Scholarship – Page 35

Ann Tweedy on the Impact of the McGirt Decision

September 11, 2020Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Ann Tweedy has posted “Has Federal Indian Law Finally Arrived at ‘The Far End of the Trail of Tears’?”, forthcoming in the Georgia State University Law Review, on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

This essay examines the United States Supreme Court’s July 9, 2020 decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma, which held that the historic boundaries of the Creek reservation remain intact, and argues that the decision likely signals a sea change in the course of federal Indian law of the magnitude of Obergefell v. Hodges in the LGBT rights arena. The essay shows how the opinion lays a very strong foundation for a much-needed return to traditional federal Indian law principles, respectful treatment of tribal governments as a third sovereign in the American system, and an understanding of fairness from the perspective of tribes and Native individuals. The essay concludes with the hope that Justice Gorsuch’s majority opinion will foster predictability in the wildly unstable area of disestablishment and diminishment jurisprudence, as well as in other facets of federal Indian law.

Stephanie Barclay & Michalyn Steele on Indian Sacred Sites

September 9, 2020September 10, 2020Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Stephanie H. Barclay & Michalyn Steele have posted “Rethinking Protections for Indigenous Sacred Sites,” forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review.

Here is the abstract:

Meaningful access to sacred sites is among the most important principles to the religious exercise of indigenous peoples, yet tribes have been repeatedly thwarted by the federal government in their efforts to vindicate this practice of their religion. The colonial, state, and federal governments of this Nation have been desecrating and destroying Native American sacred sites since before the Republic was formed. Unfortunately, the callous destruction of indigenous sacred sites is not just a troubling relic of the past. Rather, the threat to sacred sites and cultural resources continues today in the form of spoliation from development, as well as in the significant barriers to meaningful access indigenous peoples face.

Scholars concerned about government failure to protect indigenous sacred sites have generally agreed that the problem stems from the unique nature of indigenous spiritual traditions as being too distinct from non-indigenous religious traditions familiar to courts and legislators and therefore eluding protection afforded to other traditions. By contrast, this Article approaches the problem from an entirely different angle: we focus instead on the similarities between government coercion with respect to indigenous religious exercise and other non-indigenous religious practices. We illustrate how the debate about sacred sites unwittingly partakes of longstanding philosophical debates about the nature of coercion itself—a phenomenon that has previously gone unnoticed by scholars. This Article argues that whether or not one formally labels the government’s actions as “coercive,” the important question is whether the government is bringing to bear its sovereign power in a way that inhibits the important ideal of religious voluntarism—the ability of individuals to voluntarily practice their religious exercise consistent with their own free self-development. Indeed, this is precisely the sort of question courts ask when evaluating government burdens on non-indigenous religious exercise. The failure to ask this same question about voluntarism for indigenous religious practices has created a double standard, wherein the law recognizes a much more expansive notion of coercion for contexts impacting non-indigenous religious practices, and a much narrower conception of coercion, in the tradition of Robert Nozick, when it comes to indigenous sacred sites.

This egregious double standard in the law ought to be revisited. Doing so would have two important implications. First, when coercion is viewed clearly, tribal members and indigenous practitioners should be able to prove a prima facie case under statutes like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) much more easily. Second, this Article makes the novel claim that clearer understanding of the coercive control government exercises over sacred sites should animate a strong obligation under the government’s trust responsibility and plenary power doctrine to provide more—rather than less—robust protection of indigenous sacred sites.

Highly recommended!!!

Elizabeth Reese on the Exclusion of Tribal Law from “American Law”

September 9, 2020Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Elizabeth Reese has posted “The Other American Law,” forthcoming from the Stanford Law Review, on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

