News

Little River Withdraws Petition for Land into Trust, Will Likely Resubmit

Kate Fort

From 6/25/10 MIRS (subscription only):

Feds Nix Indian Casino Expansion, For Now
At least for the time being, the U.S. Department of the Interior delayed a Michigan Native American tribe’s plan to move forward with a casino project near the site of the now-defunct Great Lakes Downs Racetrack near Muskegon.

The Little River Band of Chippewa Indians wants to open a casino on the Great Lakes Downs location. The tribe was one of the four tribes that compacted with the state in 1998 for the right to operate class III (Las Vegas style) casinos. It currently operates a casino in Manistee.

Because the location is not within current tribal boundaries, there are several hurdles the tribe would need to clear in order to operate a casino at the Muskegon site. One hurdle has already been cleared. On March 19, Gov. Jennifer GRANHOLM signed two amendments to the state’s compact with the Little River band that would let it build the new casino.

The Governor attached her signature after a deal was negotiated between her administration and the tribe.

“It would mean considerable revenues,” John WERNET, deputy legal counsel told MIRS today. “The good news would be that this would mean more dollars for the School Aid Fund (SAF). The bad news is that this would take years before it happened.”

The next step would be to have the Legislature approve one of the amendments. This is HCR 0054, sponsored by Rep. Doug BENNETT (D-Muskegon), which is currently before the House Regulatory Reform Committee.

Meanwhile, the other amendment to the compact was sent to the U.S. Department of Interior for approval. That’s where the project hit a roadblock.
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News Coverage of Senate Passage of Tribal Law and Order Act

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the Denver Post (Michael Riley; link to 2007 articles in the Post on this question):

WASHINGTON — With spiraling crime rates battering Indian reservations across the West, the Senate on Wednesday passed legislation designed to plug gaping holes in the way crimes are investigated and prosecuted on Indian lands.

The legislation requires federal prosecutors to justify dropped cases to tribal leaders and allows tribal courts to impose sentences of up to three years, expanding authority that has been limited for more than 100 years.

It gives tribal police access to a key national crime database and allows felony crimes to be tried for the first time on the reservations where they occur.

“This will signify a dramatic change in the years ahead in the personal safety of a lot of American Indians who

have been abused, who have been victims of crime,” said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who chairs the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.

The system for investigating and prosecuting crimes on Indian reservations is complex — even arcane, according to some critics.

Felony crime is the sole responsibility of federal prosecutors, often based in cities hundreds of miles away. Under a law passed in 1885, the authority of tribal courts is severely limited and they can impose sentences of no more than a year.

Tribal leaders for years have accused U.S. attorneys of doing their jobs poorly, often showing little interest in prosecuting the rapes, assaults or small-time drug peddling that devastate some tribal communities.

In 2009, federal prosecutors declined to prosecute nearly half of all Indian Country felony cases presented to them, while federal crime statistics show that some reservations have violent-crime rates that are 20 times the national average.

But there is also wide disagreement on fixing the problem.

Expanding the authority of tribal courts has long been considered controversial, because in many cases tribal prosecutors and even judges aren’t required to have law degrees. Tribal court decisions in many cases are not appealable to federal court.

The Tribal Law and Order Act approved Wednesday — it passed with unanimous consent, meaning there was no formal, recorded vote — attempts to address those concerns.

Only tribal courts that meet certain standards, including minimum training requirements and the guarantee of counsel for indigent defendants, will be granted the new authority.

For the first time, the legislation also requires the Justice Department to make public yearly statistics on the number of Indian Country cases declined by federal prosecutors — and each declination must be reported to tribal leaders.

The bill also makes it easier to deputize tribal police so that they can enforce federal laws, including giving them jurisdiction over non-Indians.

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Navajo Pres. Shirley Uses Line Item Veto for First Time

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the President’s Office:

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. – Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley, Jr., today signed Resolution CJN-25-10 into law while exercising presidential line item veto authority for the first time since the Navajo People approved it more than six months ago.

The new presidential authority saved the Navajo Nation $5,650,000 in spending. The spending would have tapped the Navajo Nation Department of Justice’s Contingency Management Fund.

In his first line item veto message to Navajo Nation Council Speaker Lawrence T. Morgan and the Council, the President said the line item veto of four components of the large spending bill was necessary to preserve the fund at a level essential to protect the Nation’s interests.

“There really are no monies,” the President said after signing the law. “They’ve been encumbered. That money from the contingency fund is already obligated. The only resolution I didn’t line out is money for the kids in spite of the fact that there is no money.”

The Contingency Management Fund is reserved for liabilities and claims owed by the Navajo Nation as determined by the Office of the Attorney General.

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Asian Carp Caught Beyond Chicago’s Barriers

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

From the Traverse City Record-Eagle:

CHICAGO — An Asian carp was found for the first time beyond electric barriers meant to keep the voracious invasive species out of the Great Lakes, state and federal officials said Wednesday, prompting renewed calls for swift action to block their advance.

Commercial fishermen landed the 3-foot-long, 20-pound bighead carp in Lake Calumet on Chicago’s South Side, about six miles from Lake Michigan, according to the Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee.

Officials said they need more information to determine the significance of the find.

“The threat to the Great Lakes depends on how many have access to the lakes, which depends on how many are in the Chicago waterway right now,” said John Rogner, assistant director of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

But environmental groups said the discovery leaves no doubt that other Asian carp have breached barriers designed to prevent them from migrating from the Mississippi River system to the Great Lakes and proves the government needs to act faster.

“If the capture of this live fish doesn’t confirm the urgency of this problem, nothing will,” said Andy Buchsbaum, director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes office.

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GTB Primary Election Certified

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the Leelanau Enterprise:

The Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians on June 10 completed a successful Primary Election process after experiencing delays earlier this spring.

