inherent sovereignty

Blood Quantum and Sovereignty

Producer
Native Governance Center
Year

"Blood Quantum and Sovereignty" is a beginner-level conversation focused on why blood quantum is controversial, as well as how it came to be used as an enrollment and citizenship criteria for Native nations. Produced and recorded by Native Governance Center on March 30, 2022.

Featuring: Wayne Ducheneaux II, Megan Hill, Dr. Elizabeth Rule, Dr. Jill Doerfler, Gabe Galanda

Resource Type
Citation

Native Governance Center. "Blood Quantum and Sovereignty." Mar 30, 2022. Video. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldvC2bWRXu4, accessed March 8, 2023)

 

Tribal Sovereignty Special

Producer
KNBA 90.3 FM
Year

What does tribal sovereignty mean in Alaska? KNBA's Joaqlin Estus talks with two experts about the legal basis for tribal sovereignty, and tribal judicial systems at work in Alaska. Hear about a court ruling that Alaska tribes can put land into trust status, tax-free and safe from seizure...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

"Tribal Sovereignty Special: The Our Alaska Show on KNBA 90.3 FM (Host: Joaqlin Estus)." Featured on KDLG 89.9 FM Public Radio for Alaska's Bristol Bay. Dillingham, AK. April 9, 2013. Radio Interview. (http://kdlg.org/post/tribal-sovereignty-special-kdlg, accessed August 19, 2013)

Rebecca Tsosie: Indigenous Sustainability and Resilience to Climate Extremes

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

The School of Geography & Development presented the “My Arizona” Lecture of Prof. Rebecca Tsosie, Regents Professor of Law at Univeristy of Arizona on Friday, November 1, 2019. Her lecture, "Indigenous Sustainability and Resilience to Climate Extremes: Traditional Knowledge and the Systems of Survival" was recorded by the Native Nations Institute and abstract as follows: Tribal governments are not just "stakeholders" in the public policy debates over climate change; they are sovereign governments with longstanding political and legal rights to land, water, and natural resources. There is a vital role for Indigenous concepts of sustainability within the frameworks that drive climate policy, and this lecture explores the legal, political and moral arguments for the inclusion of tribal governments within Arizona, national and global climate governance.

Resource Type
Citation

Native Nations Institute. "Rebecca Tsosie: Indigenous Sustainability and Resilience to Climate Extremes" My Arizona Lecture Series, The School of Geography & Development, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 1, 2019

Transcript available upon request. Please email: nni@email.arizona.edu

Suzan Shown Harjo: Five Decades of Fighting for Tribal Sovereignty and Self-Determination

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

In this wide-ranging interview, longtime Native American rights advocate Suzan Harjo discusses her involvement in the development and ratification of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and the legislation creating the National Museum of the American Indian. She also offers her definition of sovereignty, and paints a vivid historical picture of the forces at work that led to the passage of Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act in 1975.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Harjo, Suzan Shown. "Five Decades of Fighting for Tribal Sovereignty and Self-Determination." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. September 11, 2008. Interview.

Ian Record:

"Welcome to Leading Native Nations. I’m your host Ian Record. On today’s program, we welcome Suzan Harjo. Suzan Harjo is a woman of many talents. Not only is she the President and Executive Director of the Morning Star Institute, which is a national Native rights organization founded in 1984 for Native people’s traditional and cultural advocacy, arts promotion and research, but she’s also a poet, writer, lecturer and curator. So welcome here to Tucson, Suzan. Why don’t you begin by telling us a little bit about yourself."

Suzan Harjo:

"Okay. Well, I’m Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee. My mother was Cheyenne and my father was Muscogee Creek and I was raised culturally in both ways in Oklahoma. And I’m a writer and that took me to New York City and it took me to Washington, D.C. and a lot of what I write is federal Indian law. So I’ve developed the line of cultural rights for Native people for a long time from the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to the follow on legislation of repatriation and I was part of the coalition in 1967 after our ceremonies at Bear Butte in South Dakota that began work that led to museum reform to the National Museum of the American Indian to repatriation law and to the Religious Freedom set of laws and policies."

Ian Record:

"Well, great. And we’re going to talk about a lot of those policies that you’ve been involved in firsthand, but first I wanted to start at the basic level essentially and discuss sovereignty. And what I wanted to ask you is the word sovereignty means a lot of different things to different people. It’s a word when you’re working on the ground in Indian Country you hear tossed around all the time and that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And I was wondering if you could just talk to us and tell us how you define sovereignty for Native nations."

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, the reason you hear so many definitions is first of all we think it’s an Indian word and we don’t think it means jurisdiction and who controls the king’s animals and that sort of concept of sovereignty that comes from Europe. Sovereignty is the act of sovereignty. We as Native nations are inherently sovereign and whatever we do to act sovereign is the definition of sovereignty."

Ian Record:

"It was interesting, I was actually in a panel presentation yesterday in Denver with David Lester, who’s the Executive Director of the Council of Energy Resource Tribes and he was discussing this exact question that 'sovereignty' inherently is a western term. It’s a colonizer’s term. And he defined sovereignty as, ‘it’s our right to be who the Creator intended us to be,’ and he said it’s really no more than that. And then he went on to talk about things like economic development, for instance, is just one of many ways that we work to become the people that the Creator intended us to be. I hear that same sort of refrain in your answer."

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, when something’s inherent, it’s inherent. You are who you are from the inside out and it’s not something that’s over layered either in law or in policy and it’s not something that the Europeans brought from Europe. It is your language. Speaking your language is an act of sovereignty. Reclaiming your language is an act of sovereignty. So the way it’s used by many people is simply as jurisdiction or simply as gaming operations and that’s so limiting. That’s really myopic, but for some Native nations that’s all they have. They don’t have their language anymore or they don’t have other vestiges of sovereignty but we have those things that define us. We have our rights of selecting citizens, setting citizenship criteria, saying who we are and who we aren’t, who is not part of us. That is an act of sovereignty. Citizenship is an act of sovereignty. We’re not, where I think we’re kind of falling down is that a lot of our people are not respecting our Native nations, but that’s something that has been taught to us and laid on us by federal and state government and private people who have, teachers and others in public schools who for so many decades and generations disrespected our elders, disrespected our traditions, disrespected our languages, disrespected our children, on and on and on and said that we were nothing, we were dead, gone, buried, forgotten at the end of the 1800s. So it is no surprise that a lot of our people do not have a strong sense of civics about our own nationhood and our own sovereignty and our own personhood. We have to get through a lot of self-hatred, a lot of this internalized oppression. These are more than buzz phrases. This happened to us. When the federal government issued civilization regulations in the mid-1880s that outlawed the Sun Dance and all other so-called ceremonies, that outlawed Indian languages, that outlawed the so-called practices of a medicine man and characterized all that was traditional and fine and good as heathen and pagan and hostile and improper and illegal for which the people were punished mightily, some of them unto death. That was interference and suppression, social suppression, national suppression, tribal suppression, personal suppression, religious suppression of a high and low order for 50 years. They were not lifted until the 1930s. So when you have that kind of generational oppression, it doesn’t go away in one generation or two generations and still today, the question I’m asked most often when I work with different nations to undertake enterprises, things that are acts of sovereignty, the first thing I’m asked is, ‘Will this make them mad?’ Hey, well, and what are they going to do, take away the Western hemisphere? I hope it makes them mad. So sovereignty is the act of sovereignty. It’s whatever people do with their inherent powers."

Ian Record:

"Well, thank you for that answer. I wanted to move on now to again some of these monumental policy initiatives and changes in Washington that you’ve been a direct part of. As you know, since the 1960s and certainly the 1970s Native nations have aggressively moved to strengthen and expand their exercise of sovereignty. Can you describe this process from your point of view and your direct experience with that?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, I reject the premise of the question. Native nations have moved aggressively to exercise sovereignty since coming into contact with the White man. There’s no beginning in the ‘60s or beginning in the ‘70s, so I reject the premise of the question. Native nations throughout the 1900s in the Pacific Northwest, for example, were moving aggressively to carry out their treaty fishing rights and treaty hunting rights and treaty gathering rights and they were stopped continually by federal and state people who denied that there were treaty rights, denied their part of the treaty in upholding the fishing rights of the people. So much so that in the ‘70s when the treaty fishing rights case that’s called the Boldt Decision finally went to the Supreme Court and was decided in 1979, the Supreme Court in effect said, ‘This case has been before us five times this century. We don’t want to see it again.’ They had consistently ruled that the Indians were right. They had consistently upheld the treaties. So what you are asking is when America started paying attention to Indian rights, when the general public started saying, ‘Oh, maybe the Indians aren’t all dead.’ That’s not the same as Native nations vigorously pursuing and aggressively pursuing sovereign powers and sovereign rights. Native nations all over the country were trying to do what it was we were entitled to do through the orderly processes of our nations and the United States in our nation to nation relationship, which is now sometimes diminished and called a 'government-to-government' relationship, but that really is lowering the bar. So I would submit that our nations never stopped being who we are and we often were not heard or our efforts were thwarted. And why? Because one side had superior weaponry. We don’t have the nuclear bomb so of course we’re going to lose some contests. But did we roll over and play dead? No. And I don’t think that there has been a more vigorous or a less vigorous assertion of sovereignty or sovereign rights since, well, at anytime. I don’t think there’s been an ebb and flow. I think that’s a fiction."

