From MLive:
BATTLE CREEK, MI – The owners of FireKeepers Casino plan to hold an informational meeting for area community leaders about a statewide ballot proposal that would amend the state constitution to allow eight new privately owned casinos to be built in Michigan.
In a press release, the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Pottawatomi [sic] said the meeting is scheduled for 10 a.m. Thursday in the Bingo Room of FireKeepers Casino.
Here is the press release:
Gun Lake Revenue Sharing Announcement 6.4.12
Photo courtesy Gun Lake Tribe.
Available here. Well worth the read.
Here.
Problematic language here:
The lower court did not inquire about the tribal status of respondent or the children as required by MCR 3.965(B)(2). However, the Michigan Supreme Court has held that it “will not reverse an otherwise proper termination absent a showing that a party suffered an actual deprivation of an important right.” In re Osborne, 459 Mich 360, 369 n 10; 589 NW2d 763 (1999). Respondent has not shown that the lower court’s failure to inquire about tribal status in fact deprived her of an important right. Accordingly, any error in the lower court’s failure to inquire about tribal status was harmless.
Problematic for many reasons, but mainly because the Michigan Supreme Court found in May:
Therefore, before a state court can determine whether ICWA applies to the proceedings, the court must first make the critical determination whether the child is an “Indian child.”
In re Morris, *13
1. At the preliminary hearing, the court must inquire about Indian heritage. While MCR 3.965(B)(2) frames the inquiry in terms of actual tribal membership, sufficiently reliable information of virtually any criteria on which membership might be based is adequate to trigger the notice requirement of 25 USC 1912(a). See part IV(A) of the opinion. As we have noted, not all tribes keep written rolls and it is possible for a parent to be unaware that she or he is a member of a tribe. See n 19 of the opinion and accompanying text.
In re Morris, Appendix (emphasis added).
Here:
We congratulate JoAnne Gasco, a former tribal judge at GTB and LTBB, and a frequent guest speaker at ILPC events, and Tom Shomin, husband to our great friend-of-Turtle-Talk Mary Shomin.
Here is the order in United States v. Booth (W.D. Mich.):
Here:
The Michigan SCT decision instructing lower courts on ICWA notice violations and adopting the “conditional reversal” requirement is here.
Here are the materials in Huron Mountain Club v. United States Army Corps of Engineers (W.D. Mich.):
Huron Mountain Club Brief in Support of PI Motion
Here is the Interlochen Public Radio coverage of the suit. An excerpt:
A private club in the Upper Peninsula has filed a federal lawsuit suit to stop the construction of a new mine in Marquette County. The nickel and copper mine, owned by Kennecott Eagle Minerals, has received permits from the state. But the Huron Mountain Club says the U.S. Army Corps needs to review the project to make sure it doesn’t violate the Clean Water Act.
The club owns nearly 20,000 acres of forest downstream from the mine on the Salmon Trout River. The lawsuit says sulfuric acid produced by sulfide mining could pollute the river. And the club is “horror-struck” by the prospect of the watershed collapsing because part of the mine will be dug directly underneath it. The lawsuit also says the federal government needs to consider the potential for damage to Eagle Rock, a site near the entrance to the mine that is sacred to American Indians.
Kennecott says the mine has been extensively reviewed and survived multiple legal challenges going back to 2006. Eagle Mine has been under construction since 2010 and the company says it is 75 percent built.
Here. An excerpt:
The Eagle Returns: The Legal History of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians (Michigan State University Press, 2012) is a governmental, legal and political history of the tribe. The volume focuses on their status as a treaty tribe and as the first tribe to be recognized—or, perhaps more accurately, re-recognized—by the federal government under the Bureau of Indian Affairs’s administrative recognition process.
“It is the story of survival against the arrival and savage intervention of several European nations—and the United States—in the affairs and property of the Anishinaabek of the Grand Traverse Bay region,” Fletcher writes in his introduction. Professor of law and director of the Indigenous Law & Policy Center at Michigan State University College of Law, Fletcher also runs Turtle Talk, the Indigenous Law & Policy Center’s legal blog and an unrivaled source of court documents pertaining to Indian casework and law.
In The Eagle Returns, Fletcher takes on the guise of storyteller, and that role is reflected in the chapter headings: “The Story of the 1836 Treaty of Washington,” “The Story of the 1855 Treaty of Detroit” and “The Story of the Dispossession of the Grand Traverse Band Land Base” are just some of the entries.
Although the chapter titles are specific to the Grand Traverse Band, in a more general sense they could serve as a template for any number of indigenous nations. The book is a reminder that so many of them have followed the same post-European settlement trajectory of cultural and economic erosion, genocide, dispossession and poverty, up to the brink of legal extinction—only to survive through resilience and resourcefulness to emerge strong and prosperous in the latter part of the 20th century.
The Eagle Returns is not just a legal history. It is also filled with details about the material lives of the pre-treaty Anishinaabek peoples. At one point Fletcher writes deftly of their renowned birchbark canoes: They were “the finest canoes in the northern hemisphere, capable of carrying over a ton of people and equipment for two-year treks, creating an ability to travel over all of the Great Lakes and their major tributaries.”
Other compelling passages detail episodes like the negotiations between the Anishinaabek leaders, who were called ogemuk, and Henry Schoolcraft, the Indian Commissioner for the United States and “an ardent land speculator prone to fits of deep ethnocentrism.” On March 28, 1836, Schoolcraft signed off on the Treaty of Washington, whereby the tribes ceded an area of 13,837,207 acres—more than one-third of Michigan’s land area. The treaty provided for permanent reservations and prohibited the ethnic cleansing of Michigan Indians. But within months the Senate rewrote it to limit the reservations to five years and provide an option to remove Indian communities to the south and west.
“The Senate added the carrot of $200,000 to the bands that chose to remove to these lands in exchange for their reservations lands,” Fletcher writes. The president agreed to the amended treaty on May 27, 1836, but the Anishinaabek were not notified of the changes until July.
Still other chapters detail the further dispossession of the Grand Traverse Band and its “administrative termination” beginning in the 1870s. The story brightens with the band’s re–recognition on May 27, 1980; its famous victorious battle for treaty rights to hunt, fish and gather on public lands; its successful gaming enter-prises; and the modernization of the tribe’s ancient law and justice systems.
Fletcher says that he intends The Eagle Returns to serve as a reference for policymakers, lawyers and Indian people and for an educated general audience. But for the author, the book is also a considerable labor of love.
“It is written for the people of the Grand Traverse Band,” writes the author, “who have not had the benefit of drawing upon one source for the bulk of their legal and political history.”
Turtle Talk 
You must be logged in to post a comment.