Here is the article.
An excerpt:
BEULAH — Helen Tanner was only about 5 feet tall, but she is remembered as a pioneering giant in writing Great Lakes Indian history.
The noted ethnohistorian’s research and testimony proved crucial to a historic 1979 federal court ruling that upheld Michigan Indian treaty fishing rights.
Tanner died late Wednesday night at her home less than a month before her 95th birthday on July 5. A memorial service will be planned later.
The State Bar of Wisconsin will host a Mining Law Symposium CLE on Thursday, August 25, 2011 which in many ways is in response to the proposed mine to be situated in the Penokee-Gogebic Iron Range in northwest Wisconsin, very near the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Tribe Reservation, by Gogebic Taconite.
Here is information on the CLE:
Here is a Milwaukee Sentinel Journal article discussing Bad River Chairman Mike Wiggins’ concerns with the proposed mine:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/119739399.html
Here is recent article describing the mine from Northwoods Wilderness Recovery:
Here:
Yakama v. Holder Filed Second Amended Complaint.
Apparently, the FBI’s raid on the Yakama reservation included law enforcement units from local counties and, remarkably, from jurisdictions in Mississippi and Virginia.
Here is the news article, and an excerpt:
Taking the dams out is part of a more than $325 million restoration plan intended to bring back five runs of salmon to the river. More than three quarters of its watershed is within Olympic National Park, making it one of the best opportunities for restoration in the lower forty-eight.
The plan is for the river to be free-flowing within three years — after nearly 20 years of talking about it. President George H.W. Bush signed the Elwha Restoration Act in 1992. It took all that time to appropriate the money to pay for the takedown and broker the politics of the project.
Meanwhile, the cost ballooned to about three times original projections. Former U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, the Republican lawmaker who fought appropriating the money for years, won’t be celebrating Wednesday.
“It is something with which I disagreed, and I don’t wish to be reminded of it,” Gorton said last week at his Seattle law office.
But the shutdown is a step some wondered if they would ever witness. Adeline Smith, 93, one of the oldest members of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, said she remembered rescuing baby salmon stranded in pools when operation of the dams would ramp the river levels up and down.
“We felt sorry for them,” she said of the gasping smolts.
Robert Elofson, river restoration director for the tribe, watched as the turbines on Elwha Dam slowly wound down, finally going still. “I’ve got a few tears in my eyes,” he said in the sudden quiet. “The tribe always wanted the dams out of the river.”
In Canadian Forest Products Inc. v. Sam, the British Columbia Supreme Court provided a short term solution for two separate forestry/aboriginal title issues. Ultimately, aboriginal interests won the day, but the injunctions provided and denied by the court are almost certainly only paving the way for future litigation.
Peter Erlinder has posted a great paper, “State of Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, Ten Years On,” on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In State of Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, 526 U.S. 172 (1999) the Supreme Court unanimously held that, by guaranteeing Anishinabe (Chippewa) rights to hunt, fish and gather, U.S. treaty negotiators severed the right to use the land from formal title to the land in an 1837 (and 1854) Treaty. The Mille Lacs majority and dissent differed only as to whether Treaty-guaranteed usufructuary property rights had been abrogated by subsequent events. The majority held the usufructuary rights had not been abrogated.
Off-Reservation Anishinabe Usufructuary Property Rights in Northern Minnesota
With respect to Minnesota Territory, not ceded in 1837 and 1854 Treaties, two major questions remain after the Mille Lacs decision: (a) did the Anishinabe have treaty-guaranteed usufructuary rights outside the 1837 and 1854 ceded territory; and (b) if so, are treaty-guaranteed usufructuary rights outside the 1837 and 1854 ceded territory, are also valid today? This article answers these questions by elaborating Minnesota treaty history to include usufructuary property rights guaranteed in Treaties of 1795, 1825, 1826, as well as, a relatively unrecognized clause of the 1854 Treaty, all of which guarantee some form of usufructuary property rights outside the 1837 and 1854 ceded territory. The article concludes that these treaties, largely ignored by the courts until now, are likely to be sources of as yet unrecognized Anishinabe usufructuary property rights in the 21st Century.
Modern Usufructuary Rights and Natural Resource Co-Management
Further, because usufructuary property rights include “the right to modest living,” environmental protection to maintain the long-term value of these property rights will have significant long term off-reservation land-use.
Here is the article. An excerpt:
During a visit to Washington this week, the chairman of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and members of his delegation will go to the National Archives to view the original 1855 Treaty with the Yakama. It will be a poignant experience for the leader of the Yakama people who live along the Columbia River and the central plateau of Washington state.
The Treaty, which was signed at Camp Stevens, Walla-Walla Valley in Washington State on June 9, 1855, is at the heart of a lawsuit the nation filed in federal court at the end of April. The lawsuit states that the nation’s treaty rights and other laws were violated when a horde of dozens of law enforcement officers from local and federal agencies and two states on the other side of the country – without consultation or notification – invaded the Yakama reservation with their weapons drawn at the crack of dawn on a cold winter morning in February to serve a questionable arrest warrant on a Yakama businessman for alleged cigarette tax violations in another state.
The Yakama Treaty says the federal government set aside lands “for the exclusive use and benefit” of the Yakama Indians and promised not to allow “any white man, excepting those in the employment of the Indian Department” to live on the reservation. The Treaty further guarantees the Yakama people that U.S. citizens would not “enter upon” their lands.
One Indian law expert compared the federal government’s apparent lack of trust toward the Yakama Nation to its lack of trust in raiding bin Laden’s house without consultation with the Pakistani government.
The Washington Supreme Court soon will decide whether the state has jurisdiction over alleged cigarette trafficking crimes committed by tribal members on Quinault Reservation land. Here are the materials:
85067-4 – State v. Robert Comenout, Jr. and Robert Comenout, Sr.
Hearing Date – 06/30/2011
Here is the State’s response to the Sault Tribe’s motion to enjoin the state prosecution of its members for treaty fishing violations:
And an amicus brief supporting the state prosecution:
Turtle Talk 
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