Indian Country Today

Report on PL 280 Published

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From Indian Country Today:

pl280_study

LOS ANGELES – When attorney Carole Goldberg was asked by a law professor at Stanford Law School in 1970 to research Public Law 280 for a book he was writing, she produced a 100-page paper.

The subject intrigued her, she told Indian Country Today.

Now, 38 years and dozens of articles later, Goldberg is an acknowledged expert on P.L. 280 and, with her University of California – Los Angeles colleague Duane Champagne, recently completed a 568-page report called ”Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice under Public Law 280.”

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David Archuleta Runs for the Democratic Nod in Senate Primary

Kate Fort

No, not that David Archuleta, though it takes some investigating among all of the American Idol flotsam to find news about this David Archuleta, a Shoshone-Bannock tribal citizen who is running for the Democratic nomination in the Idaho Senate race.

FORT HALL, Idaho – David J. Archuleta, Shoshone-Bannock, has entered the race for the U.S. Senate. He is one of two Democrats in Idaho’s May 27 primaries.

Archuleta is a lifelong resident of Idaho, with the exception of a two-year stint with the Comanche Nation as its general manager for gaming. He has an extensive background in both media and law work, having started in radio when he was 16 and returned to the Shoshone-Bannock reservation in his early 20s as a public relations officer. He also worked as news director for a radio station in Chubbuck and later joined the staff of the Sho-Ban News as a reporter, winning the Overall Excellence award for hard news reporting from the Native American Journalists Association. That was followed by being a correspondent for National Native News.

His career switched to law when he began working as a tribal court advocate. Archuleta became chief advocate and a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Bar Association. He served as the tribe’s chief prosecutor from 1998 – 2000 and, later, as associate tribal judge. He now works in private practice. During those years, he also worked in a program that administers low-income home heating assistance.

Indian Country Today, May 5, 2008

ICT Editorial on Fee to Trust Statute

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

From ICT:

The federal government’s recent actions involving its authority to make decisions on acquiring land in trust for tribal gaming purposes may inadvertently threaten the authority and duty of the secretary of the Interior Department to take land into trust for Indian tribes.

On April 29, the D.C. Circuit decided an innocuous case involving the secretary of Interior’s decision to take land into trust for the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians (also known as the Gun Lake Band). It was the third such opinion in recent years involving Michigan Potawatomi Indian tribes, each brought by well-funded citizens groups opposing Indian gaming. The suits were mere harassment suits, intended to delay rather than prevent the opening of the Potawatomi gaming operations. Each of the suits brought similar claims.

Of import, one claim was that Section 5 of the Indian Reorganization Act, the statute that authorizes the secretary to take land into trust for Indian tribes, was an unconstitutional delegation of congressional authority. The first two D.C. Circuit panel decisions (2006 and 2007), involving the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi Indians, rejected the constitutional challenge to Section 5 without much discussion or dissent. In fact, since 1995, at least three other federal appellate circuits have rejected the same kind of challenge to the statute, so this is unsurprising.

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Nokomis Learning Center Article in ICT

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From ICT:

Nokomis Learning Center educates community

OKEMOS, Mich. – Nokomis Learning Center, an American Indian cultural learning center in Okemos, provides many educational programs, exhibitions and events throughout the year.

The center estimates about 30 to 40 guests attend the center each day, with the number skyrocketing during school tours and special events.

”It really varies,” said Maria Raviele. ”A lot of school groups come in October and November. It picks up again in April and May when it’s warmer,” said the graduate student, who lives in Lansing and attends nearby Michigan State University.

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ICT: Saginaw Chippewa vs. the Unions

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From ICT:

MOUNT PLEASANT, Mich. – In an effort to ward off unionization efforts under the federal National Labor Relations Act, some tribes have adopted labor laws that allow employees to organize under tribal law. The Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe has taken a different approach.

”The position of this tribe is that the National Labor Relations Act does not apply to Indian tribes and the National Labor Relations Board does not have jurisdiction, and, that being the case, we don’t believe we have to adopt an ordinance that allows union organizing to occur. The ordinance the tribe adopted prohibits union organizing,” said Saginaw Chippewa attorney Sean Reed.

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Fletcher Op/Ed on the Off-Reservation Market

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From Indian Country Today:

Tribes’ economic plans stifled by policy

© Indian Country Today February 01, 2008. All Rights Reserved

Posted: February 01, 2008 by: Matthew L.M. Fletcher

The region where the city of Detroit now rests used to be, centuries ago, a major trading market for the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples and others. A permanent community of Indian people from all around lived in the vicinity and thrived off of the marketplace, while most Indians who traded there would travel to the market periodically from their homelands. There are places like this all over North America, such as Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.

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ICT Editorial on Cert Pool Memos & Indian Law

Matthew L.M. Fletcher2 Comments

You can read my newest Indian Country Today editorial here or here.

Here’s the text:

Each year, the U.S. Supreme Court chooses which appeals it wishes to decide. In most years, the court decides to hear fewer than 80 cases out of several thousand appeals. These usually include cases in which there is a split of authority in lower courts (often called a ”circuit split,” referencing the 13 federal circuit courts of appeals), cases in which a lower court has committed a gross error or cases in which there is a critical constitutional issue at stake. Cases in which there is no split, cases that will affect only a few people, cases involving simple correction of a minor lower court error or cases involving an unimportant issue are unlikely to be heard by the court.

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Inland Agreement Photos

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

 From Indian Country Today:

  Click to Enlarge  
   
     

Photos by Theresa Keshick — Pictured are the signatories of the commemorative signing of the 2007 Inland Consent Decree between five tribes – Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, Bay Mills Indian Community, Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians – and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. government Oct. 25. More than 100 people were present to witness the signing. (Below) Some of the signatories included Alice King Yellowbank, member of the Little Traverse Bay Bands Tribal Council; Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians Chairman Frank Ettawageshik; and Albert Colby Jr., tribal administrator of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians.

Indian Country Faces and Places welcomes your submissions. Send your high resolution photographs and a short description to photo@indiancounty.com and place ”Faces and Places” in the subject line.

Supreme Court & Indian Law

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

The Supreme Court issued its first order of the October 2007 Term last week — containing no Indian law grants, as I blogged elsewhere.

Today, the Court issued an order listing cert. denials, including Catawba Indian Tribe v. South Carolina (No. 07-69), Gros Ventre Tribe v. United States (06-1672), and Yakama v. Colville (No. 06-1588).

So what does this mean? By itself, I suppose it means nothing. But the Catawba and Gros Ventre cases were cases in which the tribal interests were petitioning (and the other case was an intertribal conflict) against a state and the federal government, respectively. A Court hostile to tribal interests would leave those cases alone.

With this round of cert. denials, keep in mind that the last time the S. Ct. granted cert. in an Indian law case was Wagnon v. Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation — and two “Westerners,” Rehnquist, C.J. and O’Connor, J., were still Members of the Court. Since then, the Court has denied cert. in something like 60 straight Indian law cases.

For background on my theory about how it matters that “Westerners” used to sit on the Supreme Court in the context of cert. petitions, see my editorial in Indian Country Today.

Of course, the editorial has an incorrect statement (my own fault) — for a few years in the early 1990s, there were four Westerners on the Court — Rehnquist, O’Connor, White, Kennedy.