Ian Record:

"Well, with respect to your involvement, I believe you’ve been in D.C. fighting these battles since the ‘60s and I was wondering if you could just talk about your experience there and I think in particular with respect to the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. That didn’t happen overnight. That was the fruition of many years of hard fought battles and can you talk about those battles and how, essentially what was going on throughout the country manifested itself in this major policy shift in Washington?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, I didn’t get to Washington until the end of 1974, but I was outside of Washington watching the process, observing how things are done in Washington and as a journalist in part and as a radio producer in part and as a part of Native delegations to Washington. So I understood how things worked, but I was an outside person when we developed the ideas, when we envisioned the National Museum of the American Indian I was not in Washington. That was a result of our elders saying, ‘After ceremonies, don’t go away...,’ in June of ‘67, ‘...stay for meetings and let’s figure out how to do these things.’ And we came up with a whole agenda of how to gain more respect in American society and in how to elevate our status and get mummies out of, off display and that sort of thing. It was a whole agenda of respect. Now at that same time, a lot of Native people were doing other kinds of things that were developing economic development or other kinds of work in other areas and our common problem was in the way that Indian affairs were ignored in Washington, D.C. except by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and then they were controlled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. That common realization by young people, older people, elders and people who were in tribal leadership position, people who were religious leaders and people who were, as I was at the time, a practitioner of traditional religion. We all came to the same realizations that something had to be done with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Everyone having that realization led to an effort for Native nations to gain more control and for the BIA to have less control because in the ‘70s when we started going to...I first went to Washington in the early ‘70s, early ‘60s with my tribal delegation. They selected me and a boy when we -- Cheyenne boy and me -- when we were seniors in high school in Oklahoma City and they took us to Washington with them. And we were supposed to, it was the custom, stop by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and let them know where we planned to go. And so our act of resistance was that our business committee, our tribal leaders didn’t stop by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and we were followed around town by them as we went to the Justice Department, as we met with people on Capitol Hill and the Bureau of Indian Affairs agents would be short, right behind us and it was, and they were upset that we didn’t stop and talk with them and tell them where we were going so they had to follow us. That was their duty, that was their mission. So that’s the kind of thing that people were experiencing. The Bureau of Indian Affairs people really thought they controlled Indian tribes. So out of that, now it could have taken many forms. People really liked the title rather than the law itself, 'self-determination,' because it sounded good but a lot of people talked about it as self termination as well and weren’t quite sure that, there were some people who were very invested in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and having a strong federal agency presence because they had lived through termination and the severing of the federal tribal relationship so they wanted something that was solid and strong in Washington to act as an advocate for Indian people. For the most part though, it was not being an advocate for Indian people and the Indian Health Service was also perceived as something that wasn’t doing the job that it should do and there were so many people dying of the flu and colds and pneumonia in Indian Country, not to mention tuberculosis and the other far more serious in general society problems, but it was the common stuff that was taking its toll in Indian Country. So you had people in poverty, ill health, ill housed and the worst, the worst of the worst on the demographic ladder, Indians were always at the bottom of everything, the lowest employment. Anyway you could measure how a society was doing or how a people were doing, we were the worst. We were doing the worst. And so everyone understood that something had to be done to get more power to the tribes and to have more of the functions of the BIA -- that is money, that really translates into money -- transferred to the Indian tribes and that’s what was so important about the Indian Self Determination Act, not that it was a great law. You read it and say, ‘This is not much,’ but it was something and it was the answer to the anger that was building by everyone. Everyone was very upset, very angry and you had people in the Pacific Northwest being maimed and imprisoned for fishing under laws signed by the United States and treaties signed by their nation and the United States nation. 'How dare they do those things!' And so the outrage was very high and that was just a tiny escape valve for the federal government and good that it happened and it began, or helped, it helped further a trend that had begun under the [Lyndon B.] Johnson Administration where the Johnson Administration had tried to put a lot of social programs in the hands of tribes and make more social programs and more programs of general applicability available to the people, to the Indian people. And self determination under [Richard] Nixon/[Gerald] Ford, first the Nixon message and then the Ford law, was a furtherance of what the Johnson Administration had tried to do to get away from termination and get more money and power and programs in the hands of the people, just more local government. So that’s what that was all about. The Nixon 'Self-Determination' message, I remember Ramona Bennett who was the Chairwoman of the Puyallup Tribe in Washington State, coming to Washington and she said, ‘I came to Washington and everywhere I went the BIA, everywhere on Capitol Hill they handed me a copy of Richard Nixon’s 'Self-Determination' message. So I read it and read it and read it on the plane on the way home and got off the plane and we took over Cushman Hospital.’ And I thought that was just a marvelous example of what it set in motion. It did set in motion the self-determining of Native people that went beyond any sort of contracting law. It was sort of like your initial question about sovereignty. What is self determination? Doing what you, in their case, the tribe needed to take over Cushman Hospital and they did. And it was just funny that it was as a result of Richard Nixon’s statement on self-determination."

Ian Record:

"Yeah, that’s interesting you mentioned that example and also your characterization of the Self-Determination Act as a tiny escape valve, at least as far as the federal government conceded it because in the research of the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project, what we’ve seen is a growing number of native nations beginning in the ‘70s and particularly since that time have driven essentially a Mack truck through that tiny escape valve and aggressively pursued self determination to a far greater scope than the federal government I think ever conceived through this law."

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, yes. I was in part, I was one of the people that helped interpret the Self Determination-Act when I first worked for the National Congress of American Indians and we did a lot of testifying on Capitol Hill in ‘75, and ‘75 about the meaning of the Self-Determination Act, who could do what with it, what it meant and how it could be used to benefit the Native people. And so we did look for every opportunity in the Act and if the Act was silent on something, we assumed we could do it because it didn’t say no. And that was a unique way of interpreting federal Indian law. It had been interpreted in the opposite direction by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for a very long time that if something didn’t say explicitly that you could do something then the answer was no, you couldn’t do it. So we flipped that and started saying, if it doesn’t have an express prohibition against doing it, then do it, just don’t ask permission, just do it."

Ian Record:

"Just do it, the Nike slogan."

Suzan Harjo:

"Yeah."

Ian Record:

"As you know, a lot of the research of the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project dating back to the mid- to late 1980s -- so you’re looking at essentially a decade after this Act was passed -- has focused on why some nations have been more successful than others in pursuing their goals of self determination, whatever those goals might be. They might be economic, they might be cultural, they might be social, etc. From your perspective, do you see any common factors that perhaps empower some tribes to be more successful in that regard and perhaps some factors on the flip side that perhaps get in the way of other tribes from moving forward and pursuing their goals and achieving their goals?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, before Jack Abramoff, it was customary for the community of Native nations to come together for the common good and develop programs or general laws in a way that could be useful, beneficial for all Native peoples. What the Abramoff scandal brought to light was that there were Native peoples who were just behaving like any corporation and trying to get the edge over any other corporation and when I ran the National Congress of American Indians during the ‘80s, that was never ever the custom or the practice. So up until the late ‘80s, until we got the gaming law, everyone was supporting everyone else so it was a, you came together for mutual support and if one group, if one intertribal organization wanted to do something, everyone would support them in that effort or just stand back, certainly not oppose them. So this idea of just one-upsmanship and edging out another Native nation for profit, for personal profit I think is a sad turn of events in our national Native efforts, and there’s just no accounting for greed and we have very greedy people among us. We have a lot of greedy white people among us, a lot of greedy other kinds of people, and we have our own homegrown greedy people. So what accounts for the success of one nation and not success of another? In part that kind of greed, an overload of greed on the part of a successful nation willing to undercut, keep down another Native nation. I think that’s what was brought to light by the Abramoff scandal and what a lot of our leadership hasn’t owned up to and are still some of them covering up and that’s unfortunate. So the specific success by one nation as opposed to another may be as a result of dirty tricks and undermining and throwing a lot of money to see that the other nation is not successful. That has translated into other kinds of rights in other parts of the country and you see a lot of ugliness one nation to another and that’s where it’s backfiring for a lot of people and the leaders who let Jack Abramoff have his way or who encouraged him or hired him because they wanted a pit bull are being turned out by the people because they’re saying, ‘At home we don’t want to be this kind of person. We don’t want to be this kind of nation. We don’t want to have this kind of Native tribal character. That’s not who we are.’ And I think that’s really good. So we had to have a kind of pot boiler to make people decide. Now some are just saying, ‘Heck, yeah, we want that. We want to be the richest ones. We want to be the most cutthroat. We want to be the meanest ones.’ So it’s in a way like everything else, it all comes down to people and it all comes down to leadership and the people having the kind of leaders that they want to have, putting in office the kind of people they want to represent them. Now it doesn’t mean that they wanted the Jack Abramoff clones or payers or dupes. It does mean though that when all of that was done with and they assessed what had happened, they took a sharp turn in the opposite direction, whatever the opposite direction was and that’s still sorting itself out. We’ve been impoverished for a long time and we’ve only been comfortable...some Native nations have been comfortable, some are mega rich, only a handful, some are comfortable and some are still way in the depths of poverty. So we have to figure out what’s keeping the people in the depths of poverty. If it’s not other Native nations doing that and keeping them down, is it the federal government keeping them down? There are still people in the federal bureaucracy who are dying to get control of Indian tribes again and some of them are doing it through the kind of carrot and stick flattery. You see many, I’ve been in Washington a long time and I see people, delegations come in and they do cow tow to the very, to federal bureaucrats and they do sell out very, for a photo op and they don’t insist on substance. Not everyone. I’m talking about just a small number of people who do this. The most successful of the tribal leaders will not do the photo op unless they have something to back it up with, unless they’ve gotten something for the people, unless they have some sort of really clear promise or a negotiated agreement or a law or they, it’s not just, ‘How nice can we be to the white people?’ but some people still have that orientation and a lot of people in Washington exploit that because there are still people who are on the payroll or on the side of for other non-monetary reasons the people who are trying to exploit our resources and the people who are trying to keep us from not just making money on things, but having them altogether. So there are still people who are trying to take our gathering places, who are certainly trying to keep control of our sacred places. That has not stopped and there is a predictable backlash against any Native people that exercise sovereignty in any area, whether it’s water rights or gaming operations, whether it’s being too cultural. People get jealous of that and [say], ‘Give me some of that medicine.’ No matter what it is that is being exercised in a way that can be commodified, there are people who try to gain a share of that commodified entity or they try to take it away from Native people altogether and that’s still going on. There are still organized networks of people who call themselves in organizations 'anti-Indian' or 'equal rights' -- 'equal rights' is buzz word for no treaties, no special Indian rights. And this issue has been taken to the Supreme Court a lot and the Supreme Court always answers the same thing, ‘Special rights of Indians don’t interfere with the constitutional rights of non-Indians, so shut up.’ I mean, that’s what is supposed to happen, but that keeps going on. And in every way that Native nations raise a resource right or commit an act of sovereignty, there are non-Indian people who are there saying, ‘Either give me some or you don’t get to do that anymore.’ And why? Part of it is racism and an ancient fear that once in control of anything, Native people will be as bad to the non-Indians as the non-Indians have been to us. That is not our history. That is not our history. Whether you look at the Maine Indian land claim settlement of the claim to two-thirds of the state in a settlement for 300,000 acres of land, that was an act of compassion on the part of the Passamaquoddys and Penobscots in not suing every citizen in the claim area. That was an act of compassion because they said, ‘We don’t want to scare people the way our people have been scared.’ I thought that was so admirable of them and so they wanted their lawsuit held in abeyance pending the outcome of talks. They said, ‘Just talk to us.’ They didn’t want to go through an entire litigation process and hurt the people in that claim area. I thought that was extraordinary."

