Here is the opinion.
Here is the NYTs article describing the opinion.
NCAI and Huy filed briefs in this matter, here.
Of note, perhaps, Justice Sotomayor authored a separate concurring opinion quoting from two lower court decisions involving Indian or Indian-related claims, Yellowbear and Wilgus.
Here.
An excerpt:
But an article in this week’s The Economist is a reminder that we haven’t put the bad old days of racially distorted coverage of poverty beyond us. The article claims “cash from casinos makes Native Americans poorer.” According to the author, a particular problem is that tribes distribute part of the revenues directly to members—typically known as “per capita payments”—which encourages “sloth.” The article is accompanied by a photograph of an American Indian man in front of a slot machine, a grin on his face and his arm pumped in the air.
Given research like Gilens’ and the long history of stereotyping American Indians as lazy, The Economist should have been particularly careful to ensure that it had solid evidence to back up its claim. In lieu of such evidence, The Economist relied on a few anecdotes and a single article by a private attorney published in a student-run law review.
We took a closer look at the law review article that The Economist relied on and were not impressed. It purportedly shows that poverty was more likely to increase in certain Pacific Northwest tribes that distributed part of their gambling revenues to members than in those that did not. But there were only seven tribes (out of a total of 17 that the article focused on) that did not distribute gaming revenues directly to members. The total reported decline in poverty among these seven tribes amounted to only 364 people. The study contained no controls for any of the many factors that affect poverty rates, nor did it take into account size differences in the tribes, differences in the size and structure of the per capita payments, or other relevant factors. In short, the study is absolutely useless in terms of providing meaningful evidence to supportThe Economist’s claim.
Here is the American Indian Law Center’s Press Release.
An excerpt:
The Women’s Law Caucus (WLC) at the University of New Mexico School of Law announced that Heidi Nesbitt, the Director of the Pre-Law Summer Institute (PLSI) and Assistant Director of the American Indian Law Center, Inc. (AILC), has been named a recipient of the 2015 Justice Mary Walters Award. The WLC presents the annual award to outstanding women in the New Mexico legal community in honor of former Justice Mary Walters, who was the first woman appointed to the New Mexico Supreme Court. Recipients of the award demonstrate courage, strong ethics, leadership and mentorship in the legal field.
This article highlights a promising program being implemented in northern Minnesota. The counties and tribes are working collaboratively to meet the needs of dual status youth (juveniles who come into contact with both child welfare and juvenile justice systems). This model is being applied in a few other places around the country and may be a model for other counties and tribes to consider.
The entire article is available here.
Excerpts from the article:
Way up in northwestern Minnesota, progress is being made within the Ojibwe tribes.
“It’s been a long process,” said Trisha Hansen, Bemidji District supervisor for the Minnesota Department of Corrections. “… It was a tough two years, let me tell you. Probation and social services have really worked together in the last two years.”Since September, the traditional divisions between the systems of juvenile justice and child welfare have begun to be erased.With a tribal nation contained within the county, the separations are doubled. . . .
The ultimate goal is to integrate tribal, federal, state and local services for culturally appropriate services and to run juvenile delinquency prevention programs within the community rather than off-reservation.
“I anticipate great results,” said national consultant John Tuell. The goal is to “overcome this mess we’ve created with this separation between child welfare and juvenile justice.” He is executive director of the Robert F. Kennedy National Resource Center for Juvenile Justice and RFK Children’s Action Corps, based in Boston.
One of the challenges, Hansen said, was figuring out the confidentiality parameters among the various agencies. She said the White Earth Nation in central Minnesota, which already uses the dual status youth strategies successfully, is helping them. White Earth Nation, also Ojibwe, is in Mahnomen County. It also uses county and tribal services and courts.
About 40 youths ages 10-17 are in the Beltrami County juvenile justice system locally and about 80 are under supervision on any given day, Hansen said.
White Earth Court Administrator Lori Thompson said the tribe adopted the dually involved youth program about 18 months ago. She has worked with the White Earth court system since 2000.
Currently, she said, about 15 young people are in the program.
The strategies, she explained, increase interagency information-sharing and give families and youngsters more of a voice in dealing with the agencies. Benefits include early identification, connecting families and youth with services, “diverting youth from adjudication and court when feasible” and “promoting culturally valid intervention.”
Such interventions include beading and drumming, Thompson said. Young people are assigned to four hours of community involvement every two weeks, such as setting up chairs, serving food and cleaning up at meetings.
The youngsters also carry wood for and take part in weekly sweat lodges, often with some of the officials, such as probation officers, who serve them. . . .
If a child commits an offense, Lind said, the process starts with the county attorney, who makes the initial decision of whether to charge the youngster. The county attorney also contacts county and tribal social services. Parents also meet with a social services worker and a probation officer, he said. Under the new program, these meetings would be conducted jointly, requiring less travel and saving time and money.
In the past, families often had to meet with several agencies. Such confrontations can be confusing to both parents and children, Hansen said. “They aren’t hearing a thing because there’s so much swirling around them,” she said.
