Settlement will address the Federal Government’s responsibility for trust accounts and trust assets maintained by the United States on behalf of more than 300,000 individual Indians. A fund of $1.5 billion will be used to compensate class members for their historical accounting, trust fund and asset mismanagement claims.

In addition, to address the continued proliferation of thousands of new trust accounts caused by the “fractionation” of land interests through succeeding generations, the Settlement establishes a $1.9 billion fund for the voluntary buy-back and consolidation of fractionated land interests. The land consolidation program will provide individual American Indians with an opportunity to obtain cash payments for divided land interests and free up the land for the benefit of tribal communities.

Furthermore, up to $60 million will be set aside to provide scholarships for higher education for American Indians and Alaska Natives.

More information can be found at http://www.doi.gov/cobell

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Sherman Alexie Responds to Recent Concerns about Young Adult Novels Being “Too Dark”

June 13, 2011June 13, 2011Kate Fort

Sherman Alexie writes a truly excellent response to recent hand wringing about the darkness of current YA novels. From the WSJ Speakeasy blog:

Almost every day, my mailbox is filled with handwritten letters from students–teens and pre-teens–who have read my YA book and loved it. I have yet to receive a letter from a child somehow debilitated by the domestic violence, drug abuse, racism, poverty, sexuality, and murder contained in my book. To the contrary, kids as young as ten have sent me autobiographical letters written in crayon, complete with drawings inspired by my book, that are just as dark, terrifying, and redemptive as anything I’ve ever read.

And, often, kids have told me that my YA novel is the only book they’ve ever read in its entirety.

So when I read Meghan Cox Gurdon’s complaints about the “depravity” and “hideously distorted portrayals” of contemporary young adult literature, I laughed at her condescension.

Does Ms. Gurdon honestly believe that a sexually explicit YA novel might somehow traumatize a teen mother? Does she believe that a YA novel about murder and rape will somehow shock a teenager whose life has been damaged by murder and rape? Does she believe a dystopian novel will frighten a kid who already lives in hell?

***

When some cultural critics fret about the “ever-more-appalling” YA books, they aren’t trying to protect African-American teens forced to walk through metal detectors on their way into school. Or Mexican-American teens enduring the culturally schizophrenic life of being American citizens and the children of illegal immigrants. Or Native American teens growing up on Third World reservations. Or poor white kids trying to survive the meth-hazed trailer parks. They aren’t trying to protect the poor from poverty. Or victims from rapists.

***

Teenagers read millions of books every year. They read for entertainment and for education. They read because of school assignments and pop culture fads.

And there are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe, despite the callow protestations of certain adults, that books-especially the dark and dangerous ones-will save them.

H/T, our friend and local librarian, S.D.

SCOTUS Reverses & Remands in U.S. v. Jicarilla Apache Nation

June 13, 2011June 13, 2011Kate Fort4 Comments

The decision is here. It was authored by Justice Alito, and Justice Sotomayor is the lone dissent. Justices Ginsburg and Breyer filed a concurrence.

In this case, we consider whether the fiduciary exception applies to the general trust relationship between the United States and the Indian tribes. We hold that it does not. Although the Government’s responsibilities with re- spect to the management of funds belonging to Indian tribes bear some resemblance to those of a private trustee, this analogy cannot be taken too far. The trust obligations of the United States to the Indian tribes are established and governed by statute rather than the common law, and in fulfilling its statutory duties, the Government acts not as a private trustee but pursuant to its sovereign interest in the execution of federal law. The reasons for the fiduci- ary exception—that the trustee has no independent interest in trust administration, and that the trustee is subject to a general common-law duty of disclosure—do not apply in this context.

And from the dissent:

Federal Indian policy, as established by a network of federal statutes, requires the United States to act strictly in a fiduciary capacity when managing Indian trust fund accounts. The interests of the Federal Government as trustee and the Jicarilla Apache Nation (Nation) as beneficiary are thus entirely aligned in the context of Indian trust fund management. Where, as here, the governing statutory scheme establishes a conventional fiduciary relationship, the Government’s duties include fiduciary obligations derived from common-law trust principles. Because the common-law rationales for the fiduciary exception fully support its application in this context, I would hold that the Government may not rely on the attorney-client privilege to withhold from the Nation communications between the Government and its attorneys relating to trust fund management.

