This lecture considers conserving and upholding Anishinaabe law as it relates to the more-than-human world. It suggests that we must continually renew our broadest legal commitments to protect and preserve what sustains us. Protecting clans and the animals from which they derive is close to the heart of Anishinaabe law (ode’naakonige). This law is embodied through Anishinaabe treaties with our evolutionary progenitors, our clan relatives. These treaties with the more-than-human world were incorporated into treaties with other First Nations. From an Anishinaabe perspective, these obligations were, in turn, eventually imported into treaties with the Crown. Anishinaabe treaties with the more-than-human world continue to inform how Anishinaabe people practice constitutional law through consultation protocols, legislation, and participation in court proceedings.
American federalism describes the constitutional relationships between three kinds of sovereign political bodies: the federal government, the fifty states, and 575 federally recognized Indian tribes. Yet federalism scholarship often elides the third sovereign, instead exclusively focusing on the relations between states and the federal sovereign. Previously, I argued that trilateral federalism should frame federal approaches to issues involving tribal governance. This Article continues that work, with a structural examination of federal statutory interventions to resolve conflicts between America’s domestic sovereigns, the states and tribes.
State-tribe conflict is a perennial feature of federal Indian law. This Article engages with examples across various substantive fields of law—including family law, criminal justice, gaming, taxation, and public health—to articulate four models of federal statutory intervention: (1) Federal Preemption, (2) Opt-In, (3) Guided Compacting, and (4) Noninterference. The Article considers their relative strengths, weaknesses, and appropriate contexts. Finally, the Article applies these models to the case study of traffic enforcement in Oklahoma Indian country, a major site of tribe-state conflict in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma.
Ecological disturbances are straining conventional fish and wildlife management, which tribal knowledge can inform to produce more effective management. Although federal policy has recognized government-to-government relations with Tribal Nations, most day-today regulation of fish and wildlife runs through state agencies. This Article argues that Oregon has provided an important management framework between the state and Tribal Nations. Since 2022, Oregon has entered a series of state-tribal agreements that constitute a durable and increasingly replicable co-management framework. This Article contends that these agreements reflect a second-generation, state-driven adaptation of an earlier co-management framework that emerged from the Columbia River treaty-rights litigation. Although Oregon has not formally ceded legal primacy, the agreements nonetheless shift considerable operational authority to Tribal Nations through recurring harvest negotiation, shared scientific information, hunting and fishing licensing, and habitat coordination. Some limits to the co-management framework appear in Willamette Falls, an important historic intertribal commons, where overlapping tribal claims expose the shortcomings of bilateralism. Habitat restoration likewise tests whether Oregon’s framework can apply beyond the harvest context. Consequently, the Article concludes that the Oregon-tribal agreements offer a workable but conditional framework of inter-sovereign resource management for other states and Tribal Nations, and other resources.
Join Seattle University School of Law for the 9th Annual Innovation and Technology Law Conference, a virtual gathering exploring Indigenous Perspectives on AI: Appropriation, Regulation, and Innovation.
Friday, June 5, 2026
9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Virtual event
Register to receive the Zoom link the day before the event
Presented by the Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics (TILE) Institute and the SITIE Initiative, and co-sponsored by the Northwest Center for Indigenous Law, Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental & Innovation Law (SJTEIL), and the American Indian Law Journal, this year’s conference brings together leading scholars, practitioners, and Indigenous leaders.
Through a full day of panels and discussion, you’ll gain insight into:
The legal and ethical implications of cultural appropriation in AI
Indigenous data sovereignty and emerging frameworks
AI regulation through the lens of tribal sovereignty
Innovative models led by Indigenous technologists and communities
View the full agenda and speaker lineup on the SITIE Conference event page. Register now to be part of this timely and critical conversation.
On May 15, 2026, the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation (NHLC), the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), and Hobbs, Straus, Dean & Walker, LLP filed a Motion to Intervene on behalf of Papa Ola Lōkahi in a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Native Hawaiian Health Scholarship Program. The lawsuit, brought by Do No Harm, targets a program rooted in Congress’s longstanding recognition of the United States government’s trust responsibilities to Native Hawaiians.