“White Earth has made a lot of progress,” Hansen said, citing the Circle Back Center in Ogema, Minn., on the White Earth Reservation. Circle Back Center clients can be referred through Indian Health Services, law enforcement, tribal court, county social services, tribal, county and state corrections, substance abuse programs and private entities or families.
Eligible clients are boys and girls ages 10-18 who have successfully completed alcohol or substance abuse treatment, those who lack a sober or safe home and those with behavior problems such as truancy, runaway and curfew violations. The center primarily accepts American Indian youth, but extends services to non-native youngsters if staff members consider them able to benefit from the program.
Here is “High Noon for the Gray Wolf.”
Here is “Navajos Face Leadership Crisis as Lawmakers Take Office, Minus a New President.”
LOWER BRULE SIOUX TRIBE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Marshall Matz, mmatz@ofwlaw.com
THE LOWER BRULE SIOUX TRIBE CONDEMNS
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH’S BIASED AND INACCURATE REPORT
Lower Brule, South Dakota
“The report of Human Rights Watch attacking the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and its leaders is totally baseless and simply republishes misstatements of the past” said Lower Brule Sioux Tribal Chairman Mike Jandreau.
Human Rights Watch (HRW), an organization that claims to be “committed to maintaining high standards of accuracy and fairness” and maintaining high ethical standards, has released a remarkably inaccurate report that attacks Lower Brule Sioux .. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is constantly monitoring all Tribes under its trust responsibilities. In fact, Lower Brule has the lowest unemployment rate of any Tribe in South Dakota because of excellent and consistent Tribal management.
The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe condemns the biased, error-ridden, defamatory attack on the Lower Brule Sioux leadership, Lower Brule Sioux sovereignty, and the Lower Brule Sioux people.
Said Chairman Michael Jandreau: “This report is absolutely baseless. It’s shocking that any credible organization would put its name on it. It’s full of factual errors, misrepresentations, and outright falsehoods. We’re exploring our legal options.”
The factual errors run from the ignorant (“The Lower Brule Sioux Reservation . . . is among the smallest . . . in the United States.”) to irresponsible and reckless inaccuracies. The report infers falsely that the stability of the tribal government is due to corrupt elections even though the current tribal council has new members critical of the previous council. The report wrongly concludes that the development of private sector businesses for sustainable future income involves the use of tribal funds. The report denigrates the long-established independent tribal justice system without any evidence that the tribal government prohibits, inhibits or discriminates against critics from reasonable and equitable access. The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe has advocated and supported, through resolution, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The report relies heavily on the false statements from political dissenters within the Tribe and treats the sovereignty of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe as simply a “problematic” and inconvenient barrier to its preconceived conclusions.
The report claims that Lower Brule Sioux tribal members have no way to hold Lower Brule Sioux leaders accountable for their decisions as leaders. To these claims, Chairman Jandreau says: “The attack entirely ignores the fact that every two years the Lower Brule Sioux people decide through their votes in open elections who will serve as leaders of the Tribe. Our government is completely transparent and open to Members of the Tribe.”
The report ignores the fact that any Lower Brule Sioux tribal member could bring an action in Tribal Court if Lower Brule Sioux leaders did not provide information they are entitled to receive.
The inconsistent and contradictory Human Rights Watch report, on one hand, portrays an oppressive tribal government while acknowledging that the government holds fair and open elections at which critics of the incumbents are elected and seated. The report does not allege that freedom of speech is suppressed, or freedom of assembly, or that there is no recourse to tribal and federal courts, or that the tribal government uses physically oppressive tactics of any kind. In spite of its allegations, the report omits he illegal conduct of the three elected tribal council members upon whom the report relies for much of its information. These three individuals attempted to physically take over the tribal government on December 12, 2014. Their wholly illegal and outrageous actions were enjoined in tribal court. While these three dissident tribal council members failed, their actions succeeded in revealing their complete lack of commitment to the rule of law and the thinly veiled and inappropriate political agenda at the root of the Human Rights Watch report. The Human Rights Watch Report is political pamphleteering of the worst sort. ###
Here is the press release:
US: Tribal Council Mismanagement
Millions of Dollars Missing; Services Undercut
(Sioux Falls, January 12, 2015) – Millions of dollars in public funds are missing in the impoverished Lower Brule Sioux reservation, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The Lower Brule Tribal Government should account for the missing public funds and abide by its own rules on openness.
The 90-page report, “Secret and Unaccountable: The Tribal Council at Brule and Its Impact on Human Rights,” documents many of the problems with tribal governance at Lower Brule for the first time. It details how the Tribal Council has diverted millions of dollars in federal funds away from key social programs without explaining how those funds were spent. Human Rights Watch has obtained hundreds of pages of government documents detailing financial mismanagement and possible corruption and is making that information public for the first time.
“Since 2007, Lower Brule’s Tribal Council has lost tens of millions of dollars to mismanagement and possible corruption,” said Arvind Ganesan, director of business and human rights at Human Rights Watch. “This has severely undercut efforts to provide basic services that people across the reservation desperately need.”
