New York Times

Obama vs. McCain and the Federal Judiciary

Matthew L.M. Fletcher9 Comments

The NYT’s editorial today on the impact of the Presidential election on the federal judiciary should be especially salient to tribal advocates. Sen. McCain promises to continue to stock the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court with arch-conservatives like Justices Scalia and Thomas.  Sen. Obama has been more circumspect in his comments about federal judicial appointments, but the NYT editors (and we agree) assume he will appoint moderate liberals like Justice Breyer to the Court.

There are plenty of American Indian voters who have decided to back Sen. McCain, but they should reconsider in light of the import of his promises relating to the federal judiciary.

Consider what eight years of the Bush II Administration did to tribal interests, and add that to the 12 years of the Reagan and Bush I Administrations. Federal Indian law professors now recognize in general that 1986 or so was a major turning point in the success of tribal interests before the Supreme Court. From 1959 to 1986, tribal interests prevailed about 55-60 percent of the time before the Court, when the majority of the Court were liberals and centrists. Since then, they have lost more than 75 percent of the time. Seven of the nine current Justices are Republican appointees.

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Bruce Duthu NYT Op/Ed on Tribal Justice

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the NYTs:

ONE in three American Indian women will be raped in their lifetimes, statistics gathered by the United States Department of Justice show. But the odds of the crimes against them ever being prosecuted are low, largely because of the complex jurisdictional rules that operate on Indian lands. Approximately 275 Indian tribes have their own court systems, but federal law forbids them to prosecute non-Indians. Cases involving non-Indian offenders must be referred to federal or state prosecutors, who often lack the time and resources to pursue them.

The situation is unfair to Indian victims of all crimes — burglary, arson, assault, etc. But the problem is greatest in the realm of sexual violence because rapes and other sexual assaults on American Indian women are overwhelmingly interracial. More than 80 percent of Indian victims identify their attacker as non-Indian. (Sexual violence against white and African-American women, in contrast, is primarily intraracial.) And American Indian women who live on tribal lands are more than twice as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted as other women in the United States, Justice Department statistics show.

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The Torture Memos and the Execution of Indians in the 19th Century

Matthew L.M. Fletcher3 Comments

More later on this as I parse through the memos, but it is now apparent that the Bush Administration (namely, to John Yoo) that modern American torture is justified by resort to 19th century American Indian law.

Check out this editorial from the NYTs.

UPDATE: Here is the torture memo, courtesy of the ACLU, and here is the relevant AG opinion mentioned in the NYTs editorial (“Modoc Military Prisoners“), cited on page 7 of the Yoo memorandum.

Literary Fraud: “Love and Consequences”

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

From the NYTs:

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

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NYTs Article on Native Village of Kevalina vs. Exxon Suit

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the NYTs:

SAN FRANCISCO — Lawyers for the Alaska Native coastal village of Kivalina, which is being forced to relocate because of flooding caused by the changing Arctic climate, filed suit in federal court here Tuesday arguing that 5 oil companies, 14 electric utilities and the country’s largest coal company were responsible for the village’s woes.

The suit is the latest effort to hold companies like BP America, Chevron, Peabody Energy, Duke Energy and the Southern Company responsible for the impact of global warming because they emit millions of tons of greenhouse gases, or, in the case of Peabody, mine and market carbon-laden coal that is burned by others. It accused the companies of creating a public nuisance.

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NYTs: “Running from Despair” — Profile of Wings of America

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the NYTs:

SANTA FE, N.M. — On a cold Saturday morning last month, 16-year-old Chantel Hunt ran across a highway onto a gravel road where the snow under her shoes packed into washboard ripples. She ran around a towering red rock butte, past two old mattresses dumped on the roadside, and into the shadow of a mesa she sometimes runs on top of.

Hunt, a high school junior and a resident of the Navajo Nation, was on a short training run for the national cross-country championships being held Saturday in San Diego. Her team, Wings of America, has risen to prominence with an unlikely collection of athletes. It is a group of American Indians from reservations around the country, and a Wings team has won a boys or a girls national title 20 times since first attending a championship meet in 1988.

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NYTs on Cobell Litigation

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the NYTs:

February 1, 2008
Editorial

The Verdict: It’s Broken

The case of the mismanaged American Indian trust funds is Dickensian both in length — now 11 years before the courts — and inequity. On Wednesday, Judge James Robertson of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Interior Department had “unreasonably delayed” its accounting for billions of dollars owed to American Indian landholders and that the agency “cannot remedy the breach.”

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NYTs Editorial on Indian Health Care Bill

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

From the NYTs:

Vetoing History’s Responsibility

President Bush’s threat to veto a bill intended to improve health care for the nation’s American Indians is both cruel and grossly unfair. Five years ago, the United States Commission on Civil Rights examined the government’s centuries-old treaty obligations for the welfare of Native Americans and found Washington spending 50 percent less per capita on their health care than is devoted to felons in prison and the poor on Medicaid.

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NYTs Feature on Indian Country Murder and Iraq War Vets

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the NYTs:

“This is really a tale of two places,” James Gregg’s lawyer said during his opening statement in 2005 in the federal courthouse in Pierre, S.D.: the Crow Creek Indian Reservation where the killing took place and “a very, very faraway” place, “a place called Iraq.”

By framing the case this way from the start, the lawyer, Timothy J. Rensch, made it clear that Mr. Gregg’s explanation for the “murder in Indian country,” as the charge read, would be inextricably bound to his year as a National Guardsman in Iraq.

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NYTs Editorial on Off-Reservation Gaming

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the NYTs:

Good Decision on Tribal Casinos

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne made exactly the right call when he recently denied permission to 11 Indian tribes around the country to acquire more land in order to build casinos.

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