American legal scholarship focuses, almost exclusively, on state and federal law. However, there are an additional 574 federally recognized tribal governments within the United States whose laws are largely ignored. This article brings to the fore the exclusion of tribal governments and their laws from our mainstream conception of “American law” and identifies this exclusion as both an inconsistent omission and a missed opportunity. Tribal law should be no less “American law” than federal and state law. Tribal law is also made, enforced, and followed by American citizens, and tribal governments have a distinct place as a sub-sovereign within the American system of overlapping sovereigns. Nor is it clearly less important, as tribes govern millions of Americans and as much land as California. And yet, tribal law is excluded from our shared conception of “American law”—and thereby our research projects, classrooms, and even conversations. This exclusion perpetuates the “othering” of tribal law and governments and harmful present day misunderstandings or invisibilities for both Indian people and their governments. Tribal governments were previously delegitimized and described as “lawless” in order to legitimize legal theories of conquest. But tribal law is real, and it is time to end its marginalization. Moreover, tribal law is vast, varied, and can be innovative. As demonstrated by the three examples in this piece, tribal governments struggle with the same kinds of problems that the other American sovereigns face, and their similarities, differences, successes, failures, innovations, etc. can inform other American sovereign’s work or public law questions more broadly. Omitting tribal law from American legal scholarship is not only a troubling inconsistency, it is a missed opportunity to tap a potentially valuable resource—a disservice to the search for good government ideas. Tribal law belongs in the mainstream study of American law and legal systems. This article places it there.

Highly recommended!

Fletcher on Policing and Anishinaabe Political Philosophy

September 3, 2020Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Fletcher’s new working paper is up on SSRN: “Erasing the Thin Blue Line: An Indigenous Proposal.”

Here is the abstract:

The article was inspired by the statements of support for the Black Lives Matter movement from state supreme courts like those in Washington and California, and elsewhere. I am a tribal appellate judge for several tribes here in Michigan, and I serve on the Michigan Tribal-State-Judicial Forum. In part, this article is addressed to the state judges who have spoken out on BLM and the judges on the Michigan forum who speak out in favor of Indian children. The novel claim of the article is that the Supreme Court long has used what I term “social contract talk” to demean, dehumanize, and marginalize POC and lower income persons most likely to be subjected to police interventions. This “social contract talk” is not the law, but enables judges to grant police (and prosecutors, though I don’t address them directly) immense discretion to target POC and lower income persons, and to immunize them from legal consequences. Weaponized “social contract talk” recalls the origin of the social contract in America, which enabled and encouraged slavery and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. I offer an alternative to social contract talk rooted in Anishinaabe political philosophy, which encourages inclusion, healing, and accountability. Many tribes have relatively little policing of their territories and a completely different mentality about criminal justice.

Dylan Hedden-Nicely & Monte Mills on Civil Jurisdiction Post-McGirt

August 29, 2020Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Dylan Hedden-Nicely & Monte Mills have published “The Civil Jurisdictional Landscape in Eastern Oklahoma Post McGirt v. Oklahoma” in the August 2020 edition of Natural Resources Law Insights (Rocky Mtn. Mineral Law. Found.).

American Indian Law Review New Issue — Vol. 44, No. 2

August 21, 2020Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here:

Current Issue: Volume 44, Number 2 (2020)

PDF

Front Pages

Elizabeth Reese on McGirt: “Welcome to the Maze: Race, Justice, and Jurisdiction in McGirt v. Oklahoma”

August 16, 2020Matthew L.M. Fletcher

In the University of Chicago Law Review Online, here. An excerpt from this outstanding essay:

The morning of July 9th, American Indian tribal citizens and non-Indian residents of eastern Oklahoma woke up and experienced a similar shock. The United States Supreme Court, in an opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, announced that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s reservation boundaries had never been disestablished.

The Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma implies, though does not explicitly hold, that eastern Oklahoma is, was, and always had been within the undiminished boundaries of the Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Nation’s reservations. The ruling was shocking and confusing for both groups of American citizens because they were experiencing a bit of what “justice” is like for the other group for the very first time.

That Thursday morning gave American Indian people a glimpse of what it must be like not to be “the Indians.” On that day, American Indians weren’t reduced to a metaphorical Red Sea, always parting to make way for White Americans’ interests. Instead, they were able to win despite those interests and without the indignities that have become the norm in the Supreme Court’s Indian law opinions.

That same morning gave the non-Indians of eastern Oklahoma a glimpse of part of the Indian experience: waking up to helpless confusion about what the United States government has just done to your lands and rights, followed by the even greater problem of trying to understand the confusing jurisdictional rules that have been the status quo in Indian Country for a long time.

