Author: Kate Fort

Robert Porter Elected President of Seneca Nation

Kate Fort1 Comment

From the Buffalo News

Robert Odawi Porter Elected Seneca President

By Dan Herbeck

Updated: November 3, 2010, 7:47 AM

The Seneca Nation’s new president-elect is an attorney and law professor who graduated from Harvard Law School.

And Robert Odawi Porter, 47, said he hopes to use his legal skills to help the Senecas deal with a wide range of problems and challenges over the next two years.

Porter defeated Maurice A. John Sr. on Tuesday, getting 1,671 votes to John’s 500, the Indian nation reported.

During the election campaign, John repeatedly criticized Porter for being a lawyer. John claimed that a man who has a license from New York State to practice law could not aggressively lead the tribe in its fight with the state over cigarette taxes and other issues.

Porter disagreed, stating that his law experience should help him to be a better fighter for the Senecas.

“I can assure you that the threats that we now face are real and that they are not going to end any time soon,” Porter said. “If we do not have strong leadership in the coming years, it is possible that many of the hard fought gains that we have achieved for our people could be eroded or even lost.”

Porter said he hopes to spend much of his two-year term helping state officials and others to understand what an important role the Senecas play in the Western New York economy. He said the nation created about 5,000 new jobs in the past several years and is one of the region’s biggest employers.

In a 7,000-member Indian Nation that allows candidates and political parties to pay people for their votes, Porter was endorsed by the Seneca Party, which has dominated Seneca elections since the 1980s.

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Tama Co. v. Midwest Regional Director, BIA

Kate Fort

The very short IBIA opinion affirming the Regional Director’s decision on the Meskwaki land decision.  Sac and Fox Tribe should now be able to put about 257 acres into trust.  It appears that though the County appealed the Regional Director’s decision, it failed to file an opening brief.

Decision

Press coverage here.

LTBB Looks to Open Museum

Kate Fort

H/T E.P., from upnorthlive.com—

History will be preserved in new Odawa museum

Andrew Keller

Posted: 11.01.2010 at 7:07 PM

HARBOR SPRINGS, MI — The Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians has a plan to preserve its history.

The new museum will not only provide a place to learn about the past, it’s also going to have a state of the art system that will help keep history safe.

There’s an old bible, worn in age, but written in native language.  There’s a tomahawk, a spear, and an arrowhead.  These are just a few things that have been in storage with a lot of other things, but soon, will be on display.

“I’m close to retirement age, but I’m going back and forth, I don’t know if I want to retire, and like an old hen on an egg, I want to see what happens, when it hatches, so I want to be there,” said Yvonne Walkerkeshick, Director, Archives and Records.

Walkerkeshick is the Director of Archives and Records at the Governmental Center for the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians.  She says retirement has been put on hold for now, as details of a new museum of history for the tribe were announced.

The tribe is moving forward with plans that started rolling more than 10 years ago.  A new museum, equipped with a state-of-the-art safety and fire suppression system, will be built near the Government Center.

“They did a study, and they found there is a need, there’s a need for storage and a museum is a big part of this to look to display our artifacts and our items,” said Tribal Chairman Ken Harrington.

Somebody found a spear near the Straits of Mackinac and donated it to the Archives and Records Department.  The estimate is it was made somewhere in the late 1700’s.  This will be one thing that’s displayed at the new museum.

Archives and Records and the Repatriation Department are working with other non-Native American Museums to repatriate items to be a part of the new museum on top of the donated artifacts.

“I believe once it really gets rolling, and the Native Population sees we really are going to have a museum, then they will go into their attics and begin digging out more things that we can put in our museum,” said Walkerkeshick.

“It shows the culture of the people,” said Harrington.

The new museum will also be safe storage for members of the tribe personal keepsakes.

Right now, site plans are being finalized to be presented to the Tribal Council.

Oral Argument Transcript in U.S. v. Tohono O’Odham

Kate Fort2 Comments

Here.

