Torey Dolan – Turtle Talk

Torey Dolan has published “The Indian Law Aunties” in the UMKC Law Review.

An excerpt:

American Indian women in the legal academy have stepped in to fight this persistent othering and invisibility in the law: through service, scholarship, and tenacious advocacy. In doing so, they have created Indigenous feminist spaces
whereby Native people can resist intellectual and social assimilation to varying degrees. Sarah Deer (Muscogee Nation) argued prophetically in 2019, “to cultivate future feminist interventions in Indian law, I contend we must do more to recruit and support Native women law students, and, ultimately, more Native women law professors.” In Native communities, “auntie” is a term of endearment for Indigenous women, often women who take positions of leadership: cultural, social, professional, or otherwise. The term encompasses blood relatives but also extends beyond them to accommodate expansive Indigenous philosophies of kinship and community care. As Laurel Goodluck (Tsimshian Tribe) describes her children’s book “Fierce Aunties,” aunties come in a variety of shapes, sizes, experiences, and backgrounds, but what these fierce aunties share is “[they] see you, they know you, and they love all of you, always.” Aunties are who you go to for guidance, advice, support, and courage. Native women entering the legal academy today are heirs to a generation of Native aunties who have toiled to build communities and infrastructures to support Native students and Indian law education. I call them the “Indian law aunties.” Native women in the legal academy (the “Indian law aunties”) resist invisibility through labor, advocacy, and institution-building for the Native women coming into law behind them. They have paved the way for future generations of Native women scholars through their unapologetically indigenous feminist interventions. This Essay seeks to name the othering and disappearing of Native women within U.S. settler colonialism, contextualize the invisibility of Native women in the academy, honor the interventions of the Indian law aunties, and advocate for a more equitable future where the labor is not theirs alone.