“No challenges were filed and we certified the Primary Election,” reported Desmond Berry, chairman of the tribal Election Board. “We are moving forward with our schedule of events and look forward to a July 15, 2010 General Election,” he said.

The primary was originally scheduled for April with the General Election slated for last month. Election challenges delayed the process, however. The names of three candidates were removed from the original Primary Election ballot after the Election Board determined the three had violated campaign rules.

One of the candidates, incumbent tribal councilor Rebecca Woods, appealed the Election Board’s determination to the Tribal Judiciary. But the Election Board’s determination was upheld by the panel of Tribal Court judges.

Woods has since resigned from the Tribal Council and accepted a position as the tribe’s chief financial officer. The names of candidates Gail Diaz and Angela Shinos were also removed from the Primary Election ballot.

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Tribal Law and Order Act Passes Senate as Part of Amendments to Indian Arts and Crafts Act

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here’s the bill: H.R. 725.

Fort Lewis College Buffalo Council Press Release re: Indian Tuition Waiver

Matthew L.M. Fletcher6 Comments

June 22, 2010
Contact: Pat Kincaid, Buffalo Council Spokesperson, (970) 903-6333

Fort Lewis College Buffalo Council Protects the Tuition Waiver by requesting Accountability of Trust Assets and promoting an Indian education agenda

Fort Lewis College (FLC) was created by a 1910 Congressional Act with the intent of “fulfilling treaty obligations with the various Tribes.” The state of Colorado received the surface rights to a 6300 acre parcel of land with two conditions (subsequent): 1) the land must be used as an institution of learning, and 2) Native Americans attending the school will receive a tuition waiver.

Currently the land is in violation of condition one and condition two has been attacked as recently as January when Colorado Representative Karen Middleton proposed a bill to kill the tuition waiver at FLC. Just as disturbing, is that the Native American students, who are the beneficiaries of the trust assets on these 6300 acres, are being blamed for budget issues.

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NYTs Article on Law School Grade Inflation: Do Grades Mean Anything Anymore?

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here is the article. An excerpt:

Law schools seem to view higher grades as one way to rescue their students from the tough economic climate — and perhaps more to the point, to protect their own reputations and rankings. Once able to practically guarantee gainful employment to thousands of students every year, the schools are now fielding complaints from more and more unemployed graduates, frequently drowning in student debt.

* * *

“For people like me who have good grades but are not in the super-elite, there are not as many options for getting a job in advance,” said Zachary Burd, 35, who just graduated from Southern Methodist University. A Dallas family law firm will receive $3,500 to “test drive” him this August.

“They’ll get me for a month or two, for free, to try me out,” he said. “It’s safer for them, and it’s a good foot in the door for me.”

But the tactic getting the most attention — and the most controversy — is the sudden, deliberate and dubiously effective grade inflation, which had begun even before the legal job market softened.

“If somebody’s paying $150,000 for a law school degree, you don’t want to call them a loser at the end,” says Stuart Rojstaczer, a former geophysics professor at Duke who now studies grade inflation. “So you artificially call every student a success.”

Unlike undergraduate grading, which has drifted northward over the years because most undergraduate campuses do not strictly regulate the schoolwide distribution of As and Bs, law schools have long employed clean, crisp, bell-shaped grading curves. Many law schools even use computers to mathematically determine cutoffs between a B+ and a B, based on exam points.

The process schools refer to as grade reform takes many forms. Some schools bump up everyone’s grades, some just allow for more As and others all but eliminate the once-gentlemanly C.

NYTs on Shinnecock Recognition

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the NYTs:

There’s no irony or attitude at the Shinnecock Nation Cultural Center and Museum, just the whaling artifacts, the carved elk on the front door, the portraits and memorabilia of a people whose history on Long Island goes back thousands of years.

Still, only a deity with a perverse sense of humor could have written the story of the Shinnecocks, which entered a new era on Tuesday when a 32-year legal effort culminated in the formal federal recognition of the tribe.

You could start with the locale: how the bays and beaches the Shinnecocks and their ancestors fished and nurtured for millennia morphed into not just the Hamptons, but some of the richest and snootiest precincts there. That left the Shinnecocks strangers in their own land, a largely poor tribe of 1,200 with an 800-acre reservation tucked amid the lime-green slacks, the $36 lobster roll (Silver’s on Main Street) and the perma-tan, perma-thin habitués of this playground of the seriously rich.

Then there’s been the long legal dance and periodic skirmishes over the tribe’s nuclear option: its threat to build a casino on the reservation that could have turned the standard East End gridlock into a graveyard of permanently immobilized Lexuses, Range Rovers and BMWs.

And now, with the economy still in the tank and development hard to come by, the outsiders at the banquet are the ones holding all the chips. The courting and wooing for what could be one of New York State’s biggest economic projects in many years have been going on quietly for some time.

But the action begins in earnest next month, when, 30 days after the designation, the tribe can start taking official steps to build what could be New York’s answer to Connecticut’s mega-casinos.

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Crow Photographer Sings in the Timber in NYT’s Lens Blog

Kate Fort

From the NYT’s Lens Blog–click through for the slideshow of Adam Sings in the Timber’s photos.

It often seems as if America has only two frames through which to view its native culture: ceremony and pageantry or poverty and addiction.

“They are both opposite ends,” Adam Sings in the Timber said. “There is so much more in the middle.”

Mr. Sings in the Timber has had ample opportunity to reflect on how Indian culture is portrayed. He is a freelance multimedia and video producer for Reznet, a Native American news, information and entertainment Web site that trains and mentors college students who are preparing for journalism careers. He has also been documenting the everyday life of the Crow Tribe in southeastern Montana.