Here.
ProPublica background reporting here.
cultural resources
Trevor Reed on Restorative Justice for Indigenous Culture
Trevor Reed has posted “Restorative Justice for Indigenous Culture,” forthcoming in the UCLA Law Review, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
One still unresolved aspect of North American colonization arises out of the mass expropriation of Indigenous peoples’ cultural expressions to European-settler institutions and their publics. Researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, missionaries, and many others worked in partnership with major universities, museums, corporations, foundations, and other institutions to capture and exploit Indigenous cultural creativity, often in violation of Indigenous peoples’ laws, protocols, and standards of care. Much of this cultural material remains in Institutional repositories today, where it has been treated as the raw material for settler research, creativity, and innovation, circulating outside the control of the Indigenous communities who created it. These institutions must grapple with their legacies of intellectual and cultural abuse towards Indigenous peoples and emerging industry norms that increasingly demand respect for Indigenous rights, while continuing to make knowledge resources available and accessible to the public, to the extent allowed by law. Faced with these two seemingly incommensurable objectives, many institutions have begun to adopt cumbersome, generally unenforceable internal policies and procedures that tend to limit access to Indigenous culture as a remedy for past abuses rather than looking to Indigenous communities for guidance on methods for repair and redress. This Article advocates for a different approach – one which merges restorative justice theory and well-established methods for “Open Source” or “Creative Commons”-style licensing into what I call restorative licensing. I further advocate for the integration of privately ordered licensing structures within the restorative justice process to ensure Indigenous expectations for repair and redress are met, and that Indigenous cultural expressions can circulate once again on terms consistent with Indigenous law, protocol, and standards of care.
Ninth Circuit En Banc Oral Argument in Apache Stronghold v. United States
Tenth Circuit Rules in Favor of Jemez Pueblo’s Aboriginal Rights Suit re: Valles Caldera
Here is the opinion in Pueblo of Jemez v. United States.
An excerpt:
In our circuit, both before and after Jemez I, the Jemez Pueblo could lose its established aboriginal title to Banco Bonito only if its title had been extinguished or abandoned. And the district court concluded that neither of those conditions had occurred. So in accordance with longstanding Supreme Court precedent, and by the district court’s findings, the Jemez Pueblo still has aboriginal title to Banco Bonito.
Links to briefs and lower court materials here.
UMich NALSA to Host Panel on Sacred Justice feat. Mike Petoskey, Tim Connors, Margaret Connors, and Fletcher
Mills and Nie on the Past, Present, and Potential Future of Tribal Co-Management on Federal Public Lands
Monte Mills and Martin Nie have posted “Bridges to a New Era: A Report on the Past, Present, and Potential Future of Tribal Co-Management on Federal Public Lands” on SSRN.
Here is the abstract:
Deep ancestral and traditional connections tie many Native Nations to the federal government’s public lands. The removal of these lands from indigenous control, their acquisition by the federal government, and the federal government’s approach to their management are largely premised upon the erasure or marginalization of those connections. Both physically and legally, Indian tribes have been removed from the landscapes they occupied since time immemorial. Rather than centering, honoring, and using those connections, the current discussion of tribal co-management of federal public lands is mostly bereft of this full legal and historical context.
Compounding these limitations is the considerable discretion enabled by the applicable legal framework and exercised by public land management agencies. This discretion is most often used in ways that place Indian tribes in a reactive and defensive position. Furthermore, in exercising that discretion, federal public land management agencies regularly disassociate their land management activities from their interactions with tribes, viewing the former as a priority and the latter as an additional burden or only ancillary to their mission. In order to reconnect the management of public lands to the broader legal and historical context, these agencies must be compelled—through statute or Executive action—to work with tribes on a co management basis, in the same manner as they are compelled to fulfill their other obligations and priorities in managing and protecting the lands for which they are responsible.
Furthermore, federal public land law generally provides to state governments and private interests broad powers and authorities not yet extended to Indian tribes. The intergovernmental dimensions of federal public lands management must more fully recognize the federal government’s fiduciary obligations to Indian tribes and include sovereign tribal governments. The common tools used in “cooperative federalism” can help inform the design of tribal co-management legislation and/or rulemaking.
Nevada Tribes Sue Interior over Lithium Mine Approvals
Kristen Carpenter on Human Rights and Cultural Property
Kristen A. Carpenter has posted “A Human Rights Approach to Cultural Property: Repatriating the Yaqui Maaso Kova,” forthcoming in the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Claims for repatriation of cultural property are emerging across the international community, with increasing attention to the inequities of acquisitions made during colonial periods. Yet the State-centric nature of legal instruments, such as the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property of 1970, remains a stumbling block to advancing meaningful remedies for past harms, especially in the Indigenous Peoples’ context. States often pursue repatriation to advance national identity or replenish museum collections, but for Indigenous Peoples, repatriation often has to do with restoring dignity to ancestors through reburial, returning ceremonial objects to religious use, and healing the community from cultural assimilation and oppression. Against this backdrop, the essay reviews the recent case of the Yaqui People, an Indigenous nation spanning the U.S.-Mexico border, who negotiated a pathbreaking agreement to repatriate a sacred deer head, the Maaso Kova, from the national museums of Sweden. Working with the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the parties expressly invoked the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, along with Yaqui and Swedish law, as bases for repatriation. The Yaqui-Sweden matter advances a human rights approach to repatriation that begins to transcend the hegemony of States in cultural property claims, while recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ equality and self-determination, along with religious and cultural freedoms.
Buena Vista Rancheria Brings Federal Common Law Nuisance Action against Surface Lands Strip Mining Company
Here is the complaint in Buena Vista Rancheria of the Me-Wuk Indians v. Pacific Coast Building Products Inc. (E.D. Cal.):
Amicus Briefs in the Ninth Circuit En Banc Stage of Apache Stronghold v. United States
Here is the fantastic amicus brief on behalf of tribes and tribal orgs written by April Youpee-Roll at Munger and Jason Searle and Beth Wright at NARF:
Here are the other briefs:
Protect the First Amicus Brief
Religious Liberty Scholars Amicus Briefs
Prior post here.
Turtle Talk 
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