At times like this I think that Lady Justice must have a sense of humor.

Environmental Law Review Symposium on 50th Anny of Sohappy/Belloni Decision

July 21, 2020Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here:

The Belloni Decision: A Foundation for the Northwest Fisheries Cases, the National Tribal Sovereignty Movement, and an Understanding of the Rule of Law

Charles Wilkinson

Judge Belloni’s decision in United States v. Oregon, handed down a half-century ago, has been given short shrift by lawyers, historians, and other commentators on the modern revival of Indian treaty fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest. The overwhelming amount of attention has been given to Judge Boldt’s subsequent decision in United States v. Washington and the Passenger Vessel ruling by the Supreme Court affirming Judge Boldt. I’m one who has been guilty of that.

We now can see that United States v. Oregon was the breakthrough. In those early days, Judge Belloni showed deep understanding of the two key bodies of law and policy—classic Indian Law dating back to John Marshall and the new ideas just beginning to remake public wildlife law and policy. We can fairly doubt that Judge Boldt and the Supreme Court would have ruled as they did if Judge Belloni had not written his profoundly insightful and brave opinion. Further, the Belloni decision reached beyond Indian treaty rights per se, energizing the emerging broad and fundamental movement for Indian tribal sovereignty that has revitalized Indian Country. Even more broadly, the decision led the way in the long and difficult chain of events that finally allowed the beauty of the rule of law to rise above the contentious and seemingly insolvable disputes over Indian fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest.

The Belloni Decision and its Legacy: United States v. Oregon and its Far-Reaching Effects After a Half-Century

Michael C. Blumm. & Cari Baermann

Fifty years ago, Judge Robert Belloni handed down a historic treaty fishing rights case in Sohappy v. Smith, later consolidated into United States v. Oregon, which remains among the longest running federal district court cases in history. Judge Belloni ruled that the state violated Columbia River tribes’ treaty rights by failing to ensure “a fair share” to tribal harvesters and called upon the state to give separate consideration to the tribal fishery and make it a management priority co-equal with its goals for non-treaty commercial and recreational fisheries. This result was premised on Belloni’s recognition of the inherent biases in state regulation, despite a lack of facial discrimination.

The decision was remarkable because only a year before, in Puyallup Tribe v. Department of Game, the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to accord considerable deference to state regulation of tribal harvests (which it would soon clarify and circumscribe). Instead of deference, the Belloni decision reinstated burdens on state regulation that the Supreme Court had imposed a quarter-century earlier, in Tulee v. Washington, but seemed to ignore in its Puyallup decision. The directive for separate management was prescient because otherwise, tribal harvests would remain overwhelmed by more numerous and politically powerful commercial and recreational fishers.

Judge Belloni eventually grew tired of resolving numerous conflicts over state regulation of the tribal fishery, calling for the establishment of a comprehensive plan, agreed to by both the state and the tribes, to manage Columbia Basin fish harvests. Eventually, such a plan would be negotiated, implemented, and amended over the years. Today, the Columbia River Comprehensive Management Plan is still in effect a half-century after the Belloni decision, although the district court’s oversight role is now somewhat precariously perched due to statements by Belloni’s latest successor. Nonetheless, the plan remains the longest standing example of tribal–state co-management in history and a model for other co-management efforts. The Belloni decision was the first judicial recognition of the importance of the tribal sovereignty in regulating reserved rights resources. This Article examines the origins, effects, and legacy of the Belloni decision over the last half-century.

Beyond the Belloni Decision: Sohappy v. Smith and the Modern Era of Tribal Treaty Rights

Monte Mills

Indian tribes and their members are leading a revived political, legal, and social movement to protect the nation’s natural resources. In doing so, tribes and their allies employ many effective strategies but core to the movement are the historic promises made to tribes by the United States through treaties. Tribes are asserting treaty-protected rights, which the United States Constitution upholds as the supreme law of the land, to defend the resources on which they and their ancestors have relied for generations. Those claims have resulted in significant legal victories, igniting a broader movement in favor of tribal sovereignty and securing a prominent and perpetual tribal presence in the movement and on the ground.

