Author: Kate E. Fort

Saginaw Chippewa Tribe to address U of M Board of Regents regarding Ancestral Remains held by U of M

ilpc

From the email announcement:

CALLING OUT FOR SUPPORT!

The Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe (SCIT) was just notified that
a request was granted to address the University of Michigan’s Board of
Regents during their meeting TOMORROW, Thursday, March 20. The meeting
will begin at 3pm in the Regent’s Room of the Fleming Administration
Bldg. in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Joseph Sowmick, SCIT Public Relations Director, will read a
5-minute statement during the Public Comment session regarding the 1,200
or more “culturally unaffiliated” ancestral remains and their associated
funerary objects that are being held by the University of Michigan.

The Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe is asking for a unified
mobilization of support from all Anishinabe people. MACPRA
representatives and Ogitchedaw (George Martin will be present with his
Eagle Staff) are strongly encouraged to attend. All interested peoples
who support the return of our ancestral remains, please join us.

We are planning to meet in the plaza between 2-3pm in front of
the Fleming Administration Bldg. located on Thompson St. All present
will not be able to go into the Regent’s Room, but a delegation of
support can be present in the plaza.

Go MSU NALSA!

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

Our students have reached the sweet 16 in the National Native American Law Students Association annual moot court competition, held this year in Tempe! Go Alicia and Nova!

Bay Mills and Sault Tribe Land Claims Settlement Bills Reported Out of Committee

bnewland

During a Full Committee MarkUp session today, the House Committee on Natural Resources voted to report HR 2176 (A bill to provide for and approve the settlement of certain land claims of the Bay Mills Indian Community) to the floor of the House of Representatives by a vote of 21 to 5.

The Committee also voted to report HR 4115 (A bill to provide for and approve the settlement of certain land claims of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians) to the floor of the House of Representatives by a vote of 26 to 5.

HR 2176 authorizes the Bay Mills Indian Community to operate a gaming facility in Port Huron. HR 4115 authorizes the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians to operate a similar facility in either Romulus or Flint.  In both cases attempts to amend the bills were voted down.

We’ve posted about these bills and issues surrounding them here, here, here and here

Tsalagi Think Tank blog

ilpc

Prof. Stacy Leeds just started a new blog at www.stacyleeds.com, called Tsalagi Think Tank. The blog is a Cherokee-centric blog about tribal law, good native governance and education.

Voting Rights in Indian Country Panel

ilpc

We will be hosting a panel tomorrow, January 31, on Voting Rights in Indian Country.  Speakers include Laughlin McDonald, Director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project, Dan McCool and Susan Olson, professors at the University of Utah and authors of Native Vote, and Ellen Katz, professor at the University of Michigan Law School.

More about time and location information can be found at our Spring Speakers Series page.
Please contact us if you have any questions.  No registration is necessary for attendance.

Indian Health Care Improvement Act Up For Vote in U.S. Senate

ilpc

Sent to us by Jerilyn Church, Executive Director of the American Indian Health & Family Services of Southeastern MI, Inc.:

Please call your respective United States Senator to ask him or her to vote YES on S. 1200, the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, which according to the Senate Calendar will come up for consideration on Tuesday, January 22. It is especially important for callers to urge their senators to also vote NO on any Urban Indian Health Amendments, which would eliminate funding for urban clinics.

The National Council for Urban Indian Health has disseminated an Urban Indian Health one-pager for callers to use when contacting their Senators.

Lost “Indian Law” Article by Justice Scalia

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Kate Fort dug this up — it’s a Michigan Law Review article from then-Professor Scalia on federal sovereign immunity in the context of public lands cases, pre-APA. Most of the cases he discusses involving Indian lands. His aversion to federal common law is apparent at the end of the article.

Continue reading →

MSU 5th Annual Conference — Call for Papers: Deadline Feb. 1, 2008

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

CALL FOR PAPERS

5th Annual MSU Indigenous Law Conference

October 10-11, 2008 @ MSU Law College

Forty Years of the Indian Civil Rights Act – History, Tribal Law, and Modern Challenges

The Indian Civil Rights Act will be 40 years old in 2008 – and Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez will be 30. We have decided to dedicate our 5th annual conference to the Act and to Martinez. Confirmed speakers already include Catharine MacKinnon, Gloria Valencia-Weber, Carole Goldberg, Duane Champagne, Stacy Leeds, Kristen Carpenter, Angela Riley, and others.

Our vision for this year’s conference is to solicit papers that cover a specific provision in the Indian Civil Rights Act, e.g., free speech, freedom of religion, due process, equal protection, and so on. We want academics, practitioners, tribal judges, tribal leaders – anyone that has something important to say about this very important statute. We will collect the best of these papers into an edited collection for publication with a major university press, co-edited by Kristen A. Carpenter, Matthew L.M. Fletcher, and Angela R. Riley.

The authors of the paper abstracts selected will present their papers at the conference at MSU law college. We anticipate that there will be commentators for each paper.

Please send a title and a short abstract, with contact information, to matthew.fletcher@law.msu.edu by the deadline or call (517) 432-6909 with questions.

Deadline for Proposals – February 1, 2008

Sherman Alexie wins National Book Award

ilpc

From the Seattle Times:

Seattle’s Alexie wins the National Book Award

By Mary Ann Gwinn
Seattle Times book editor

Seattle author Sherman Alexie has won the National Book Award for his highly autobiographical novel for young people, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.”

Alexie got the news Wednesday night at the awards ceremony in New York. He won for best book in the young people’s literature category. In his acceptance speech, Alexie, an author of 19 books of fiction, poetry and essays, quipped: “Wow … I obviously should have been writing YA (young adult) all along.”

He credited Alex Kuo, a creative-writing teacher at Washington State University who gave him an anthology of Native American writing. It helped persuade him to become a writer: “I had never read words written by a Native American. The first one was a poem about frying baloney … I grew up eating fried baloney. The other was a poem by Adrian Lewis, and the poem had the line, ‘Oh, Uncle Adrian, I’m in the reservation of my mind.’ I knew right then when I read that line that I wanted to be a writer. It’s been a gorgeous and magnificent and lonely 20 years since then.”

The article continues here.