Here:
Question presented:
Whether individual Indian allottees with a current right of possession conferred by federal law have a federal common-law cause of action for trespass on their allotments.
Lower court materials here.
As Bryan Newland has been preaching lately (see his Strickland lecture), the federal courts have been treating tribal and Indian property rights as fungible because of their status as tribes and Indians, which is simply wrong. I’m glad Indian country is pushing back.
Three Tribal Nations (Pueblo of Isleta, Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, and Cheyenne Arapaho Tribes) along with Native students amended challenges against the United States Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Education, and the United States Department of Education for unlawfully failing to consult with Tribal Nations on two sets of key agency actions directly impacting the education of Native American students.
You can see previous posts on this case here.
Public Law 959, known as the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, was enacted on August 3, 1956. The National Archives has assembled an excellent online guide to BIA urban relocation records, including the original statute, federal relocation promotional materials, field office records, case files, and records from the relocation offices including the Chicago relocation office for folks interested in Great Lakes relocation history.
Additional resources
Native community centers helped preserve culture and connection during urban relocation, Rachel Schuit for Crosswinds, August 3, 2026
The Federal Indian Relocation Programme of the 1950s and the Urbanization of Indian Identity, Donald Fixico, in
RICHARD BESSEL AND CLAUDIA B. HAAKE (eds.), Removing Peoples. Forced Removal in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
Thomas Stratmann has posted “Ten Years, Three Tribes” on the Rules and Results substack.
Here is an excerpt:
The Tulalip Tribes have been a fishing people for as long as anyone remembers. Their reservation runs 22,000 acres along the eastern shore of Puget Sound, 35 miles north of Seattle. The waters at the edge of the reservation, where the tide goes out and exposes the mudflats, are where shellfish grow, and salmon come to spawn. In an 1855 treaty, the United States agreed that those waters would always belong to the Tribes. The treaty remains in force today.
Today, 73 private docks and 124 private mooring buoys cover the Tulalip shoreline. Many were built without tribal permission. Tulalip’s own Natural Resources Department documents the consequences: water quality has fallen, salmon populations have fallen, and shellfish beds have closed.
In 2019, Tulalip asked the federal government for the authority to manage their own shoreline. The federal government said no.
In 2023, they asked again. The federal government said no.
Here are the materials in Corrales v. United States (S.D. Cal.):
Here are the materials in Farden v. United States (D.N.M.):
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