Link to announcement here.
Link to registration here.
This year’s competition is March 5-6 at Michigan State College of Law.
Scholarship
University of Arizona’s 4th Annual Tribal Lands Conference Coming January 25-26
Fall 2015 Publication of Seattle University’s American Indian Law Journal
Contents
New Article by Lorinda Riley on the Role of Politics in Federal Recognition
Lorinda Riley has published “When a Tribal Entity Becomes a Nation: The Role of Politics in the Shifting Federal Recognition Regulations,” in the American Indian Law Review.
Here is a description excerpted from the article’s introduction:
This article explores how each presidential administration has both shaped and bent the federal recognition regulations to fulfill its political priorities. By merging a quantitative analysis of each administration’s federal recognition record and the political realities that each administration faced, this study provides a rare inquiry into the political nature of the recognition process. First, this article examines the regulatory history of federal recognition, including a detailed discussion of various versions of the regulation and accompanying guidance published by the Department of the Interior (DOI). Then the article provides an overview of how politics play into the regulatory process and the implementation of regulation. Finally, the article re-visits each administration’s actions related to federal recognition, and considers how each administration has utilized these regulations to serve its own political priorities.
Indigenous Summer Intensive
This May, the University of Victoria Law School is running a month-long Summer Intensive in Indigenous Law and Comparative Indigenous Legal Issues. Both Val Napoleon and John Borrows are teaching.
They accept other law professors, for-credit students, as well as students/lawyers who may want to audit the courses.
There are different application deadlines for credit vs. non-credit students. Here is the information:
http://www.uvic.ca/law/about/indigenous/indigenoussummerintensive.php
Here is an example of work from the Indigenous Law Research Unit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uNgq7raxk4
Please feel free to write Val Napoleon, John Borrows, or Janet Person, the admissions officer, if you have any questions (1-250-721-8155).
Latest Issue of The First Peoples Child & Family Review
Table of Contents here.
This issue includes Finding their way home: The reunification of First Nations adoptees by Ashley L. Landers, Sharon M. Danes, and Sandy White Hawk.
New Carla Fredericks Scholarship on Tribal Energy
Carla Fredericks has posted “Plenary Energy,” forthcoming in the West Virginia Law Review, on SSRN.
Here is the abstract:
An incompatible relationship exists between the federal trust responsibility over Indian tribes and tribal sovereignty, the conflicting nature of which has been exacerbated by numerous judicial confirmations of the unbridled congressional plenary power over all tribal affairs. Nowhere is there more conflict between the trust responsibility and sovereignty than within the context of mineral resource development on tribal lands. The evolution of the regulatory framework of Indian mineral development can be viewed as a continuum, with maximum trust obligation and minimum tribal sovereignty on one extreme, and an inversion of these two variables on the other. There currently exists pending legislation that would amend the 2005 Energy Policy Act in a manner that would allow tribes greater autonomy in developing their mineral resources without necessarily compromising the trust relationship. But, as this article suggests in using the Keystone XL Pipeline as a case study, tribes should not rely on Congress to act in the interest of tribal sovereignty unless they can attach this interest to a strong political impetus. Invoking both the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People and Convention No. 169 of the International Labour Organization, this article contends that attaining a understanding of American Indian rights as fundamental through an international human rights framework can help untangle the web of conflicting doctrines that very much defines American Indian law today, opening the door to a paradigm shift in the domestic relationship between tribes and the federal government that would allow tribes to attain economic self-sufficiency through their own assets.
Save the Date: 4th Annual Tribal Lands Conference
Link to announcement here.
Registration open for the University of Arizona College of Law’s 2-day conference in January.
Save the Date: N. Scott Momaday at U-M
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.
New Scholarship on the Cherokee Freedmen Controversy
Lolita Buckner Inniss has published “Cherokee Freedmen and the Color of Belonging” in the Columbia Journal of Race and Law. PDF
The abstract:
This Article addresses the Cherokee Nation and its historic conflict with the descendants of its former black slaves, designated Cherokee Freedmen. This Article specifically addresses how historic discussions of black, red, and white skin colors, designating the African-ancestored, aboriginal (Native American), and European ancestored people of the United States, have helped to shape the contours of color-based national belonging among the Cherokee. The Cherokee past practice of black slavery and the past and continuing use of skin color-coded belonging not only undermines the coherence of Cherokee sovereignty, identity, and belonging but also problematizes the notion of an explicitly aboriginal way of life by bridging red and white cultural difference over a point of legal and ethical contention: black inequality.
Turtle Talk 
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