White House

White House Announces 2014 Tribal Nations Conference

Kate Fort

The White House press release:

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 20, 2014

President Obama Announces 2014 White House Tribal Nations Conference

WASHINGTON, DC – On Wednesday, December 3, President Obama will host the 2014 White House Tribal Nations Conference at the Capital Hilton in Washington, DC. The conference will provide leaders from the 566 federally recognized tribes the opportunity to interact directly with the President and members of the White House Council on Native American Affairs. Each federally recognized tribe will be invited to send one representative to the conference. This will be the sixth White House Tribal Nations Conference for the Obama Administration, and continues to build upon the President’s commitment to strengthen the government-to-government relationship with Indian Country and to improve the lives of Native Americans. Additional details about the conference will be released at a later date.

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Office of Public Affairs – Indian Affairs
Office of the Assistant Secretary – Indian Affairs
U.S. Department of the Interior
1849 C St., N.W., MS-3658-MIB
Washington, D.C. 20240
Main Phone: 202-208-3710
Press Line: 202-219-4152
as-ia_opa@bia.gov

 

Two Year Anniversary of TLOA

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here is the announcement from the White House.

Native Lawyers Join With Other Groups at White House Briefing to Call for End to Judicial Vacancies

Kate Fort

From NARF:

Yesterday NARF joined with 28 other national organizations to call for an immediate end to the persistent and destructive obstruction of judicial nominees in the United States Senate.  The joint statement released by NARF and others reads as follows:
Regardless of where you live or what issues you care about, all Americans deserve a judiciary that works for them.  Today’s White House briefing with community leaders, legal experts and advocates for an effective judiciary is an unequivocal statement about that priority.
Recent cases demonstrate that no matter the issue – health care, immigration, marriage equality, workers’ rights, employment discrimination, environmental regulation, privacy, and ethics – the courts will continue to play an increasingly important role in the lives of hardworking Americans. But the courts can’t function without judges.  Unprecedented obstruction by a minority in the Senate has left the nation with 96 current and future vacancies on the federal courts, leading to a substantial backlog of cases that undermines our system of justice and makes it impossible for most Americans to have their case heard in a timely manner.
Additional coverage here:

Three prominent Oklahomans visited the White House and Capitol Hill on Monday to urge Senate confirmation of federal judicial nominees. The process of approving judges to the federal bench often slows in the months leading up to a presidential election as lawmakers from the party out of power sometimes stall action in hopes that they’ll win the White House and get a chance to replace the nominees with their own.

Former U.S. Attorney Dan Webber, former Seminole Nation Chief Enoch Kelly Haney and Jeremy Aliason, executive director of the National Native American Bar Association, went first to the White House to meet with Attorney General Eric Holder and White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler about the vacancy rate.

And here:

WASHINGTON, DC – Four Arizona community leaders, advocates and legal experts will travel to the nation’s capital on Monday, May 7, to meet with White House officials about the vacancy crisis in America’s federal courts. Nationwide, one in nine federal judgeships are vacant. Nearly one out of every ten federal judgeships remains vacant, and 250 million Americans live in a community with a courtroom vacancy.

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Local invitees to the White House meeting include:

  • Lou Hollingsworth, Partner, Hollingsworth Kelly
  • Stan Lubin, Member, American Constitution Society Judicial Nominations Task Force
  • Nick Enoch, Member, American Constitution Society Judicial Nominations Task Force
  • Patty Ferguson, National President, National Native American Bar Association

They will join approximately 150 individuals from 27 states in a day of discussions with White House staff. A deal between Senate Republicans and Democrats to allow judicial nominations to proceed in the Senate expires May 7th, and the advocates are urging the Senate to hold final up-or-down votes on all pending nominees.

White House Online Event at 1:30 Today about Tribal Claims

Kate Fort

From the White House blog:

White House Event on Tribal Trust Case Settlements
Posted by Charlie Galbraith on April 10, 2012 at 05:23 PM EDT

Tomorrow, Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 1:30pm EST, Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, Senior Advisor to the President Valerie Jarrett and other senior members of the Obama Administration will join tribal leaders to announce a significant step forward in the resolution of tribal trust cases pending against the United States.  Many of the cases include claims by the tribes that go back over 100 years.  Tomorrow’s event will recognize the good-faith cooperation and hard work of the Administration and 41 American Indian tribes in working out fair and honorable resolutions of the tribes’ claims.

The resolution of longstanding disputes is a key pillar of President Obama’s record for American Indians and Alaska Natives.  In 2010, the Administration settled the $760 million Keepseagle case brought by Native American farmers and ranchers who alleged discrimination by the Department of Agriculture (USDA) in its administration of loan programs.  President Obama also signed into law the Claims Resolution Act of 2010, which included the Cobell settlement agreement resolving a lawsuit over the management and accounting of over 300,000 individual American Indian trust accounts.  The Claims Resolution Act also included four water rights settlements, benefitting seven tribes in Arizona, Montana, and New Mexico.

Most recently, in October 2011, the Administration reached a $380 million settlement with the Osage Nation over the tribe’s long-standing lawsuit regarding the government’s management of trust funds and non-monetary trust resources.  That settlement featured, among other things, prospective management measures designed to further improve the trust relationship between the tribe and the United States.

Tomorrow’s event will mark another key step forward in the Administration’s efforts to resolve the disputes that have clouded the shared history of the United States and Indian tribes.  Please join us on Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 1:30pm on www.WhiteHouse.gov/live.

Charlie Galbraith is an Associate Director in the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.

 

 

NYTs on the White House Meeting with Indian Country

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the NYTs:

White House receptions of American Indian leaders have too often been patronizing historical footnotes. President Obama opened what we hope will be a more promising chapter on Thursday when he met with the leaders from all 564 federally recognized tribes. He vowed that there would be no more “going through the motions” and that his administration would finally face the severe economic and social problems that are the result of centuries of federal abuse and neglect.

This is no easy vow, but Mr. Obama has taken important first steps: naming American Indians to senior policy and health positions and earmarking $3 billion of the stimulus package to tribal programs. The president told the leaders that he was ordering his cabinet members to come up with plans on how to improve relations with the sovereign tribes.

Already this week, Interior Department officials told Congress that they would work to overhaul the often intractable, decades-consuming process by which tribes apply for federal recognition. Recognition is required for tribes interested in seeking revenue by opening a casino. But, more importantly, recognition is the key for tribes ravaged by poverty and joblessness — and there are far more of those — to qualify for federal aid programs.

The tribes gathered at an interesting point in history. The last four censuses show tribal populations booming, where extinction had been the experts’ prediction a century ago. Stirred by the Red Power movement of the civil rights era, more and more people have self-identified as American Indians, raising the census count to more than four million.

Not all are in recognized tribes, and there is no agreement, even among tribal leaders, on what factors define American Indian-ness. But the vitality is stirring and must be met by greater sensitivity, creativity and sustained attention from Washington.