Native Americans pay taxes. Territories, by contrast, tax in place of the federal government. Both live with the legacy of American imperialism. Both seek the elusive fiscal self-governance and autonomy promised by Congress. The Supreme Court—through preemption, the plenary power doctrine, and interpretive principles—has hollowed out the Native tax base, forcing tribes to compete fiercely with Congress, states, and localities for revenue. By contrast, territorial residents pay no federal or state taxes on territorially sourced income by edicts of Congress and geography. But such tax exemption enabled the creation of incentive regimes that have only invited more criticism as entrenching subordination. This Article argues that the conceptual underpinnings of the divergent tax treatment of tribes and territories are unsound. Under a more robust vision of fiscal autonomy, judicial limits on Native tax sovereignty are misguided. The territories’ wide latitude in designing revenue streams merits increased scrutiny. While imperfect, a uniform, nonrefundable federal income-tax credit for tribal and territorial taxes paid is a promising path forward. This Article thus provides the first systematic study of subfederal taxation beyond states and localities—the “other” American taxation often overlooked in scholarship.
Does a state court have to enforce a judgment issued by a tribal court? In 1991 the Arizona Supreme Court surveyed the current treatment of tribal court judgments and concluded that a majority of courts “extend[ ] the application of the full faith and credit clause” to decisions rendered by tribal courts. Just fifteen years later the Southern District of Florida castigated the Miccosukee Tribe for making the same representation; reasoning that “the clear majority of states addressing the issue have concluded that Indian tribes” are outside of the Full Faith and Credit Statute.
This Article corrects the judicial record. First, it actually surveys the split among state laws and concludes that most states that have considered the issue treat tribal court judgments as enforceable beyond the traditional comity extended to judgments from foreign courts, although not all of these states describe this recognition as full faith and credit. Second, it makes a normative argument, suggesting that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in a relatively obscure bankruptcy case, Lac du Flambeau v. Coughlin, actually resolves the conflict and mandates that state courts extend full faith and credit to tribal court judgments. Finally, the Article considers the limited enumerated powers of Congress and the federal courts, to suggest that while states must give full faith and credit to tribal court judgments, tribes are free to decide for themselves whether to reciprocally recognize state court judgments.
The implications are profound. The judicial record is replete with hundreds of cases, across dozens of states, searching for guidance on the scope of the Full Faith and Credit Statute when applied to Indian tribes. There is a circuit split. There are federal courts refusing to comply with nineteenth century Supreme Court precedent that has never been overturned. The congressional response has been piecemeal, requiring full faith and credit in specific circumstances, without ever articulating a standard for the recognition of other tribal court judgments. This Article unifies history and practice, statute and precedent, to articulate a single consolidated theory of the recognition of tribal court judgments.
American Indian women in the legal academy have stepped in to fight this persistent othering and invisibility in the law: through service, scholarship, and tenacious advocacy. In doing so, they have created Indigenous feminist spaces whereby Native people can resist intellectual and social assimilation to varying degrees. Sarah Deer (Muscogee Nation) argued prophetically in 2019, “to cultivate future feminist interventions in Indian law, I contend we must do more to recruit and support Native women law students, and, ultimately, more Native women law professors.” In Native communities, “auntie” is a term of endearment for Indigenous women, often women who take positions of leadership: cultural, social, professional, or otherwise. The term encompasses blood relatives but also extends beyond them to accommodate expansive Indigenous philosophies of kinship and community care. As Laurel Goodluck (Tsimshian Tribe) describes her children’s book “Fierce Aunties,” aunties come in a variety of shapes, sizes, experiences, and backgrounds, but what these fierce aunties share is “[they] see you, they know you, and they love all of you, always.” Aunties are who you go to for guidance, advice, support, and courage. Native women entering the legal academy today are heirs to a generation of Native aunties who have toiled to build communities and infrastructures to support Native students and Indian law education. I call them the “Indian law aunties.” Native women in the legal academy (the “Indian law aunties”) resist invisibility through labor, advocacy, and institution-building for the Native women coming into law behind them. They have paved the way for future generations of Native women scholars through their unapologetically indigenous feminist interventions. This Essay seeks to name the othering and disappearing of Native women within U.S. settler colonialism, contextualize the invisibility of Native women in the academy, honor the interventions of the Indian law aunties, and advocate for a more equitable future where the labor is not theirs alone.
In nine treaties signed by Tribal Nations and the United States between 1867 and 1868, the United States promised redress to Native Americans for wrongs committed against them by “bad men among the whites.” Today, Native Americans are more likely to be killed by police than any other group, with much of this violence concentrated near the borders of Tribal Nations. Although claims brought under the “bad men” treaty clauses offer an avenue for combatting this epidemic of violence, courts have begun interpreting the clauses to apply only when “wrongs” occur within Tribal boundaries. This article argues that the territoriality of the bad men clauses should be read broadly to encompass violence committed outside of Tribal boundaries to address the disproportionate police violence against Native Americans that occurs there.
Turtle Talk 
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