Here.
Native America Calling Show on Post-McGirt Oklahoma Tuesday January 4
Here.
Former Navajo Nation President Peterson Zah Receives Grand Canyon Trust Lifetime Achievement Award
From the presser — Flagstaff, AZ – On Tuesday, January 11, 2022, at 3:00 pm MST, former Navajo Nation Chairman and first President of the Navajo Nation, Peterson Zah, will receive the 2021 Grand Canyon Trust Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes exceptional individuals who have accomplished significant conservation for the Grand Canyon and the Colorado Plateau.
Zah will be honored for his life’s work, including significant contributions to conservation of the environment and advancing tribal sovereignty.
During his long career, Zah led national tribal efforts in Congress to strengthen many federal environmental laws. In his time as president and chairman, Zah renegotiated mineral, coal, oil, and gas leases with major energy companies to better benefit the Navajo people, and created permanent trust funds, now valued at several billion dollars, dedicated to culture, language, education, health, governance, infrastructure, and land restoration.
The award will be presented during a small private ceremony. Members of the public can attend the ceremony virtually at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83197071336 or by phone at 1 (602) 753-0140 using webinar ID: 831 9707 1336.
“Peterson Zah’s extraordinary leadership made clear that within the ambiguity of modernism and tradition, righteousness and tremendous influence could come from homegrown legitimacy and purpose,” said Grand Canyon Trust Board Chair Jim Enote.
“Peterson has truly been a giant in this region, and well beyond. We are so honored to recognize Peterson, his achievements, and his profoundly positive impacts on this world,” said Grand Canyon Trust Executive Director Ethan Aumack.
Past recipients of the Grand Canyon Trust Lifetime Achievement Award include former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt (2003), former Arizona Congressman and Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall (2004), and the writer Terry Tempest Williams (2010). The award, established in 2003, has been given only six other times; Zah will be the seventh recipient.
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Founded in 1985, the Grand Canyon Trust is a non-profit conservation organization dedicated to safeguarding the wonders of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado Plateau, while supporting the rights of its Native peoples.
Recent American Indian Legal Scholarship
It’s None of Your Business: State Regulation of Tribal Businesses Undermines Sovereignty and Justice
New York University Journal of Law and Business, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2021; Sam Carter and Robin Rotman
Native American Representation: What the Future Holds
Idaho Law Review, Vol. 56, 2020; Emily Rong Zhang
Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribes: Recommendations for Operational, Administrative, Policy, and Regulatory Reform
University of Utah College of Law Research Paper No. 475; Bidtah Becker, Anne Castle, Heather Tanana, Ana Olaya, Jaime Garcia and Chelsea Colwyn
‘We Want Our Land Back’: Returning Land to First Peoples in the Land Return Era Using the Native Land Claims Commission to Reverse Centuries of Land Dispossession
Vol. 24 The Scholar: St. Mary’s Law Review on Race and Social Justice I (Forthcoming); William Y. Chin
Federal Statutes and Environmental Justice in the Navajo Nation: The Case of Fracking in the Greater Chaco Region
American Journal of Public Health; Mario AtencioMA, Hazel James-Tohe, Samuel Sage, David J. TsosieEdD, Ally BeasleyJD, MPH, Soni GrantPhD, MA, and Teresa SeamsterEdS, MS
Slaves, Indians, and Legal Formalism in 19th Century America
Walker Lake and the Public Trust in Nevada’s Waters
Virginia Environmental Law Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2022; Michael C. Blumm and Michael Benjamin Smith
Synching Science and Policy to Address Climate Change in Tribal Communities
Natural Resources & Environment (2021 Forthcoming), University of Utah College of Law Research Paper No. 467; Heather Tanana and John Ruple
Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribes in the Colorado River Basin
University of Utah College of Law Research Paper No. 466; Heather Tanana, Jaime Garcia, Ana Olaya, Chelsea Colwyn, Hanna Larsen, Ryan Williams and Jonathan King
Liz Reese and Abby Abinanti on Tribal Criminal Laws
From Stanford, here is “Imagining Justice: American Indian Tribal Laws of Criminal Responsibility.”
Oklahoma Appellate Court Decides Kiowa/Comanche/Apache Reservation Disestablished
Here are the materials in Martinez v. State (Okla. Ct. Crim. App.):
Ninth Circuit Decides Grondal v. United States [20-35694]
Here.
An excerpt:
The panel affirmed the district court’s grant of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ motion for summary judgment and ejectment order in an action brought by a group of recreational vehicle owners seeking to retain their rights to remain on a lakeside RV park located on American Indian land held in trust by the Bureau.