Ian Record:

"You mentioned sacred places, which is a good segue into my next question. As you mentioned, you were directly involved in the creation and the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Can you just describe what...how that act came about and really what was the impetus behind it and perhaps your perspective on its impact 30 years later?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, I keep referencing this 1967 meeting, which was the nucleus of a coalition that became a national coalition for cultural rights and we had a second meeting, because we were mostly -- although there were people from other nations there at that ‘67 meeting in June -- we were mostly Cheyennes, Arapahoes and Lakotas, your basic Little Big Horn coalition. And we talked about a lot of things and realized that the Lakotas had different issues than the Cheyennes, even though we have so much in common, that there were slightly different things, slightly different experiences, different religions, different things that we had to do that we were being prevented from doing. So everyone had the ‘no trespassing’ signs in commons, the ‘no Indians and dogs allowed’ signs in common. We all had that in common, but what we realized was we needed to know more in order to do something that would help everyone and that was our goal was to help everyone. And it really was a, there was an emphasis on freedom. So we, and I can’t emphasize enough that we were still criminalized even though the civilization regulations had been lifted 30 years earlier, we were still criminalized when we practiced our religions and we were demonized by a lot of Native people too who had bought the whole bill of goods and who called us pagans and that sort of thing in resolutions and in letters to the BIA. So we realized that we had to do a lot of things to help ourselves and to help other people so, anytime that we tried to get to a sacred place that had been confiscated and turned into the public domain, we had to go through private property, federal property, sometimes state property and everywhere were these ‘keep out’ signs and ‘no trespassing’ signs and we were literally in order to continue a pilgrimage lifting barbed wire to get to these places. We still do that today in some places, so it’s not over, it’s not ended. So we wanted to see beyond that and make sure that in making ourselves free from a lot of these constraints that we weren’t imperiling anyone else. So kind of put out the word to different parts of the country what we were doing, what we were trying to do and that we wanted museum reform, we wanted a national cultural center, that’s what we called the museum facing the capitol and so the capitol, the people who were making laws about us would have to look us in the face. And we wanted something where people weren’t confiscated eagle feathers from us and we wanted the ‘no trespassing’ signs gone. So we got an invitation from Governor Robert Lewis to go to Zuni and so we went there, a pretty big delegation, and he had invited some other people and we had a similar set of meetings for a week and discussed what they needed and what they were afraid of and what they were confronted with and so that became, we were building a door like this and then it became a wider door, kind of a taller door. Everywhere we would go there would be another kind of issue that people wanted to be a part of this thing. So while we were building a door to get everyone through, we ended up with something that was very oddly configured and you can say the same sort of thing about all of these laws in the cultural rights realm, repatriation certainly is a good example of that, and the reason it doesn’t, these don’t look like other laws is because so many different cultures and so many different ways of dealing with issues had to be accommodated. And I do mean had to be. I mean, that was a real mission that everyone felt was we needed to be absolutely inclusive and to not have language that would restrict other people. So we just continued lots and lots of meetings like this, lots of gatherings, hundreds. We had hundreds of meetings of this kind, some later at Native American Rights Fund, some out in the open where everyone would camp, some at hotels in conjunction with Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians or National Congress of American Indians, and it was a very important movement that took hold in Washington and a lot of people were responsive. And the first two people I went to were Senator Barry Goldwater in this state and Senator Ted Kennedy because they were the most conservative and most liberal and then all you do is fill in the blanks in between. And both of them were so receptive and that’s when we really knew that we were going to prevail on a national Indian cultural rights agenda was when we were able to get really broad sponsorship and then in the House another person from Arizona, Congressman Morris Udall, was our champion there. So that, and if you look at the Religious Freedom Act and you look at the report of the president pursuant to the Religious Freedom Act, it was done after a year’s implementation. After a year’s implementation of 50 agencies' review of their rules and regulations in the context of Indian religious freedom, you see that it covers a lot of areas, it covers museum reform, sacred objects, sacred places. It’s quite a broad set of policies and the overall, overarching policy statement is to preserve and protect Native religious religions and practitioners of those religions. That was huge because it, the only, it had been the policy of the United States to destroy them. So that’s why we had to have an Indian religious act and why we had to have repatriation and the like, all the follow on legislation because this was a policy statement and then you go from there to make something that is specific to a topic. So that’s sort of how we got from the ‘67 meeting to just lots and lots of, they weren’t hearings, they were gatherings where we exchanged information and there was a lot of traditional knowledge sharing and learning that we were all doing. We all came away with in effect Ph.D.s in comparative religion. It was quite the thing. And I am so privileged to have been a part of that and to have been educated by so many extraordinary people. So that period was just an amazing thing. It was an, talk about an exercise of sovereignty. This was the people rising up and saying, ‘This is what we want and need and we need it to look like this.’ And that’s what repatriation was. We continued that same process from ‘78 when we did the Religious Freedom Act to ‘89 when we finally got the Indian museum and the historic repatriation provision agreement with the Smithsonian. And after that it took only 11 months to get it applied to the rest of the United States, to every other federal agency, educational institution and museum that was, that had any sort of federal tie. And that’s a pretty remarkable thing. And we literally got everything that we wanted and a process to try to do something about the things that were causing people so many nightmares. In part, our elders in ‘67 called us together because so many people were having nightmares about people who were held in these places and things that were held, our living beings, our sacred objects, that were being held in these places and they were describing them as prisoners of war. And at that point, we didn’t know exactly how it had happened, but by the ‘80s we had found the documentation to support what our oral history told us about beheadings. We knew there had to be a policy and a program to behead us and just because it was in everyone’s oral history, but we didn’t find until the ‘80s the information about the Indian crania study of the U.S. Army Surgeon General and we didn’t know until I started having negotiating sessions at the Smithsonian with Bob Adams, who was Secretary of the Smithsonian, that they had in fact 18,500 human remains, 4,500 skulls from the Indian crania study. We knew all of that from our own history, but we didn’t know how it was done until we found the paper, and thank goodness for the Magna Carta culture.

