by Robert T. Coulter*
Robert T. Coulter is Executive Director of the Indian Law Resource Center. He is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and has more than 30 years of experience in the field of Indian law.
It has been just a year since President Obama announced the Administration’s support for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and promised action to implement at least some of those rights. Across the country, tribal governments are seizing the Declaration and using it creatively to protect their lands and resources, and especially their rights to cultural and sacred sites.
For example, the Navajo Nation has used the Declaration in its efforts to protect the San Francisco Peaks, and the Seneca Nation has pointed out Article 37 (“Indigenous peoples have the right to the recognition, observance and enforcement of treaties”) in its efforts to resolve a 60-year occupation of Seneca territory by the New York State Thruway that violates the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua. Continue reading →
Meeting in Shawnee, Oklahoma for their 12th annual Family Reunion Festival, Citizen Potawatomi Nation members have retained Linda Capps for a new four-year term as the Nation’s Vice Chairman. CPN voters also filled four seats in the tribe’s 16-member legislature and filled out the ranks of the CPN’s judiciary.
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CPN voters retained CPN member Angela Riley, [UCLA law prof and Director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center], as a Supreme Court Justice and elevated her to the post of Chief Justice. She replaces G. William Rice, who has held the post since the mid-1980s. Robert Coulter, Robert Coffey, and James White were also retained on the Supreme Court.
Judge Phil Lujan, who helped establish the Citizen Potawatomi Nation court system in the mid-1980s and who has been a CPN District judge since the days of the Court of Indian Offenses, won retention as the Nation’s Chief District Court Judge.
Angela Riley, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and one of its appellate justices, and a tenured law professor at Southwestern Law School, will join the UCLA Law School faculty as a tenured professor. Professor Riley also will be Director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center.
This is outstanding news for Indian Country and American Indian studies!
1. Whether an Indian tribe can use Indians Claims Commission Act funds, appropriated by Congress and distributed to the tribe with a specific exemption from federal income tax, to pay federal income tax exempted salaries to elected officials the tribe is required to have under its tribal constitution.
2. Whether the imposition of a penalty by the Internal Revenue Service against the tribal chairman for sovereign legislative actions of the tribe improperly infringes on the tribe’s sovereign powers.
Turtle Talk 
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