Given the strength of this modern movement and the centrality of treaty rights to its success, it is hard to believe that, just two generations ago, those rights faced seemingly existential threats. Notwithstanding bedrock Supreme Court precedent from the first half of the 1900s recognizing the supremacy of Indian treaties, tribal members exercising the rights those treaties guaranteed were under attack in the Pacific Northwest and the Great Lakes, with armies of state wildlife rangers and law enforcement arresting tribal members for not following state laws and regulations. Then, in 1968, the Supreme Court cut against its earlier solicitude for tribal treaty rights by opening the door for broad state power to establish laws, rules, and regulations that could govern tribal members engaged in treaty-reserved activities. Facing escalating harassment from state authorities, the Court’s endorsement of state priorities seemed to leave little room for the meaningful exercise of treaty rights as the tribes and tribal members themselves saw fit.

But, with his 1969 decision in Sohappy v. Smith, Judge Robert Belloni began to reverse the course of that time and, in doing so, opened the modern era of tribal sovereignty over natural resources. Judge Belloni’s approach to reaching that momentous decision recognized the permanence and supremacy of tribal treaties while also accounting for the ongoing exercise of state sovereignty. Rather than approach the balance of those two interests as a zero-sum proposition, however, Judge Belloni sought and provided practical guidance pursuant to which states and tribes could work together to ensure their continued coexistence. While that coexistence would demand higher burdens and more limitations on the state’s exercise of authority, Judge Belloni also had the foresight to provide a judicial forum for resolving conflicts over those burdens and limitations and urged the parties to reach cooperative agreements beyond the courtroom doors. Judge Belloni’s approach and the Sohappy decision laid the foundation for state and federal courts struggling to balance state authority and tribal treaty rights. This Article traces the legacy of the Sohappy decision across litigation in the Great Lakes region, where members of the Chippewa Tribes fought to continue their time-honored and treaty-reserved practices, various states sought to regulate those activities, and judges relied on Judge Belloni’s wisdom and insight to reach sustainable solutions.

Cultural Linguistics and Treaty Language: A Modernized Approach to Interpreting Treaty Language to Capture the Tribe’s Understanding

Sammy Matsaw, Dylan Hedden-Nicely, & Barbara Cosens

Language is a reflection of a thought world. A worldview that has been shaped by place to describe one’s identity in space and time does not equate to species relatedness as a default to know one another. In the legal system of the United States, there is acknowledgement of treaties in colonized lands that there are rights granted from the tribes and not to them, and those rights are land-based. Yet, the Indigenous voice is dead before arrival, before it enters the room of science, justice, academe, or otherwise. The exclusion of Indigenous peoples at the table of knowledge and from the power to make decisions within their homelands has proven a detriment to the land, waterways, flora and fauna, and human beings. Nowhere would tribal peoples have agreed to our own destruction, it is and has been a forced hand. This Article explores the changing interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court canon to construe treaties with Native American tribes as the tribe would have understood them, and why mere translation of Native language to English fails to capture a Native understanding. Through the juxtaposition of western legal analysis and the powerful voice of a Native scientist, this Article illustrates how difficult and yet how necessary it will be to bridge that divide if this powerful western nation is to fulfill its sacred promises to Native people. As a contribution to the Issue on the fiftieth anniversary of United States v. Oregon, this Article looks to the future of federal jurisprudence on the interpretation of treaties with American Indians and envisions one in which reconciliation through an understanding of different worldviews is possible.

How Much Evidence Should We Need to Protect Cultural Sites and Treaty Rights?

Jeffrey B. Litwak

Too often, the administrative and judicial systems require tribes to reveal too much about their cultural site and treaty rights before agencies and courts are willing or “able” to protect them. Tribes must make a difficult decision whether to reveal information about their cultural site and treaty rights practices, which, when made public, leads to damage, vandalism, and personal safety concerns. To prevent these effects, agencies and courts can, and should, consider these concerns in determining how much detail is needed to constitute “substantial evidence.” This Article gives examples from the practice of the Columbia River Gorge Commission, a regional land use planning agency created by an interstate compact between Oregon and Washington, which, by its compact, must engage with the four Columbia River Treaty Tribes and protect cultural resources and treaty rights.