Ian Record:

"I wanted to follow up on the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and also NAGPRA, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and just get your sense, now that there’s been obviously 30 years since AIRFA, moving on 20 years, I believe, since NAGPRA. How have those two acts worked out in practice? Are they achieving the goals that those folks that you were initially working with had set out?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, AIRFA is a policy statement, so it is what it is and we expected to gain more follow-on legislation from it than we have. So our big failing would be in sacred places protection and what we need are legal protections for sacred places and what we’ve been doing is cobbling together protections made of all sorts of other laws and processes and then some outright buying of areas of sacred places. We can’t obviously buy everything and some things were taken from the Indian people and we were confined to reservations and not allowed by the civilization regulations to roam off the reservation. That was an act that was unlawful, to roam off the reservation and for all of these sacred places that were off reservation, they were attempting to stop the relationship between the place and the people going there to pray. So a lot of people went there anyway of course, but had to do it underground and had to, had to make themselves criminals and hostiles and fomenters of decent and all of that and risk imprisonment, withdrawal of rations, starvation and any open-ended sentence that an Indian agent might apply in his discretion. So these places, none of these places were taken properly. They were all stolen. These were our usual and accustomed places, these were places that it didn’t occur to our ancestors that we wouldn’t be able to go there. Yet we were stopped. It didn’t occur to them that someone would take them and say, ‘Now these are ours, not yours.’ But that’s what happened. So we haven’t fulfilled the hope that we had of securing legal protections of a general nature, of a national nature for these important places to all our peoples. As far as repatriation, that is a good example of what was supposed to happen. We did do follow-on legislation. We were able to get it and I think we were able to get it because we were able to find so much of the documentation that was about an area of American life that most people on Capitol Hill had no idea existed and they would say, ‘You’re kidding. This is what the United States did? How is this possible?’ And there it was in black and white, there it was in green boxes in museums. So we had a good case, we made a good case for repatriation and I think, and we set up three processes, two laws and one process at NMAI and they were all slightly different, they had slightly different standards, the legal standard, the test under the two laws, one for the Smithsonian and one for everyone else, was or is preponderance of the evidence, which is 5941. In the NMAI [National Museum of the American Indian] trustees repatriation policy that governs NMAI, we made that a reasonable belief standard to see if that would be different in its implementation from preponderance of the evidence, reasonable belief not quite requiring a majority of belief, however you quantify these things. And it hasn’t made all that much difference, I don’t think, proving to me at least the point that everything comes down to people. It matters who’s in the delegation on the tribal side, it matters who’s in the repository receiving side and when the people get together what is their interaction and what are their motives and are they really concentrated on the good of the Indian people, the public good for education. Are they truly concentrated on these things or is it about people looking at us as if we’re the butterfly collection or our people, our ancestors as if they’re the butterflies that are pinned down. That’s a different way of looking at the world and that’s not the kind of world that we made with the repatriation laws. We made something that was interactive, that would bring together the peoples who cared most about the subject and that it was supposed to be for the good. I think that they’ve accomplished that and they’re not finished and it’s a long process. It’s a long process because Native people, it’s not a simple matter to repatriate. No one has the ceremony for what you do when people come and dig up your grave and take your great grandma or your grandma to Washington or to University of Arizona or UCLA or the Colorado Historical Society. There’s no ceremony for that except for those who have it now. So everyone, and you don’t just invent ceremony all of a sudden. You have to say, ‘Is this like anything else? What happened when there was a flood and bodies floated up, what happened? Ah, we did this, we did that.’ So people have to think of other things that it’s most like and find a way to discuss it in a way that’s not just ripping the scab off everything that’s happened in the whole of the 500 years and find a way to discuss it in a way that everyone can be put back together again. So that’s a lot and that requires a lot. Repatriation has placed a tremendous burden on Native nations, which is usually discussed as a paperwork burden. Say, ‘Wow, we’ve got a mountain of paper.’ It’s put a tremendous burden on everyone, but when it’s done best, it’s a tremendous learning process because people, well, like the teachers say, everything is a teaching opportunity. This is a teaching and learning opportunity for everyone. It’s a way of talking to the artist in the community. We want our cultural patrimony back so you see these designs. We want our people back so people can stop having nightmares about them and we put them to rest finally. So it’s a small measure of justice in a very unjust history and an unjust world. The really smart thing we did in repatriation law in both the ‘89 and the ‘90 law and in the NMAI trustees policy was to leave the implementation of the law up to the people doing the repatriations themselves. And that was, well, we had two choices. We could have guessed and we would never have guessed right, never. There are so many surprises that have come up in the individual repatriations. Or we could do what we did, which was to punt. We agreed on the general policy, we agreed that there was going to be a repatriation law, we agreed that it would be human rights of Native Americans. All of that was agreed to. And then we didn’t tie everyone’s hands with too much law. We left a lot to be, the manner of repatriation, so people looking for guidance in the law need to look to the spirit rather than the letter and then to do what they agree to do because that’s the whole point. People are coming together for a common purpose and they need to do whatever they need to do to make it dignified, to make it respectful, to make it lasting or to make it an interim thing. They might just say, ‘This is what we’re doing for now, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has to do it this way afterward,’ because it’s up to the current, to the living people to define cultural appropriateness, to do religious interpretation, to understand what the people need right now and then to, what kind of presentation? Does it need to be just something that’s written down and no one talks about it again? Does it need to be something done as a ceremony? Does it need to be something done that’s not a ceremony, but done with ceremoniousness? There are all sorts of ways to do these repatriations and the best thing is for the peoples to, on the Native side and on the repository side, to come together and to deal with it in the way that they can agree to deal with it. And that’s part of healing and that’s what we wanted to accomplish. So, and that’s what I hear from lots and lots of people who do repatriations is that they have accomplished that. But it takes a long time to get from point A to point Z. It just takes a long, long time. And sometimes you don’t quite get there, but you just run out of time or you run out of patience or you feel that it’s going in a negative rather than positive direction. There are lots of reasons that people decide that the end has been reached. Sometimes it’s a person on a particular repatriation committee knows they have three months in office or a tribal leader and they just have to get it done before then. Sometimes it’s a religious thing where the important thing is to get this back before this thing happens in the sky or before this kind of thing happens or to keep the salmon running or to keep the buffalo healthy. There are all sorts of community reasons that people do things or they just want not to deal with the subject anymore and to do, to resolve it quickly and quietly. There are all sorts of reasons for pace and style and as I said, I think that’s the smartest thing we did with the repatriation laws was to leave it up to the people."

Ian Record:

"You are also, among your many activities, one of the plaintiffs in the Washington Redskins trademark lawsuit, which has been going on for several years now."

Suzan Harjo:

"Sixteen."

Ian Record:

"Sixteen -- more than several. Just describe for us briefly why this suit was brought, what was the basis of it and what the current status of it is and essentially what larger problem it’s trying to address."

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, all roads for me lead back to our ‘67 meeting at Bear Butte, which was just eye opening for me and the people kept talking about respect and respect and respect and how we were being, we were not being respected in general society and one of the things that got tossed around was all of the, all of these sports teams that were walking all over our good names and walking all over our reputations and that that was helping keep us down and helping make everything else possible and that not enough people were speaking out about it. And that really meant a lot for those of us who were from Oklahoma, where sports are a really big deal and we joined up with the effort already underway in Oklahoma to try to get rid of Little Red who was the mascot for the University of Oklahoma and that became the first of the American references in sports, Native American references in American sports to go by the wayside. It was ended...Little Red was the first dead mascot in 1970 and after that came Syracuse and Stanford and Dartmouth and a lot of others. Until this time, when we’ve eliminated over -- we collectively, not me, but we collectively -- have eliminated over two-thirds of the Native references in American sports. So we’ve won already. Now that’s in educational sports. In pro sports, not one has changed. So you have 2,200 in educational sports have changed, have dropped their stereotypes, not one in pro sports. So there was a trademark trial, a trademark lawyer, patent and trademark lawyer named Steve Baird who was doing research on causes of action in trademark law to deal with this issue and so he wanted to interview me when I was, I think I had just stepped down as Director of National Congress of American Indians, but I was all over the record on this issue for many years and decades. And so he called and he was in Minneapolis and could he come and interview me. So he and his wife came over and we were doing an interview and the first question he asked me was, ‘Why did you reject, ’ because I’d said that we’d met many times. He said, ‘Had you ever considered a lawsuit against the Washington team?’ and I said, ‘Well, yes, but we rejected the civil rights approaches and they didn’t seem quite right for this forum that we knew we would have the hardest row to hoe in pro sports.’ So he said, ‘Well, why did you reject the forum of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Board?’ And I said, ‘Oh, well, we didn’t.’ And he said, ‘Well, did you reject or why did you reject, if you did, the Lanham Act as a cause of action?’ And I said, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ And he was so smart, he explained all of this to me about a pocketbook incentive lawsuit and how the Lanham Act said that you can’t get a trademark license if you have disparaging -- there are four tests -- if you have something that’s derogatory to anyone or anything or if it holds people or thing up to contempt, holds a people or thing up to ridicule or is scandalous and it seemed to me that we fit all of those. It was certainly scandalous to us, but I didn’t know if it was scandalous to general society. So he explained that it would be difficult to have them do it retroactively. What we would have to do is ask them to cancel the licenses, the trademark licenses that the team owners had received in the late ‘60s and, rather than going in the front end to have them not issue the license and that there were complexities in the lawsuit. So by the time he left, I had hired him as my lawyer and then I took a poll of the, I talked to the Board of Morning Star [Institute] and Morning Star became the sponsor for the lawsuit and then I made elaborate lists and called up six people and each one said yes. And the first one I called was Vine Deloria, Jr. and he said, ‘Oh, hell yes. I’m definitely for that.' We’ve got to do something to take this burden on ourselves as the responsible adult population and not have our, not pass this burden on to our children and their children and their children. So that’s why we did it. And his other remark was so much like one of the remarks that had been made at that ‘67 gathering where he said, ‘We have to tell people that this is not acceptable, but we have to say it and we haven’t done enough of that.’ And that was exactly what I had heard and I thought, ‘This is really such a smart man and such a wise elder.’ I think there were many of us who knew Vine was a wise elder before he accepted that he was and he was always very self deprecating. And so we had, I wanted seven people because seven is a really important number for the Cheyennes and we won in ‘99 before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Board. Filed in ‘92, won in ‘99, lost before the federal district court in 2003, and we’ve been on appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals since then with one narrow question having been sent back to the lower court about whether latches, the passage of time runs against the youngest of the seven of us who was in diapers at the time that they filed for trademark protection and the Court of Appeals sent that question back with some language that said roughly, ‘There are always going to be Native Americans born and obviously some of them are going to continue to be offended. What about them?’ They were asking themselves and continue to do. So from that I concocted a lawsuit of young people who have no latches problem and again wanted to have it mirror our lawsuit and got seven, but one had to drop out. So it’s now six young Native people between the ages of 18 and 24 so there was no lag or minimal lag between them reaching their maturity and filing the lawsuit. And they filed our same lawsuit, they did that in 2006 and their lawsuit is being held in abeyance pending the outcome of ours."