New Southern Ute Museum on NPR

June 13, 2011Kate Fort

The story is here. The story about the museum is excellent. The framing of the story as a “happy accident” and the “government’s blunder” is very strange–it was an accident and blunder that the Southern Utes remained on their land and are able to use their mineral resources for themselves? Not being removed was a happy accident?

It’s not often that you hear of Native American tribes flourishing thanks to the U.S. government, but that’s what happened to Colorado’s Southern Ute.

With the help of a historic government blunder, the Southern Ute have become one of the country’s wealthiest tribes — so wealthy, in fact, that they’ve just transformed their old museum into an impressive new cultural center in Ignacio, Colo. It’s called the Southern Ute Museum and Cultural Center and it’s housed in a new $38 million building. The hope is that the center will help boost tourism, but it’s also meant to teach outsiders and tribal youth about Southern Ute history and culture.

History’s Happy Accident

In the late 19th century, the U.S. government divided the Ute people into three different tribes, sending them north or west and letting some stay where they were.

An excerpt from the better part of the story:

When the Southern Ute decided to diversify their already impressive financial portfolio by opening a casino, it became clear that the time had also come to update their museum.

“It was an awful little building, maybe not even 1,000 square feet,” Burch says. “So we decided to build a place where we could have a showcase for our children and grandchildren, and they would always know their culture.”

The community set out to retrieve Ute artifacts from all over the world and bring them home — priceless white clay pottery, intricate beadwork and glorious baskets by White Mesa weavers.

But for many Southern Ute, the most meaningful part of the museum is its display of family photographs. It was there that former tribal Chairman Matthew Box discovered a long-lost family photo.

“It is a picture that has my mother, my uncle Leonard, my grandpa and my dad and myself. And we’re all sitting around a drum,” Box says.

Box gets teary-eyed looking at it. He says he had never seen the photo — which was taken in the 1980s — before it was put on display at the museum.

Andrew Jackson Article in ICT, with Fletcher Interview

June 7, 2011Kate Fort1 Comment

Matthew’s Commentary:

Coming on the heels of the Geronimo/bin Laden Incident, what do you make of the government’s expropriation of indigenous history— using Geronimo as the code name for Osama bin Laden, and then citing the Jackson’s murderous actions against the Seminoles and Brits as a precedent for the prosecution of Al Qaeda suspects?

Generations of West Point officers learn about war from studying the “Indian wars,” and so it would make perfect sense for them to draw an analogy between Indians and al Qaeda. The military tradition is that the Indians were the bad guys, they were savage and engaged in non-traditional, even scary warfare, and that they had no rights under the U.S. Constitution. As such, they were fair game for anything—anything at all—the U.S. military wanted to do to them. Preemptive attacks on unarmed women and children like Wounded Knee, indefinite detention in concentration camps like Fort Sill, mass executions for trumped up war crimes like at Fort Snelling all of it legally justifiable from the point of the view of the military. Same is true in the Department of Justice, where in the days following 9/11, Bush Administration attorneys like John Yoo (now a Berkeley law professor) and Jay Bybee (now a Ninth Circuit judge) argued that the President needed no authorization from Congress to engage in torture, establish military jails and commissions to house and try al Qaeda suspects, etc., through extensive reliance on Indian war-related “precedents” involving self-serving legal opinions about the Modocs, the Seminoles, the Dakota at Fort Snelling, and others. It was Yoo and Bybee who authored so many of the so-called “torture papers” who first explicitly compared the Seminoles and other tribes to al Qaeda. The military prosecutors are just cribbing from them.

Continue reading →

Mrs. Obama Plants the Three Sisters in White House Garden

June 6, 2011Kate Fort

From the press release (we don’t usually highlight these on the main page, but this seemed pretty neat):

Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs Larry Echo Hawk today joined First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House kitchen garden for the planting of the Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash—a traditional indigenous agricultural method of planting.

***

Mrs. Obama was joined by numerous American Indian children from a variety of tribes including Jemez Pueblo, Skokomish, Cherokee, Sault Ste. Marie, Navajo, Turtle Mountain Chippewa, St. Regis Mohawk, Tlingit, Oglala Sioux, Standing Rock Sioux, and the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation. Together, they planted Cherokee White Eagle corn, Rattlesnake pole beans, and Seminole squash seeds that were provided by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.
“We harvested some crops for the First Lady and planted some squash, beans, and corn,” said Jayce Archambault of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. “It was a real fun experience; to get outside and be active and plant these things to help people get healthy is something we will remember.”

