Here:
Author: Matthew L.M. Fletcher
ICT Profile on the Impact of Shelby County v. Holder on Indian Country
Here.
Alex Pearl on Dusten Brown’s Blood Quantum, which apparently is 3/256
Here. Highly recommended.
An excerpt:
Baby Veronica is, or is eligible for, enrollment as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. By the way, the Cherokee Nation isn’t like your local public library—not just anyone can join. It’s like the United States. Not everyone can join us here—the U.S. has citizenship requirements. It would be unintelligible to say that someone is 3/256 American, right? You either are or are not a citizen of a nation. The usage of blood quantum in this way by the Majority conflates Indian identity and tribal citizenship.
Update in Arizona v. Tohono O’odham Nation — Remaining Contract Claims Defeated
Here are the materials in State of Arizona v. Tohono O’odham Nation (D. Ariz.):
An excerpt:
For reasons explained below, the Court concludes that §§ 201(1) and 201(2) cannot be used by Plaintiffs to establish an enforceable oral agreement that the Nation would not open a casino in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The Court has already held that the Compact between the State and the Nation includes no such agreement, and that even Plaintiffs’ extrinsic evidence does not make the Compact’s terms reasonably susceptible to such a reading. Doc. 216. The Court now concludes that the Compact is a fully integrated written agreement under Chapter 9 of the Restatement, and that such an agreement between the parties forecloses any separate oral agreement. As a result, the Court will grant summary judgment in favor of the Nation on Plaintiffs’ § 201(2) claim and deny Plaintiffs’ motion for reconsideration on the § 201(1) claim.
This concludes the trial court proceedings, mostly concluded in the court’s order granting summary judgment on most claims we posted about here.
California COA (Los Angeles) Reverses Guardianship Case for Violation of ICWA Notice Requirement
Here is the opinion in In re S.E.:
An excerpt:
A.A.-E. (Father) and S.S. (Mother) appeal from an order of the juvenile court establishing guardianship of their son, S.E. Both parents contend that the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) failed to comply with the inquiry and notice requirements of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA) (25 U.S.C. § 1901 et seq.) and the analogous California statutes governing custody proceedings involving Indian children. (Welf. & Inst. Code, § 224 et seq.) We conclude that the inquiry and notice conducted was not in full compliance with the requisites of the statute. We reverse for the limited purpose of full compliance with ICWA, as explained below.
Also:
Although we are sympathetic to DCFS‟s contention that Mother‟s objection will result in regrettable delay in the proceedings, we cannot say that the failure to thoroughly investigate the child‟s Indian heritage constitutes harmless error. The information which was omitted here pertained directly to the ancestor Mother and the maternal grandmother affirmatively claimed was Indian. Under these circumstances we cannot say that the omission was harmless and that providing the ancestor‟s name might not have produced different results concerning the child‟s Indian heritage. (Cf. In re Antoinette S., supra, 104 Cal.App.4th 1401 [omission of information concerning non-Indian relatives is harmless error if the notice included all known information about the Indian parent and relatives].) Where the information was known, its inclusion was required regardless of the lack of a preprinted line on the Judicial Council form asking for it.
IPR Profile on American Indian Treaty Rights in Michigan
Interlochen Public Radio continues its excellent profiles of northern Michigan history with “Looking Back: The Fight For American Indian Fishing Rights,” profiling Arthur Duhamel.
Here’s my contribution:
The urgency was about more than fish. The federal government had ignored the poverty in Peshawbestown for generations. As Matthew Fletcher puts it, the federal government just stopped returning the tribe’s phone calls in the 1870s.
Fletcher teaches indigenous law at Michigan State University and is a member of the Grand Traverse Band. Fletcher says the tribe needed some way to make the federal government recognize its existence and asserting fishing rights under a treaty signed in 1836 was the way to do that.
“The United States does not sign a treaty with counties or corporations,” says Fletcher. “They sign treaties with nations.”
Public Radio Spots on Baby Veronica Case
Minnesota (with Colette Routel)
and New Mexico (with Fletcher)
and Michigan (with Fort)
NPR (with Marcia Zug and Mary Jo Hunter)
Sarah Krakoff on Settler Colonialism, Natural Resources Law, and Indian Law
Sarah Krakoff has posted “Settler Colonialism and Reclamation: Where American Indian Law and Natural Resources Law Meet” on SSRN. It’s forthcoming in the Colorado Natural Resources, Energy & Environmental Law Review. Here is the abstract:
Three hours east of Phoenix, Arizona, the Colorado River Indian Tribes (“CRIT”), a federally recognized tribe that includes over 3,700 enrolled members of Mohave, Chemehuevi, Navajo, and Hopi descent, occupies a reservation nearly 300,000 acres in size. The CRIT was one of five tribes to have its water rights confirmed in the landmark case of Arizona v. California, and therefore has senior rights to 719,248 acre-feet of Colorado River water, nearly one-third of Arizona’s allocation. How the CRIT came to be a single federally recognized tribe composed of members from four indigenous peoples located on lands that were a fraction of their aboriginal territory is both a federal Indian law story and a natural resources law story. The stories are two sides of a single coin, which is the currency of settler colonialism in the United States. The object of settler colonial societies was to clear the land of their indigenous populations to allow for nonindigenous settlement. In the U.S. context, American Indian law has often done the work of clearing the land, while natural resources law assures the successful occupation of that land by non-Indians. This Article delves into CRIT’s natural resources history, which serves as a reminder that public land and water law do not start from a blank slate. The distribution of land and water to non-Indians required first that those resources be wrested from Indian control. With that as the starting point, current debates about Indian water rights can be seen in their proper context, as measures of corrective justice that recognize indigenous peoples’ preexisting political, moral, and legal claims, rather than as special rights doled out to select minorities. Understanding tribal water rights this way also liberates them from static and limited notions of use, making them all the more relevant to the contemporary challenges of climate change and resource scarcity.
Highly recommended!
Michael Olivas on Fisher v. Texas
Here.
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