Ian Record:

"So depending on how they rule on yours, they would proceed with the other one."

Suzan Harjo:

"Then they proceed, right. And it’s a different lawsuit so if they don’t, if the Court of Appeals does not reach the merits whether it’s disparaging or not to us, in our lawsuit then they have to reach it in the next one because they have no loophole, no escape hatch of latches for the Washington football club to get through. So they may escape through that loophole in ours, but they can’t through the next one and that’s just one forum and one cause of action and one tiny group of people. We’ve got a lot of relatives and there are lots of forums and all of that is to say that we’re on the downhill slide on winning this issue and, when you think about it, over 2,000 schools have gone through this process thoroughly and some at length, University of Oklahoma for almost 10 years, some of them really for a long time, before deciding to eliminate their Native references. That’s amazing. That’s really a societal sea change all around the country in the heartland, on the coast, everywhere, big towns, little towns, and almost all of those happened one by one by one except for LA [Los Angeles] Unified School District, they did it as a school district. Dallas-Fort Worth did it for half of Dallas-Fort Worth as a district. Lewisville, Kentucky did it as two counties in one school system. So other than those, though, it’s been done school by school and it’s always the same process and always the same arguments and it’s amazing how you could almost script it and say, ‘This is what’s going to be said. They’re going to say, 'You’re not offended.' You’re going to say, 'You’re not honored.' And that’s going to be the argument.’ And it has been and you almost want to say in the middle of these negotiations, ‘I know you think you’re being original, but we’ve heard it all before.’ Nonetheless, not every argument has been made in every situation and that’s what’s being played out all over America. So we’ve won on that. Whether or not we lose this lawsuit or win this lawsuit, these names are gone, these references are gone."

Ian Record:

"I wanted to wrap up with again getting back to a very general question and really what I’m curious to know from you is what do you see for the future of Indian Country and Native nations?"

Suzan Harjo:

"Well, "

Ian Record:

"I didn’t say it was a simple question, I just said it was a general one."

Suzan Harjo:

"I was the National Coordinator for the 1992 Alliance, which was from ‘89 to ‘93 really providing Native voices on the occasion of the Columbus Quincentenary, which was 1992 and one of the things that I put in place for October 1992 to kind of wrap everything up was a meeting of 100 wisdom keepers -- all Native people -- wisdom keepers, artists and writers to come together and then I co-chaired that with my old friend Oren Lyons, who’s an Onondaga Chief from the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. And we invited, we just put together a list of our, of the people we most admired and respected and asked them to come. What we were finding was that we knew a lot of different people and that a lot of people, I talked to Vine Deloria for example and he said, ‘Oh, I think that’d be really interesting. I’ve never met, ’ and he named several people. So we put together people mainly so we could just talk about the future and we called it 'Our Visions: The Next 500 Years,' and I will tell you that no one mentioned Columbus at that entire week of meetings and we came out with a wonderful statement, which I will get to you so you can read it into this record called ‘A Statement Toward the Next 500 Years.’ And essentially it says we’re going to be talking our languages, speaking in our languages, we’re going to be the Native people, we’re going to reclaim a lot of our traditions, we’re going to clear out some of the underbrush of stereotypes so our images come through. And it talked a lot about reclamation in a sense and who we were going to be not in relation to anyone else, but as ourselves. And one thing, it was just a marvelous, marvelous thing, and there were all sorts of people there who knocked each other off the charisma meter. Scott Momaday and Vine Deloria and Joy Harjo and it was just an extraordinary group of hundred people, Thomas Banyacya, just amazing, amazing people. And everyone came up with this statement. So that’s how I feel and as the years have gone by there have been so many examples of things that have gone away, things that have been called extinct that are now being revived, which is just, our old people on the Muscogee side say, ‘Never count out anyone, never count out anything because there they will appear again.’ And people all over the place say that about medicine plants that haven’t been seen in a long time and here they are. The teal blue butterfly, which was thought to be extinct for 100 years has reappeared in northern California. And the Pequot language, which, well the Pequots were said to be extinct and then there they were. I know they were there, I was the lead lobbyist on their land claim settlement. And what they have done with their extraordinary wealth through gaming and creating the world’s largest casino, Foxwoods, is they’ve done a lot of good. One of the amazing things they’ve done is to reclaim their language. They know how it sounds. There are lots of Algonquin languages that are spoken today including Cheyenne. No one, everyone thinks we’re from the plains, but we’re not. We’re from up that way. And they, so they know the sound of the language, they know words and there’s vocabulary, a lot of stuff was written down and now they have people speaking it and that’s an amazing thing. Now talk about an act of sovereignty. Here they are doing language reclamation and it really, this is what we in effect envisioned in 1992 when we did our retreat and said, ‘What is it that we want for the next 500 years? We want to be the Native people in the next 500 years and even more so than we are now.’ So this is what’s happening."

Ian Record:

"Well, Suzan, I really appreciate your time. I think a lot of people are going to learn quite a bit from your thoughts and perspectives. We’d like to thank Suzan Harjo for joining on us on this program of Leading Native Nations, a radio series of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona. To learn more about Leading Native Nations, please visit the Native Nations Institute website at nni.arizona.edu. Thank you for joining us."

Walter Echo-Hawk: In the Light of Justice: The Rise of Human Rights in Native America & the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Producer
Indigenous Peoples' Law and Policy Program
Year

Walter Echo-Hawk, legendary civil rights attorney, discusses his latest book In the Light of Justice: The Rise of Human Rights in Native America & the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, stressing the need for Native nations and peoples to band together to mount a campaign to compel the United States to fully embrace and implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Echo-Hawk, Walter. "In the Light of Justice: The Rise of Human Rights in Native America & the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples." Indigenous Peoples' Law & Policy Program, James E. Rogers College of Law, The University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. November 20, 2013. Presentation.

James Anaya:

“The Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program is pleased to host a range of thought-provoking speakers in multiple settings over the course of each academic year as part of our multi-faceted program of learning and outreach. This evening we are especially privileged to have with us one of the truly groundbreaking advocates and thinkers of recent decades on issues concerning Native Americans in the United States and abroad, Mr. Walter Echo-Hawk.

A citizen of the Pawnee Nation, Walter Echo-Hawk is a distinguished lawyer who for years was one of the leading attorneys of the Native American Rights Fund, a former justice of the Supreme Court of the Pawnee Nation and now the Chief Justice of the Kickapoo Supreme Court, an author with numerous influential books and articles, and an activist whose energies extend to innovative initiatives to support Native American arts and culture. His vast legal experience includes precedent-setting cases involving Native American religious freedom, prisoner rights, water rights, and rights of reburial and repatriation. His work litigating and lobbying on Native American rights goes back to 1973 and much of that work occurred during pivotal years when America witnessed the rise of modern Indian nations. As American Indian tribes reclaimed their land, sovereignty and pride in an historic stride toward freedom and justice, Walter Echo-Hawk worked at the epicenter of a great social movement alongside tribal leaders on many issues, visiting Indian tribes in their Indigenous habitats throughout North America. He was instrumental in the passage of numerous important laws like the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act amendments in 1994.

As a scholar and author, Walter Echo Hawk’s numerous published works include his acclaimed book In the Courts of the Conquerors: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided. This is an outstanding and insightful critique of the evolution of federal Indian law doctrine and its social implications. This evening we’re privileged to hear Walter talk about his most recent book In the Light of Justice: The Rise of Human Rights in Native America & the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In this book, Walter explains how the harm historically inflicted on the Indigenous peoples in the United States still commands attention because of the ongoing affects of the past on conditions today. He helps us understand why justice requires confronting the combined injustices of the past and present and he points us to tools for achieving reconciliation between the majority and Indigenous peoples focusing on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of the United Nations as such a tool.