The full release is available at our Federal Press Release page.

Big Michigan News: John Wernet to Be Sault Tribe’s General Counsel

June 2, 2011Kate Fort

From the Sault Tribe website (no permalink, unfortunately). Thanks, A.K.:

Sault Tribe selects John Wernet as New General Counsel
Written by Michelle Bouschor

Wednesday, 01 June 2011

John Wernet, former deputy legal counsel to Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm and a recognized expert in Native American law, will be the new general counsel to the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.

Wernet will become the lead attorney for the Sault Tribe, the largest federally recognized Indian tribe east of the Mississippi with nearly 39,000 members, and its talented team of lawyers. He brings to the position many years of experience in Native American legal issues nationally and in Michigan.

“I am thrilled to have the opportunity to serve the members and leadership of the Sault Tribe,” said Wernet, who officially starts the job on June 13. “The Sault Tribe is the state’s largest sovereign Native community and is vitally important as a job provider. I am proud to be a member of their team.”

Wernet earned his B.A. from the University of Michigan’s Residential College in 1972 and his J.D. from Antioch School of Law in Washington, D.C. in 1975. From 1975 through 1979 he was on the faculty of Antioch School of Law where he directed the law school’s paralegal programs including the National Indian Paralegal Training Program.

Wernet returned to Michigan in 1979 to become an Assistant Attorney General for the state of Michigan and served as counsel to the Michigan Commission on Indian Affairs from 1980 through 1988, as First Assistant in the Indian Law Unit from 1992-1995, and as Assistant in Charge of the Native American Affairs Division from 1998 through 2003. In 2003, he became Deputy Legal Counsel to Michigan Gov. Granholm and served as the governor’s advisor on tribal-state affairs.

“John Wernet is a superior attorney and a high quality person with distinguished credentials and a stellar reputation, and we are thrilled to have him as our new general counsel,” said Lana Causley, vice chairwoman of the Sault Tribe Board of Directors.

Interior to Talk with Class Members About Land Trust Consolidation

June 2, 2011Kate Fort

From the Department of the Interior:

WASHINGTON – A federal judge, in response to a motion on behalf of the Department of the Interior, has granted permission for Interior officials to begin communicating with class members on land trust consolidation provisions of the Cobell Settlement agreement. The Department will soon publish a Federal Register notice announcing its intent to begin formal government-to-government consultations with tribal leaders. Interior expects the land consolidation consultations to begin by late-summer.

Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted the motion to communicate with class members on May 27, 2011. At Interior’s request, the Department of Justice filed the motion with Judge Hogan on April 6, 2011 for permission to communicate with class members regarding trust land consolidation.

The Cobell settlement was approved by Congress on November 30, 2010 (Claims Settlement Act of 2010) and signed by President Obama on December 8, 2010. Interior officials have been under a longstanding court imposed prohibition from communicating with Cobell class members while the litigation continues. Judge Hogan’s order allowing for communication between the parties states that, “This case has materially changed since the date of any other order that may have prohibited such communication. The case’s posture now compels the Court to grant the motion.”

The $3.4 billion Cobell Settlement will address the Federal Government’s responsibility for trust accounts and trust assets maintained by the United States on behalf of more than 300,000 individual Indians. A fund of $1.5 billion will be used to compensate class members for their historical accounting, trust fund and asset mismanagement claims.

In addition, to address the continued proliferation of thousands of new trust accounts caused by the “fractionation” of land interests through succeeding generations, the Settlement establishes a $1.9 billion fund for the voluntary buy-back and consolidation of fractionated land interests. The land consolidation program will provide individual American Indians with an opportunity to obtain cash payments for divided land interests and free up the land for the benefit of tribal communities. Individual Indians will receive cash payments for these transfers and, as an additional incentive, transfers will trigger government payments into a $60 million Indian scholarship fund.

The court documents filed by DOJ are at http://www.doi.gov/tribes/special-trustee.cfm.

More information on the Cobell Settlement, including resources for Indian Trust Beneficiaries, is available at http://www.doi.gov/ost/cobell/index.html or http://www.indiantrust.com/index

Cert Petition in Breakthrough Management Group v. Chukchansi Casino

May 24, 2011Kate Fort

The cert petition in BMG v. Chukchansi was filed two weeks ago. The petition is available here. Previous coverage of this case is here.

Turtle Talk

Author: Kate Fort