Briefs here.
Wyoming Appellate Court Orders Hearing in Herrera Matter; State Appeals to State SCT
Here is the opinion in Herrera v. State of Wyoming:
State SCT cert stage briefs:
ResponseObjection – Petition for review
Prior post here.
Fletcher Wisconsin Law Review Symposium Paper on the Indian Law Restatement
Here is “Restatement as Aadizookaan,” forthcoming in the Wisconsin Law Review. The abstract:
The goal of this essay for the Wisconsin Law Review’s symposium on the Restatement of the Law of American Indians is to develop a framework on the durability of this restatement. The aadizookaanag are unusually durable in terms of their transmission of underlying, foundational lessons, but the stories change all the time. The earth diver story explores and describes the critically important connection between the Anishinaabeg and the creatures of Anishinaabewaki, but only a very broad level of generality. How the Anishinaabe tribal government in the 21st century translates those principles into modern decision making requires new analysis, new stories. Additionally, old aadizookaanag may fade into irrelevance, even disrepute, as times and conditions change.
Law is the same. Restatements are intended to be durable and persuasive, supported by the great weight of authority, but not permanent. There are provisions in the Indian law restatement I believe are truly timeless, while the law restated in some sections is likely to change a great deal over the next few decades. I choose four sections in the restatement and match them with one of the four directions sacred to the Anishinaabeg. The youngest direction, Waabanong, the east, is the most likely to change. The next youngest, Zhaawanong, the south, is older, but still subject to change. Niingaabii’anong, the west, is still older, wiser, less likely to change, but also very dark in its philosophies. Kiiwedinong, the north, is the oldest, wisest, and most durable, yet distant. A restatement section includes black letter law, law that is well settled and indisputable. The reporters’ notes that accompany the black letter law constitute the legal support for that statement of law. The stronger the legal support, more durable the black letter.
In the east, I choose one of the plainest, easiest to restate principles of federal Indian law, the bar on tribal criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians. In the south, I choose the law interpreting the federal waivers of immunity allowing tribes to sue to the United States for money damages. In the west, I choose the darkest, yet perhaps the most foundational principles, the plenary authority of Congress in Indian affairs. For the north, I choose tribal powers, the oldest and most durable of all of the principles in the restatement.
New Scholarship Shows Tribes with Gaming Operations are 30% More Likely to Disenroll Members
Anna Malinovskaya has posted “Understanding the Native American Tribal ‘Disenrollment Epidemic’: An IV Approach” on SSRN.
Here is the abstract:
Recently, over 80 Native American tribes have banned or disenrolled members of their tribes or denied citizenship to eligible individuals. This phenomenon has received media attention nationwide, and even the term the “disenrollment epidemic” was coined. Many speculate that at least some of it is driven by political struggles over multi-million dollar revenues of tribal casinos, which are sometimes distributed in per capita payments to all tribal members. In this paper, we test whether gaming has been driving disenrollments, and since a tribe’s involvement in gaming might be endogenous, we employ an instrumental variable approach. In particular, we use machine learning to select an optimal subset of instruments for a Native American tribe operating a casino from the set of potential instruments all plausibly meeting the exclusion restriction and associated with the geographical characteristics of reservations, such as their proximity to an MSA, an interstate highway, or a border of a neighboring state with no brick and mortar casinos. We find that a tribe’s involvement in gaming leads to a large and statistically significant increase in the probability of the tribe experiencing a disenrollment episode.
An excerpt:
This paper sought to understand if tribes’ involvement in the gaming industry, particularly wealth from per capita distribution of gaming revenues made possible by this involvement, has been the primary factor driving disenrollments and other types of dismemberment episodes. Both gaming and per capita distributions of gaming revenues are likely to be endogenous. Although we did not find an instrument for per capita distributions, we identified a set of instruments for gaming, and used them to understand, albeit indirectly, whether gaming has been driving disenrollments (the direct approach would be instrumenting for per capita distributions rather than gaming). Although this approach has its limitations
(as discussed in the Empirical Strategy section, it represents, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to identify a causal link between gaming and dismemberment in Indian tribes. Additionally, the consistency of results across our OLS and IV estimates, as well as across several sub-samples, is encouraging.
This research could be strengthened by instrumenting for per capita distribution of gaming revenues directly, though finding an appropriate instrument might be challenging. It could also be strengthened by finding instruments that would pass the Weak Instruments test for the full sample (327 tribes) that is likely to produce less biased IV estimates, or by using a different quasi-experimental empirical approach that would overcome the limitations associated with IVs when the sample is relatively small.
Turtle Talk 
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