This UN declaration is an expression of standards grounded in fundamental human rights and a global consensus among governments and Indigenous peoples worldwide. It was adopted in the year 2007 by the UN general assembly with the affirmative votes of an overwhelming majority of UN member states, [and] expressions of celebration by Indigenous peoples from around the world who had been long advocating for the declaration. At the urging of Indigenous leaders from throughout the country, President Barack Obama announced the United States’ support for the Declaration on December 16, 2010, reversing the United State’s earlier position and he did so before a gathering at the White House of leaders of Indigenous nations and tribes. In his wonderful new book, Walter Echo Hawk shows us the seeds of change in the Declaration. “With the Declaration,’ he tells us, ‘we are in a rare moment of potential transformation, of a tectonic shift toward a new era of human relations that extends the promise of justice beyond the boundaries set by the past. It is a move farther along the path of greatness for which America yearns.’ This book inspires and moves us to seize that moment. Please welcome, please join me in welcoming Walter Echo-Hawk.”

[applause]

Walter Echo-Hawk:

“Well, thank you so much Professor Anaya for that very kind and generous introduction. I have admired Professor Anaya for many, many years. We first met in the mid 1970s when Jim was the General Counsel to the National Indian Youth Council [NIYC] and I was on their board of directors, and at that time he was deeply involved in civil rights litigation on behalf of NIYC and international litigation and international tribunals as well way back in the early 1980s. I’ve admired your work and your groundbreaking career for many, many years in the field of international human rights law and I think that your work has really opened new vistas for our Native people here at home and I’m very, I think, indebted to you also for writing the foreword to my new book In the Light of Justice and I’m grateful for that. It just put a lot of pressure on me to do my best because I have respected your work so much over the years.

I want to thank Professor Tatum, Melissa Tatum, the Director of the Indian [Peoples] Law [and Policy] Program here, Professor Mary Guss also as well for your kindness in showing me around town, making my presence possible here this evening. And lastly, I thank each and every one of you for coming tonight to be with me here. It’s certainly my great honor and privilege to be here at the Law School. This ranking law school is well known throughout Indian Country and among my colleagues in the practice of federal Indian law as being an important center for Indian law and policy. Some of the very brilliant scholarship that has emanated here from the Law School with folks like Professor Anaya and the other faculty, all-star faculty that is assembled here at the Law School including Professor Williams, Rob Williams, have truly opened some major vistas for Indian tribes and my colleagues throughout the nation. So I’m very glad to be here, very honored to be at this center of knowledge here. I feel like I’m very at the fount of knowledge if not very close to it.

And so I’m very honored to give a presentation this evening about my book In the Light of Justice, and this book is about a brand new legal framework for defining Native American rights here in the United States. The book does basically three things. First, it examines the landmark UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that Professor Anaya mentioned. This is a landmark international human rights instrument that creates a very comprehensive stand-alone legal framework for defining the rights of Native Americans as well as Indigenous peoples worldwide. As Jim mentioned, this UN declaration was approved in the year 2007 by the General Assembly. It was endorsed by the United States government in the year 2010 so it’s technically a part of U.S. Indian policy and today 150 nations around the world have also endorsed this UN Declaration, making it the new order of the day it seems to me. Secondly, this book goes on then to compare our existing law and social policy with regard to Native Americans to these UN standards, these minimum human rights standards that is established by the Declaration to see how well our domestic law stacks up against these human rights standards. And then thirdly, the book urges our nation to undertake a social and legal movement to implement these UN standards into our law and social policy.

What I’d like to do tonight is to basically cover three areas with you this evening. First, I’d like to talk about why I felt compelled to write this book. Secondly, I want to describe briefly this declaration and this new human rights framework for defining Native American rights. And then thirdly, I want to discuss some of the findings that I made in my comparative legal analysis and some of my conclusions that I drew in this legal analysis of the declaration and especially to talk about the need for implementing these standards in our own nation here in the United States, including some of the implementation challenges that our generation or this generation will face in implementing these UN standards into our law and social policy. But before I begin, I need to add a caveat here and that is that I am not and don’t hold myself out to be an international law expert. I haven’t gone to the UN, I haven’t gone to Geneva, I did not participate in the making of this declaration and the book simply examines this declaration and its implications purely from the standpoint of a domestic practitioner of federal Indian law to look at the possibilities of this in terms of strengthening our existing law and policy. So with that, I think after I hope we’ll have time for some questions and answers and then we’ll be able to sign a few books afterwards and I think this’ll be a rare opportunity especially if James joins me in signing some books. So you’ll have the signature of both of the authors of this book. So it should be a collector’s edition for you book collectors out there.

But at the outset, I’d like to just begin with the premise of this book and that is this -- that I believe that this is a historic time for federal Indian law and policy and of course we know that federal Indian law is our current legal framework here in the United States for defining Native American rights and we know through our experience in the modern era of federal Indian law that federal Indian law basically has two sides to it. On the one hand, it has some very strong protective features that are protective of Native American rights that arise from the doctrine of inherent tribal sovereignty and the related protectorate principles that was articulated in Worcester v. Georgia, and within that protective side of federal Indian law in the last two generations our Indian nations have made great nation-building advances in this tribal sovereignty movement and we can look around the country and see the fruits of that effort all around us, and it’s been described by Charles Wilkinson as giving rise to our modern Indian nations rivaling the great American social movements, the environmental movement, the women’s movement, the civil rights movement in American history. But on the other side of the coin, federal Indian law also has a dark side to it as well with some very clear anti-Indigenous functions that are seen in a whole host of nefarious legal doctrines that were implanted in the body of federal Indian law by the Supreme Court many decades ago, in numerous unjust legal fictions and a significant body of the jurisprudence of racism as defined by Webster’s dictionary book can be found in some of these Supreme Court decisions that are still the law of the land today. So this dark side to federal Indian law holds us back as Native people, it makes us vulnerable and it also keeps us poor. And so we have these two sides of our existing legal framework.

But today as I mentioned is a historic time because we can now clearly see two legal frameworks for defining Native American rights. Our old legal framework of federal Indian law and then out on the horizon we can see this brand-new human rights framework out on the horizon and it reminds me of an old Pawnee song about a spotted horse that we see way far away and it’s coming our way and it makes us feel good because we know it’s bringing good things for us and that’s how this declaration is. And so we can clearly see these two frameworks now and we stand at a crossroads today between these two legal frameworks here in the United States and I think that the challenge of our generation of legal practitioners and tribal leaders and Native American peoples is to basically work to save the very best from our old framework, our most protective features and to merge that with this new human rights framework to create a stronger body of law that is more just and to make it a seamless…to merge the two frameworks into a strengthened and more just legal framework for the 21st century in a post-colonial world.

So I want to turn to my first task tonight and that is: why did I write this book? I was motivated by three reasons, the first being the need to strengthen federal Indian law. As I’ve alluded to earlier, although we’ve made great strides under our existing legal framework, I feel like we have stalled out in recent years because there’s been a gradual weakening of federal Indian law since 1985 with the U.S. Supreme Court trend towards trimming back hard-won Native American rights beginning with the [William] Rehnquist Court in 1985. Court observers tell us that Indian nations have lost over 80 percent of their cases into the present day, in some terms losing 88 percent of our cases, and that frightening statistic means that prison inmates fare better before the high court than our Indian nations. That’s caused some of our leading legal scholars to ask, ‘Is federal Indian law dead?’ And then we have this dark side to our body of law that I mentioned earlier and that compounds this problem it seems to me. Scholars have thoroughly studied this dark side to federal Indian law. They’ve identified these factors there that make our rights vulnerable today. These nefarious legal doctrines have been traced to their origins in medieval Europe. These internal tensions that are found in our body of law between self-determining peoples that have [an] inherent right of tribal sovereignty on the one hand being hostage to these doctrines of unfettered colonialism, conquest and colonialism. You can’t have these two conditions, they’re mutually incompatible so we have these inherent tensions that struggle…are pitted against one another in our body of law. And so that’s not questioned today in the year 2013 in any serious way, but we’ve lived with this body of law since 1970 at the inception of the modern era of federal Indian law. Our litigators basically took this legal framework as we found it. We didn’t create federal Indian law, we simply took this legal framework as we found it and tried to make the best of it. We tried to coax the courts into applying the most protective features of this legal framework and then simply living with this dark side. But it seems to me that now in recent years we have stalled out. I think we’ve faltered in recent years. I think Indian Country is huddled against an assault by the Supreme Court for its further weakening our legal rights and we’ve stalled out it seems to me at the very doorstep of true self-determination as that principle is broadly defined in modern international rights law and it may be that our Indian tribes have come as far as we can go under this existing regime and to go any further we’re going to have to reform that legal framework. I think there’s an axiom here and that is that a race of people can only advance so far under an unjust legal regime and that there’ll come a time where they have to turn on that legal regime and challenge it to go any further in their aspirations. And I think we may have rode our pony as far as we can and to go further we’re going to have to focus for the very first time on challenging some of the dark side of federal Indian law and strengthening our legal framework. So these problems in the law have troubled me as a lifelong practitioner of federal Indian law and I felt that federal Indian law today is in deep trouble. It needs a lifeline and perhaps this UN Declaration is that lifeline. So I felt it well worth my while to examine this new legal framework.