UNM Symposium on Montana v. United States

Kate Fort

From the flyer:

Montana v. United States

Pathmarking the Field of Indian Law for Three Decades and Counting

Sponsored by UNM Law and the UNM Indian Law Program

March 24-25, 2011

Isleta Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, Albuquerque, NM

On March 24, 1981, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in Montana v. United States, a case that addressed several important issues concerning tribes’ treaty rights, property interests, and sovereign governing authority on Indian reservations. Despite its inauspicious beginnings as a dispute over who controls access to a highly prized trout fishery on the Big Horn River within the exterior boundaries of the Crow Reservation, Montana since has served as juggernaut for a number of unprecedented changes to core doctrines of federal Indian law, all of them detrimental to tribes. The University of New Mexico School of Law and the UNM Indian Law Program will convene a one-and-a-half-day symposium—beginning on Thursday, March 24, 2011, thirty years to the day since the case was decided—to engage law professors, jurists, practicing attorneys, tribal leaders, and Indian law students in a wide-ranging reflection on Montana, including how the litigation originated and unfolded, how the case has impacted Indian law doctrines, and what potential pathways lie ahead for tribes and states in view of Montana’s enormous continuing influence.

New Share Buttons

Kate Fort1 Comment

While we’d like to take credit for adding the print, email, Twitter, Facebook and Digg share buttons to each Turtle Talk post, in truth it is a WordPress upgrade that allows us to do it.

Regardless, a number of readers have asked us for these functions, and we are happy to finally be able to add them to TT.

Indian Country Today Coverage of MI Native Language Law

Kate Fort

From Indian Country Today:

Michigan’s tribal language bill allows uncertified Native speakers to teach

Pottawatomi ‘is quintessentially a language of this place’

By Gale Courey Toensing

Story Published: Oct 27, 2010

Story Updated: Oct 22, 2010

LANSING, Mich. – The Michigan legislature has taken a commonsense approach to the teaching of Native languages in the state’s public schools.

As of Sept. 30, public school students will get foreign language credits for succeeding in Native American language and culture classes taught by tribal elders and other Native language speakers who are not state-certified teachers.

The new law, Public Act 168 of 2010, was introduced in December 2009 by Sen. Mike Prusi, who represents the state’s 38th District, which includes most of the Upper Peninsula.

“With this new law we will put the best teachers, the tribal members who have the greatest knowledge about their culture and language, into our classrooms and teaching our children,” Prusi said at the signing ceremony. “I am happy to be the sponsor of this law because it means that all Michigan students will have the opportunity to be better informed about the history of our state, and about the people we share Michigan with and who have been here the longest.”

The signing ceremony took place in Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s capitol office and included leaders and members of the Hannahville Indian Community Tribe of Potawatomi Indians, the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians (Gun Lake Tribe), the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, and the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians.

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Disturbing News of the Day: Skulls Mailed to University

Kate Fort

Via one of our favorite academic bloggers, Tenured Radical.  She has a good point about the reporting, such as

Jim Crow, John Doe — whatever.  A little bit of research reveals that the Crow (Apsaalooke) Nation headquarters are also in Montana, slightly south of Billings:  Augusta is a four hour drive from there. 

October 26th, 2010 @ 6:00pm
By Sam Penrod

PROVO — What first looked like a Halloween prank has turned into a mystery at BYU. A box showed up in the mail Monday, and inside were two human skulls.

The skulls showed up from the U.S. Postal Service in a box, sent Priority Mail. There was no label and no explanation why two skulls were being mailed to the university.

“Why here? We don’t know. They put ‘historical department’ [on the box]. It was delivered to the history department, but we don’t know why,” said BYU police Sgt. Mike Mock.

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HuffPo on Sen. McCaskill and the Washington Post

Kate Fort

An interesting article on Senator McCaskill’s retro plan for Indian tribes and the Washington Post’s anti-8(a) stance.  The Washington Post has been publishing a lot of anti-8(a) articles lately, though the idea of Sen. McCaskill using them to push her own bizarre plan is an interesting connection.  If the Democratic party is trying to  stay away from the “socialism” tag (which is, we know, ridiculous, but still), maybe not switching from a successful 8(a) program to a program paying individual Indians directly out of federal coffers and federal pity would be a good plan.  As usual, the power interests are looking to take away any successful tribal enterprise.   After all, in the 1950’s after the Menominee Tribe created one of the first (if not the first) sustainable timber industry in the world, they were promptly terminated.

