Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Louis LaRose Walks On

November 13, 2023Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Louis LaRose, former chair of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, has walked on. News profile here.

As chairman, Mr. LaRose testified on behalf of the bill that would become the Indian Child Welfare Act. Justice Brennan’s majority opinion in Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians v. Holyfield quoted extensively from Louis’s testimony. Footnote 25 reads:

In large part, the concerns that emerged during the congressional hearings on the ICWA were based on studies showing recurring developmental problems encountered during adolescence by Indian children raised in a white environment. See n. 1, supra.See also 1977 Hearings at 114 (statement of American Academy of Child Psychiatry); S.Rep. No. 95-597, p. 43 (1977) (hereinafter Senate Report). More generally, placements in non-Indian homes were seen as “depriving the child of his or her tribal and cultural heritage.” Id. at 45; see also 124 Cong.Rec. 38102-38103 (1978) (remarks of Rep. Lagomarsino). The Senate Report on the ICWA incorporates the testimony in this sense of Louis La Rose, chairman of the Winnebago Tribe, before the American Indian Policy Review Commission:”I think the cruelest trick that the white man has ever done to Indian children is to take them into adoption courts, erase all of their records and send them off to some nebulous family that has a value system that is A-1 in the State of Nebraska and that child reaches 16 or 17, he is a little brown child residing in a white community, and he goes back to the reservation and he has absolutely no idea who his relatives are, and they effectively make him a non-person, and I think . . . they destroy him.”Senate Report at 43. Thus, the conclusion seems justified that, as one state court has put it, “[t]he Act is based on the fundamental assumption that it is in the Indian child’s best interest that its relationship to the tribe be protected.” In re Appeal in Pima County Juvenile Action No. S-903, 130 Ariz., at 204, 635 P.2d at 189.

Thanks to Lucas LaRose.

UM Ross Panel on Tribal Businesses This Wednesday

November 13, 2023Matthew L.M. Fletcher

ABA/NABA Report on Native Women in the Legal Profession

November 13, 2023November 13, 2023Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here. Miigwetch to Rebecca Tsosie to bringing this report to our attention last Friday at TICA.

Maggie Blackhawk on the Constitution of Colonialism

November 13, 2023November 13, 2023Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Maggie Blackhawk has published “The Constitution of American Colonialism” in the Harvard Law Review. PDF

Guest Post by Rob Williams: NCAI, NOT STATE RECOGNIZED TRIBES, HAS AN IDENTITY ISSUE

November 11, 2023November 11, 2023Matthew L.M. Fletcher

By Robert A. Williams, Jr.

At its annual meeting next week, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) will consider removing state recognized tribal governments from its voting membership. This proposal comes amid an all-out, misguided assault on state recognized Tribes based on the asserted claim that they somehow threaten Tribal sovereignty.

This self-righteousness about who qualifies and who doesn’t qualify as Indigenous is all too familiar. This brand of identity-policing is based on the historically mistaken belief that there has been a foolproof, legitimate and consistent system developed by the United States as a colonizing government for recognizing the Tribal governments it believes it has successfully colonized. It ignores the colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial impacts on Indigenous peoples who may not have been fortunate enough to be recognized with the stroke of the pen by a federal Indian affairs bureaucrat, or to have been participants in a federal court case, or to have been signatories to a treaty that Congress bothered to ratify but has never fully enforced or honored.

The proposal NCAI will entertain in New Orleans—that Tribal rights should be dictated and determined by a listing of select tribes made up by the federal government—is one of the highest and more efficient forms of colonization one can imagine; getting the “officially” colonized to do the dirty work of culling out and silencing the voices of those “unofficial” groups the colonizer doesn’t want to bother with.

NCAI was “established in 1944 in response to the termination and assimilation policies of the U.S. government.” According to Thomas W. Cowger’s book, The National Congress of American Indians: The Founding Years, the Indian Congress originally “stressed both civil and tribal rights by declaring that the common welfare of Native Americans required the preservation of cultural values.” The organization has drifted far from its original instructions.

In 1978, NCAI convened its historic National Conference on Tribal Recognition, unanimously adopting a Declaration of twelve principles, proclaiming that “as an organization that represents the common interest of all tribes,” NCAI demands that the United States “fulfill its obligation to all tribes . . . and acknowledge the existence” of non-federally recognized Tribal governments. That proclamation aligns with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), including its affirmation of the right to “distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions” and related “constructive arrangements” with nation-states.

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