The second reason that motivated me to write this book was if you look around Indian Country today and in our tribal communities, we will see numerous, hard-to-solve social ills that stalk our tribal communities today. Despite our best efforts to redress these social ills, we see these shocking socioeconomic gaps between Native Americans and our non-Indian neighbors with the lowest life expectancy in the nation, the highest rate of poverty, poorest housing, serious shocking gaps in the medical treatment, mental healthcare, highest rate of violence in the nation, highest suicide rates, unemployment. These ills have lingered for so long in our tribal communities that they’re seen as normal and they threaten to become permanent. How do we account for these shocking inequities? Social science researchers tell us that these are unhealed wounds inherited from our…as historical trauma from [the] legacy of conquest; dispossession, subjugation, marginalization created these open wounds and they haven’t healed yet in the year 2013, despite our best efforts. These are the end products of our current legal regime, our existing law and policy, and I believe that this declaration is specifically designed to redress this inherit…the inherited effects of colonialism through a human rights framework. It’s a prescription for the social ills, and so I therefore thought it was worth my time to examine that framework in this book.

The third reason that I wrote this book is that the UN approval of this declaration in the year 2007, which was done in a landslide crowning victory for over 20 years in the United Nations of work by Indigenous pioneers who accessed the international realm for the very first time in a couple hundred years. This landmark achievement was basically unheralded. It caught the United States by surprise; it caught Indian Country by surprise. I feel like it caught our tribal leaders and our tribal attorneys [who] were unfamiliar with it. We hadn’t read it. It caught us with our chaps down, so to speak. And so since that time, and especially since the year 2010, Indian Country has just begun to read this document for the very first time and our tribal attorneys to read it and educate ourselves. It’s been the subject of a Senate oversight hearing. It’s been the subject of conferences at the federal bar, at NCAI [National Congress of American Indians], at tribal leaders' forums and law school conferences. And as we study this document I felt that it would be helpful to provide some baseline information about this declaration to help our self-education process on this new human rights framework, to look at some of the implications, to provide some baseline information about it, some reconnaissance-level legal analysis and that’s what this book attempts to do, to assist Indian Country and our nation in looking at this new legal framework for defining the rights of our people.

Let me turn now to: what is this UN framework? And let me just ask you, if you’ve read this raise your hand. If you’ve read this declaration, raise your hand. By golly, I’m glad James has read it. That’s a pretty nice substantial fraction. But many places where I ask that question, very few hands will go up.

So I just want to make about seven fundamental points about this new human rights framework. The first, the point is that it…in 46 articles, it lays out the minimum standards, minimum human rights standards for the…protecting the survival, dignity and well-being of Indigenous peoples worldwide -- that includes Native Americans, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians. As Professor Anaya mentioned, it was approved by the UN in 2007, it was formally endorsed by the United States in 2010, 150 nations around the world as well.

Secondly, this document contains the authentic aspirations of Indigenous peoples in large measure because they wrote it and they negotiated it through the UN human rights framework. And if you read it as a practitioner of federal Indian law, you’ll see that all of the issues that our clients are concerned about and that we’ve litigated on and towards are contained in this document.

Thirdly, these standards as I mentioned earlier are comprehensive in nature. They address the full range of our Native American issues and aspirations. Our property rights, political rights, civil rights, economic rights, social rights, cultural rights, religious rights, environmental rights; it’s all there in this framework. And the interesting thing about it is the rights that are described in here are described as inherent, inherent human rights and I think that that’s very significant because an inherent human right means that the UN didn’t give these rights to Native people. These are rights that we already have.

So these are inherent human rights that nobody gave to Indigenous peoples, but rather they arise from our Indigenous histories, our Indigenous institutions, but were beyond reach by Native people in their domestic legal forums. What the United Nations did here was basically look to the larger body of modern international human rights law and simply pulled the norms and the human rights treaty provisions, pulled it out of this larger body and put them into this declaration and it’s showing the 150 nations of the world how to interpret this larger body of human rights law in the unique context of Indigenous peoples so that Indigenous peoples have the same human rights that the rest of humanity already enjoys. Further, these rights that are described in here, it is said that they’re supposed to be interpreted according to notions of justice, equality, good faith, democracy, a very just foundation for these inherent human rights, more just foundation than that found in the dark side of federal Indian law. Moreover, related to that, these rights are not considered to be new rights or special rights, but simply as I mentioned earlier just simply rights that are drawn from the existing body of international human rights law.

Next I’d like to talk about some of my major finding about these rights that I… conclusions that I drew in this book. Firstly, that these UN human rights standards are largely compatible with our U.S. law and policy in its finest hour. And at its very best and in its finest hour ,our federal Indian law in the 10 best cases ever decided about Indians show a fundamental compatibility with many of these standards. And those standards, if they were to become part of our body of law would simply make the very best in our legal culture more reliable and more dependable, but at the same time I also found, secondly, that many areas in our existing law and policy simply fail to pass muster under these standards, they don’t comply with these standards. And the book goes on to lay out these many, many areas that we need…where we need to uplift our existing law and policy so that they conform or are compatible with these minimum human rights standards.

The sixth point I wanted to make about this framework is that the Declaration is not a self-implementing instrument. It’s not legally binding law that federal courts must enforce, but rather the Declaration asks the United States to implement these standards in partnership with Native people, that the United States and all these other 150 nations are supposed to work with Native people to implement these standards, to provide technical assistance, to provide funding, to go forward in a nation-building kind of an effort to implement these standards. And so I think that that is a call to action to Indian Country to sit down with the government and see how we should go about implementing these standards in partnership.

I’d like to begin winding this lecture down here by looking at the need for these standards in our own country here. I think that the threshold question for all Americans of good will, including our tribal leaders and our tribal attorneys, is why do we need these standards in our own country? Aren’t we the leading democracy? Are you saying that we have injustice in our midst? Many Americans of goodwill will admit that yes, our nation was birthed on the human rights principle and we’ve got a very proud heritage of human rights that have always animated our nation from the very inception down to the present day. We’ve gone to war to protect human rights, to punish those who violate human rights, and it may be true that we haven’t always lived up to these core American human right values throughout our history in terms of our treatment of Native people here in the U.S., but are we responsible for healing a painful past when we didn’t personally have any hand in these appalling miscarriages of justice? It’s unfair to come to me when I had no part in that and ask me to heal the past. Others will ask, honestly ask, ‘Is an international law ineffective and unenforceable?’ That’s a myth that I once believed in as a dyed-in-the-wool practitioner of federal Indian law. Besides, many people just don’t like the UN. We don’t want to be bossed around by the UN or international law. Other Americans of good faith, goodwill, will say, ‘Why can’t we just rely on our existing law and policy to address these problems? After all, we have the Bill of Rights. Why not just apply the Bill of Rights and treat everybody alike and nothing more? We’ve got a comprehensive body of federal Indian law already. Why not just rely on it to fix these problems?’ And as advocates we must be able to answer each of these questions in a very persuasive way at the outset, otherwise we should fold up our tents and go home. So this book tries to answer those questions about the need for these standards in our nation. It explores answers. It looks at…it basically sees four reasons regarding the need for these standards: legal reasons, political reasons, social reasons and environmental reasons. And I hope that after you review these reasons in the book that you’ll agree with me that we do have compelling reasons and a compelling need to implement these standards here in the United States.

The first reason being a legal reason. As I mentioned earlier, to strengthen our body of federal Indian law, to reform that dark side of federal Indian law and root out the law of colonialism, the doctrines of conquest, doctrines of racism, all of these dark sides of our existing framework that have anti-Indigenous functions, to resolve our internal tensions and we have to remember that as I mentioned earlier or maybe it was later today that right now in our existing legal framework if you read our Supreme Court decisions in our foundational cases you will see that when it comes to defining Native American rights that the Supreme Court expressly eschews looking at ‘abstract principles of justice’ or ‘questions of morality’ when defining Native American rights. So this has produced an amoral body of law that is bereft of the human rights principle and I think that that has led to an amazing prevalence of unjust cases in federal Indian law. And so there is a need to reform federal Indian law to try to inject this human rights principle. I know as a litigator whenever you’re able to inject human rights into your issue, your position is immediately strengthened, and we found that when we were making the NAGPRA [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act] statute that we were stymied in our negotiations, stalled out because of self-interest between the scientists, museums and the tribal communities until we agreed to follow the human rights principle and that kind of cracked the case and led to the passage of NAGPRA. And you can imagine if your client’s right to self-determination was considered an inherent human right, your client’s right to culture, your client’s right to accountable public media and so on and so forth, rights to protect Indigenous habitat were deemed to be inherent human rights, that’s going to put you in a much stronger legal position. So we have a legal reason here.

Secondly, we have social reasons, that is this inherited legacy of conquest that I talked about earlier, and the need to finally try to solve these hard-to-solve social ills. These are root problems that we’ve inherited in our tribal communities, cry out for healing in a national program of reconciliation and I think that this declaration is the antidote for those social ills and will enable our nation to solve them at long last and then move forward.

