News

Save the Date: N. Scott Momaday at U-M

Sarah M Donnelly1 Comment

The Inaugural Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. Lecture
in Native American Studies

An Evening with N. Scott
Momaday

Friday, March 11, 2016
6:00 – 7:30 PM
Michigan League Ballroom
Reception to follow lecture

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Native American scholar, and poet N. Scott Momaday has been hailed as “the dean of American Indian writers” by the New York Times.  He crafts — in language and imagery — majestic landscapes of a sacred culture.

Named a UNESCO Artist for Peace and Oklahoma’s poet laureate, he was also a recipient of the 2007 National Medal of Arts, presented by President George W. Bush.  Momaday was the first Native American to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, House Made of Dawn, widely considered to be the start of the Native American Renaissance.  His most recent volume, Again the Far Morning: New and Selected Poems, was released in 2011.

His other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the “Mondello,” Italy’s highest literary honor. His works include The Way to Rainy Mountain, The Names: A Memoir, The Ancient Child, and a new collection, Three Plays, which celebrates Kiowa history and culture.  He was featured in the Ken Burns documentary, The West, that showcased his masterful retelling of Kiowa history and mythology.

For more information, contact Scott Lyons, Director of Native
American Studies at U-M (lyonssr@umich.edu).

Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. (1931-2012) was an historian and a leading scholar in the field of Native American studies. The author of many influential books, including The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (1978), Berkhofer taught at Michigan from 1973-1991.  This annual lecture on Native American Studies honors his work and legacy.

County Court Awards $109 Million Against Tribal Member

Sarah M Donnelly

Link to Journal Entry of Judgment by Default in the matter of Whitebird v. McKinney (12/11/2015) here.

Link to Topeka Capital-Journal coverage here.

Excerpts from judgment:

Exhibit 4 which represents information published in the Kansas Register authorizing the daily rate for Kansas Neurological Institution in Topeka, Kansas.  KNI is a residential health care facility for profoundly disabled individuals.  Exhibit 4 also represents an estimate of projected future cost of care in an institution similar to KNI in Topeka, Kansas, to the age of 68 that totals $104,160,411.68.

Exhibit 5 is a medical cost projection for severely disabled individuals through the age of 77 that totals $5,020,246.00.  This projection does not include cost of full-time attendant care that Romeo Whitebird will need the rest of his life.

Plaintiffs don’t believe they will recover the full award, but the judgment secures any future earnings from income or oil royalties from the Three Affiliated Tribes member who is serving nine years for abusing the, then, seven-month-old.

Coverage of Oral Arguments at the Supreme Court for Dollar General

Sarah M Donnelly

From The Atlantic: “Who Can Tribal Courts Try? The U.S. Supreme Court weighs which disputes America’s Indian tribal courts can adjudicate.”

From The New York Times: “Justices Weigh Power of Indian Tribal Courts in Civil Suits”

A Native American Parent Confronts a Pervasive NFL Slur

Aside Sarah M Donnelly

Link to Education Week article by Jared Hautamaki here.

Excerpt:

The interim superintendent of the Montgomery County district responded to me. He said that in a large, diverse school district, not everyone is going to like what they see. He said that given the system’s values of equity and respect and students’ right of free expression, district officials would continue to monitor the impact and respond to the issue by benchmarking their actions against those of other Washington-area school districts. He hoped I would continue to collaborate with my son’s principal and still be “respectful and kind.” He didn’t address the academic research that I had shared. He didn’t address the comments of the district spokesman, who said the board addresses complaints like mine on a school-by-school basis. He didn’t address the dress code. He didn’t address the offensiveness of the name. But, he also didn’t use the name itself.

…

In the Washington region, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, the Indian Health Service, tribal lobby offices, and tribal law firms all employ a steady number of Native Americans who leave their tribal homes and uproot their families to serve their communities and their two nations—their tribe and the United States government. Native American student enrollment in the Montgomery County schools is around 280 students. The fact that we are a minority among minorities in the region is not an excuse for ignoring our children’s rights to an education environment free of racist imagery and discrimination.

More Dollar General Coverage — Tulalip Tribes

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here is “Supreme Court case draws Tulalip’s attention.”

Cross Deputization for Pokagon Band of Potawatomi and County Officers

Sarah M Donnelly

Link to South Bend Tribune article here.

Excerpt:

In the meantime, the deal will allow tribal police officers to enforce Indiana laws in St. Joseph County, including on the 1700 acres of Pokagon land near North Liberty and the 166 acres between Prairie Avenue, Locust Road and the St. Joseph Valley Parkway.

“With the Pokagon Band restoring the tribal village here in South Bend, we thought it was our duty to work with St. Joseph County to enhance public safety in this area,” said tribal Chairman John Warren.

At the Supreme Court: Contentious Questions of Tribal Jurisdiction in Dollar General v. Choctaw Nation of Miss.

Sarah M Donnelly

Link to Stanford Law article here.

Excerpt:

Let me give you an important example from this case, based on what Dollar General seems to think is its strongest historical argument. The company relies heavily on a couple of treaties with two Native nations in what is today Oklahoma—treaties that seem to strip civil jurisdiction over non-Natives from those tribes in particular. But those treaties are hardly representative of the history of even those two tribes, let alone all the histories of all of the over five hundred different federally recognized tribes. Soon after the handful of treaties referenced by Dollar General, the federal government began contemplating an Indian state in what was then Indian Territory, so it entered new treaties that explicitly granted this new Native government civil jurisdiction over non-members. Later in that century, Congress reversed course and, in creating the state of Oklahoma, abolished tribal courts there altogether. But only thirty years after that, in the 1930s, Congress changed policy again, and passed a law that permitted the re-establishment of tribal courts in Oklahoma. And this is just two Native nations over a span of eighty years. This single example, I think, suggests some of the challenges: we simply can’t distill centuries of change and contradiction into a single, unambiguous narrative.

Legal News Profile of Judge Tim Connors

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here.

Guardian Series on America’s Poorest Towns Includes Gila River

Sarah M Donnelly

Link to article here.

 

Senate Indian Affairs Committee to Review TLOA

Sarah M Donnelly

Hearing set for Wednesday, December 2, 2015 at 2:15PM EST.

Link to announcement here.