The report is being released during a crisis in tribal governance with a split between newly elected Tribal Council members who have clashed with longstanding council members over government transparency and accountability.
The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe is located on a small, extremely poor reservation in central South Dakota on the shore of the Missouri River. Some 40 percent of the local population requires food assistance, and the reservation’s poverty level is almost three times the national average.
The Tribal Council at Lower Brule serves as the legislative and executive branch of the government and is extraordinarily powerful on the reservation. Since 1980, the council chairman has been Michael Jandreau. Neither the local courts nor any other public institution exercise meaningful oversight over the council’s prerogatives.
Over the last two years, the Tribal Council is perhaps best known for its partnership with the Washington Redskins, the National Football League team.
Human Rights Watch found that the Tribal Government’s mismanagement of scarce financial resources has directly impacted basic services many tribal members rely on. For example, US$1.2 million was diverted between 2005 and 2007 from a federally funded program to supply potable water on the reservation. How the money was used has not been explained.
In another instance $2.6 million in federal funds meant for the school system and other programs for the poor were diverted from 2010-2011 for unexplained purposes. Since then the Lower Brule school system has effectively collapsed.
In perhaps the most brazen case of mismanagement, in 2009 members of the Tribal Council set up a series of shell companies to purchase the Westrock Group, a troubled Wall Street brokerage firm. By the time of the sale, the firm had been repeatedly sanctioned and fined by regulators for unethical business practices. Within two years of that purchase, Westrock was bankrupt.
The tribe made this dubious investment with the help of a $22.5 million federal loan guarantee, which the tribe subsequently sold for about $20 million in cash. That money is equivalent to nearly two-thirds of the Tribal Government’s entire annual budget and has since disappeared.
“The Tribal Council has consistently thwarted public efforts to secure information about government finances,” Ganesan said. “Council members’ secretive approach to governance has fostered mismanagement, abuse, and serious allegations of corruption.”
In 2007, tribal members began to openly protest the Tribal Council’s secrecy and mismanagement. In response, the council has withheld virtually all information and documentation about its activities from the public, in violation of the open records provisions of the tribe’s constitution and basic standards of good governance and human rights.
This information blockade has even extended to some elected Tribal Council members who wanted to look into the council’s financial practices, including three new council members that were elected on a reform platform in September 2014.
Indian reservations in the United States are sovereign entities with considerable authority to manage their own affairs. Sovereignty itself is not the cause of Lower Brule’s problems since many other tribal governments have robust mechanisms to hold themselves accountable and protect the rights of tribal members. The lack of any such mechanisms at Lower Brule, coupled with the Tribal Council’s refusal to abide by its own rules and constitutional norms, is the primary cause of the problems documented, Human Rights Watch said.
Even though Lower Brule has a sovereign government, US federal officials have an important role to play in securing accountability on the reservation. Federal officials were aware that the tribal government diverted federal funds earmarked for social programs, but has not done enough to address it. The Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General has, however, has begun to examine why the Bureau of Indian Affairs extended a loan guarantee to the tribe to buy Westrock.
“The federal government can play an important role by helping to investigate and account for the millions of dollars in taxpayer funds that have gone missing at Lower Brule,” Ganesan said. “As a key source of tribal government revenue, federal authorities have the authority – and indeed the responsibility – to demand greater transparency.”
When the three reform council members were elected in September 2014, Chairman Jandreau and two other longstanding council members were reelected. Since the new council was sworn into office on October 1, the new council members have been denied access to government information by Jandreau and the incumbent council members.
The new council has not met to conduct official business since October. At the same time, the previous council secured the resignation of a newly elected chief justice of the tribal court just before the new council took office, and reappointed the incumbent judge who had come in third place in the September election.
On December 12, the new council members held a largely symbolic vote of no confidence against the chair and the other two council members, and voted to remove them from office and appoint the runners-up in tribal elections to their positions. Jandreau’s representative responded by petitioning the tribal court to remove the three new council members from office. The first hearing in that case takes place on January 12, 2015. These events have led to an increasingly tense environment on the reservation.
Human Rights Watch repeatedly contacted Tribal Council members in office during the period these events occurred, and other Tribal Government officials. They refused our requests for information, would not meet with us, and did not comment on these allegations.
“The people of Lower Brule have been deprived for years of information, desperately needed public services, and government accountability,” Ganesan said. “It’s time to end the stonewalling and secrecy and let the truth come out about where their money has gone.”
Upon release, it will be available at:
http://www.hrw.org/node/131578
For more Human Rights Watch reporting on business and human rights, please visit:
http://www.hrw.org/topic/business
For more information, please contact:
In Sioux Falls, Arvind Ganesan (English): +1-202-612-4329; or ganesaa@hrw.org
Here is the opinion:
Turns out Keystone’s backers lost 4-3, but state law required a super majority….
News coverage here.
Here are the materials in Poor Bear v. Jackson County (D. S.D.):
29 Statement of the Interest of the US
Complaint here. Other materials here.
News coverage here.
UPDATE: I should point out this doesn’t look like a formal motion to intervene, more like an amicus brief.
Turtle Talk 
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