Here is the whole article.

Thanks to Ho-Chunk, Inc., tribal members participate in the American dream in ways not imagined a generation ago, with blue- and white-collar jobs, home ownership, and retirement accounts. Along the way, Morgan has been lauded by the Small Business Administration, the State Department, and business magazines. However, his achievement may soon fade, and fewer tribal members may be receiving paychecks.

Instead, they may be expecting “direct payments” from the federal government — presumably a new form of welfare — that Senator Claire McCaskill (D.-Mo.) suggested to the Washington Post as an alternative to tribally owned businesses. McCaskill is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, with authority over Defense Department spending. If she has her way, Morgan said, hundreds of Ho-Chunk, Inc. employees will be laid off, kids’ college scholarships will be put on hold, and tribal housing-assistance programs will be cut.

McCaskill fielded the direct-payments idea in a series of Washington Post articles that sometimes anticipate and sometimes shadow the senator’s activities, with policy creating news, and news creating policy. McCaskill, and the newspaper, are sharply critical of Alaska Native Corporations (or ANCs), created to settle indigenous land claims, with Native people as individual shareholders. In July 2009, the Post, also referred to as WaPo, got in an early shot at the highly successful corporations, warning that “long overdue scrutiny of ANCs is about to get intense.” In late September and early October of this year, the paper published a rapid-fire succession of pieces, then announced on Oct. 7 that McCaskill would soon introduce legislation to “target” the Small Business Administration’s tribal 8(a) program. When McCaskill’s press release appeared the next day, Oct. 8, it noted that the newspaper had confirmed her findings and she would move on the legislation.

 

News Coverage of the TLOA Symposium

Kate Fort2 Comments

From the Albuquerque Journal

Thursday, October 21, 2010

New Law Broadens Tribal Powers

By Astrid Galvan
Journal Staff Writer
A new law that significantly expands the powers of tribal courts will help fight the most pressing public safety problems on Indian land, federal and tribal officials said at a three-day symposium in Albuquerque.
The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010, signed into law by President Barack Obama in July, expands the ability of tribal law enforcement to tackle crimes that would otherwise go unprosecuted, symposium participants said.
It also holds the federal government to a new level of accountability, forcing it to keep and report data pertaining to crimes committed in Indian Country that federal authorities decline to prosecute.
“The impact of the act is significant, but we still have a lot of work to do,” said Wizipan Garriott, a policy adviser for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs, who helped draft the legislation.
Garriott and dozens of experts and tribal leaders gathered at the Albuquerque Marriott Pyramid this week to discuss the law.
Garriott said the law is a “significant step forward” for tribal justice, which is often viewed as ineffective because it has minimal powers.
For example, until now tribal courts could only sentence a criminal to a maximum year in jail. When the federal government declines to prosecute violent crimes such as domestic violence and sexual assault, which has been common in the past, tribal courts were burdened with trying a case whose defendant would only face up to a year in jail and a possible $5,000 fine.
Now, tribal courts can sentence someone for up to three years and can tack on more than one sentence. Fines were increased to $15,000. And because those convictions are considered felonies, criminals lose voting and gun rights.
“I see that as a recognition of the inherent sovereignty of tribes to administer justice,” Garriott said.
The law has been embraced by both tribal leaders and members. But there are also those who doubt its effectiveness.
Navajo Nation Public Defender Angela Keahnie-Sanford questioned the fairness of increasing fines, which she said most Indians would not be able to afford.
“That’s just going to be cruel and unusual punishment in Indian Country,” she said.
Other provisions of the law:
• Require the FBI and U.S. Attorneys to share evidence and information with tribal law enforcement when declining to prosecute a crime, so that tribal courts can take over the prosecution.
• Allow tribal courts to prosecute minor crimes they haven’t been able to in the past, such as when a non-American Indian commits a crime on a reservation.
• Authorize tribal police officers who obtain federal deputization to cite, arrest or search both American Indians and non-Indians suspected of breaking a federal law.
• Give tribal police access to federal crime databases they previously had minimal or no access to.
• Reauthorize past acts that provide grants and funding for tribal courts and law enforcement agencies.