Over 30 years ago in Michigan, then Supreme Court Chief Justice Michael Cavanagh began a relationship with our Tribal Courts. His initial words were prophetic to our neighbors: “We know we have more to learn from you than you do from us.” And so, it began. We have only scratched the surface of what we can learn. We can learn because there is a need, perhaps a necessity, that we open spaces and places for incorporating other world views and create procedures that nurture values that address areas of conflict in our communities.
Whether Rule 19 requires dismissal of APA suits challenging federal agency action whenever a nonparty who benefited from that action asserts sovereign immunity.
Many First Nation individuals appear to accept that debates about belonging to First Nations political community are properly framed as debates about citizenship. Interlocutors frequently identify the ongoing significance of kinship, but fold it into their conception of citizenship. This Article resists citizenship’s orthodoxy. Kinship is not a unique feature of First Nations citizenship, but rather is its own model of belonging to a political community: a model internal to First Nations law, understood on its own terms. There are, then, two models of belonging to First Nations political community, citizenship and kinship, within and over which debates about belonging play out.
For First Nations political communities using their own systems of law, kinship is a source of fundamental legal interests, just as citizenship is a source of fundamental rights and freedoms in modern liberal democracies. However, comparativists, legal theorists, and political theorists have struggled to appreciate this reality because internal (or settler) colonialism disconnects kinship from legality conceptually and thus institutionally. Those connections must be reestablished.
To that end, this Article shows that, functionally, kinship is a full answer to citizenship. The argument is made in two interwoven parts, each of which turns on the picture of kinship as a structural feature of First Nations law, understood on its own terms. First, kinship is citizenship’s political equal insofar as it offers a justificatory account of belonging to a political community; second, kinship is citizenship’s legal equal insofar as it, too, serves as a foundation for fundamental legal interests. The gravamen of this Article is, thus, twofold. First, one is not hearing what First Nations law says about belonging if one is only willing or able to listen in the language of citizenship. Second, the stakes in one’s choice of model are significant: citizenship and kinship structure legality in fundamentally different ways.
The land-back movement in its current state began in 2018 and has rapidly gained traction since. The main call in this movement is for the return of government owned ancestral lands to their Indigenous stewards. This paper quantifies the economic impacts of land-back movements on income and employment for over 1,700 Indigenous communities, using both panel data instrumental variables and endogenous treatment techniques. We find uniformly promising results (reductions in the percentage of citizens living on low incomes, and reductions in the unemployment rate) that recommend continued return of tribal lands not only for racial justice reasons, but as a catalyst for economic stability of populations living in proximity to Indigenous peoples.
Turtle Talk 
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