Thirdly, we have these political reasons to implement this declaration. Our nation has long been plagued with the Indian question or the Indian problem, ever since the United States first embarked on colonizing Indian lands and peoples. The political question has always been, ‘What do we do with the Indians once we’ve colonized everything? What do we do with them?’ And this has long perplexed our nation and historically…well, it’s a universal problem that all settler states with a history of colonialism have had to confront. How do we bring the Native people into the body politic? What’s the best approach for doing that on a political basis? And we’ve tried many approaches here in the United States. We’ve tried this Worcester framework of inherent tribal sovereignty for domestic dependent nations operating under the protection of the United States. We’ve tried Indian removal, to remove the tribes from our body politic. We’ve tried to exterminate Indians at the zenith of the Indian wars. We’ve zigzagged back to guardianship and Christianization methods to bring Native people into the body politic. We’ve tried self-government under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. We’ve swung back from there to termination to make our Indians disappear and then in 1970 swung back to Indian self-determination. So we’ve had these zigzagging policy shifts in U.S. history trying to figure out the best way to bring Native people into the body politic. The problem is that the normal mode for assimilating immigrants into our free and democratic society simply doesn’t work for Native people because we already inhabit the nation and we want to retain our Indigenous rights. Well, this declaration shows us how to do that. It tells us that we want to bring Native people into the body politic using the self-determination principle with our Indigenous rights intact, basically saying that we got it right with our Indian Self-Determination policy of 1970, that we should stay the course and do whatever we need to do to bring Native America into the body politic with all of their Indigenous human rights intact.

Fourth reason that is discussed in this book is environmental reasons. I think that there’s a healthy byproduct in recognizing and protecting Indigenous rights and that healthy byproduct has to do with this environmental crisis that our nation is confronted with. We have a growing environmental problem and a crisis that is a worldwide environmental problem that threatens human security. We see it in the mass extinction of animals and plants, the pollution of Father Sky, Mother Earth, our waters, our oceans. We see it in this climate change. We now live in a warming world thanks to the industrialized nations emitting these gases into the atmosphere. And this has caused…this crisis has caused scientists to fear a catastrophic collapse of some of our important global life systems. And so the scientists are sounding the alarm, but no one is listening. This crisis continues to get worse and not better. We can’t solve it without first getting a land ethic and [an] ocean ethic that can guide us, a moral compass to show humans and our modern society how we should comport ourselves to the natural world. And as far back as 1948, Aldo Leopold urged America, ‘Get a land ethic.’ But it’s never taken root in our nation yet. Why? We don’t have any clear guidance from our Western traditions, the Western religions, science or technology. They don’t tell us how humans should comport to the natural world. We have to look to Indigenous peoples for that, into their value system, our primal tribal religions, our hunting, fishing and gathering cosmologies and those value systems, which were the first world views of the human race that were wired into our biology as humans spread across the planet, and in that set of Indigenous value systems I think our nation will find the ingredients for an American land ethic. Without that ethic, we’re not going to be able to solve this environmental crisis and we’ve placed ourselves on the path of failed civilizations. We can’t solve it, the problem, without an ethic to guide us. It’s just simply too expensive. The problem is too severe. It costs too much money and we lack the political will to address and solve this problem. So we sorely need a land ethic and I think that there is a congruency between protecting Indigenous habitat and Indigenous land uses of Indigenous land, Indigenous cultures, empowering the Native people to protect their ways of life so that they can come to the seat at the table and maybe share some of their traditional knowledge and their value system and help us forge a land ethic. If you look at the Amazon forest, the remnants of that forest exist because of the Indigenous peoples that reside in these habitats that have been empowered to continue to live there and to defend those areas. Were it not for them, that forest would probably have long been gone. So there is that relationship between protecting and empowering Indigenous peoples and their environmental rights and addressing this environmental crisis.

So I’ve spoken too long and I want to just simply close with some quick concluding observations about the challenges in implementing this declaration and I think that I would direct your attention to James Anaya’s report that he submitted to the United States in his capacity as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In the year 2012, he conducted an official mission to the United States to consult with the United States government, to consult with tribal leaders to identify the human rights situation of Native Americans and barriers to implementing all of these human rights standards and he compiled this report in August of 2012. It’s entitled The Situation of Indigenous Peoples in the United States of America. And I would urge you to go to your computer and download it, and in fact I think we may have copies here this evening alongside my book tonight, our book I should say, in which Professor Anaya gives recommendations to the United States for steps that our nation must take to implement these standards. He concludes that we have a significant challenge in doing that, in rectifying and addressing our legacy of conquest here in the United States and it calls for changes, fundamental changes in all three branches of the federal government -- Congress, the President and the Executive Branch and our courts -- and these are fundamental changes that he is recommending that our nation take. And so it lays out a big task it seems to me for our generation and the next to implement these challenges to…I think this report is one of those rare policy analyses that come across from time to time, once in a great while, that can become a catalyst for change and so this report is a good starting place to download it and read it and I think you’ll agree that it does lay out a big task for our generation. And there’s a role for our law schools, our law professors, our law students, Native people, Americans of goodwill to come forward, our tribal leaders to come forward, to reach out for these human rights standards and work to implement them.

And I think the first step here is a…there’s a need for a focused national dialogue on the nature and content of human rights for Native Americans. And our nation has never had such a national dialogue of that nature in the same way that we looked at…our nation looked at Black America and the need for equality under the law for Black America. That was serious national conversation, but we’ve never had one when it comes to talking about human rights for Native America and our legal framework has no human rights judicial discourse in it at all and so we need to have a national discourse to understand the need for these standards in our country, to debunk the reasons not to act and I think that that’s a first step.

Secondly, I think we have to build a national campaign to implement these standards, to coax the government into developing a national plan of action through a national program of reconciliation to implement these standards in partnership with Native America. To do that…unless we do that, nothing’s going to happen and these human rights standards will remain beyond reach. So we need the internal machinery to set that in place for a campaign complete with guiding legal principles to develop this seamless new framework, employing some of our finest legal minds in our ranking law schools to help us do that, strategies and a focused public relations and public education campaign to educate the public about this, very similar to the campaign that Black America engaged in for 58 years to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education. There’s lessons to be learned there in that campaign. There’s lessons to be learned from our tribal sovereignty movement that could be helpful in guiding a campaign to implement these standards in the 21st century.

And so with that brings me to my final point that this campaign has to also develop some philosophical foundation, some philosophical principles to motivate social action, social justice action and to guide our campaign into the light of justice. I don’t think we have to look far for that philosophical foundation for this campaign. We only have to look as far as to our wisdom traditions of the human race, remembering that from day one of the history of the human race has been one of atrocity, acts of genocide, warfare, catastrophes brought about by man’s inhumanity to man in the whole course of human history and along the way our ancestors developed some wisdom traditions that come to us from the world’s religions that teach us and tell us how to heal historical injuries, injuries of the kind that we have perpetrated on other people. These wisdom traditions work as sure as the rain must fall and they tell us it’s just five steps, it’s not rocket science. The first step being an injury has taken place and here we’re talking about this legacy of conquest that is still seen and felt today.

The second step is whatever tradition you come from your finest and highest teachings tell you that when you’ve injured somebody you must go to that person and apologize, prostrate yourself and ask for forgiveness. It’s a very hard step to do because we often demonize the people that we have harmed, wished them ill and it’s inconceivable, unthinkable to then go to them on bended knee and ask them to forgive us. It’s a hard thing to do, but our wisdom traditions teach us that we have to do that to relieve our guilt, to relieve their shame, to begin clearing the air for a healing process.

And that brings us to our third step in this healing process and that is to accept the apology and forgive; also very hard to do. I think one of the indicia of a traumatized community is simply they’re unable to forgive those who have trespassed against them. It’s hard to do, but it’s important that we forgive. Only the strong can forgive. It’s probably our highest, strongest human spiritual power that we have to forgive and all of our traditions teach us that we must forgive.

That third step then leads us to the…once peace is made it leads us to the fourth step in this process, acts of atonement. The burden shifts back to the perpetrator’s community to perform acts of atonement, to make amends, to wipe the slate clean as best as humans can do. We know we can’t turn back the hands of time, but we can do everything within our power as humans to make things right and I think these acts of atonement and this process are laid out in that declaration. It shows us what we must do here.

Once that step has gone through, it brings us to the last step and that is healing and reconciliation and at that point we’ve done everything that humans can do to heal, taken that high road to heal a historical injury in our midst regardless of the cause and from there we sit at the center of human compassion and we can honestly say at that point that I am you and you are me and we are one. We’ve been reunited and we can go on from there. And so I think that these wisdom traditions work in even the most heinous situations and I think we only need to look that far as a philosophical foundation for a campaign to guide us to that promised land so that we might all stand in the light of justice.”

[applause]

James Anaya:

“Walt has agreed to take a few questions. You have about five, maybe 10 minutes.”

Walter Echo-Hawk:

“Okay. I was hoping to filibuster so that we wouldn’t have to do any questions, but as long as they’re easy ones but please…yeah, five minutes, questions and then we have some books compliments of the campus bookstore. Anyone? Sir.”

Audience member:

“I think it was wonderful to hear you. And you have talked about how the United Nations Declaration can help the United States of America and do you have anything in the United Nations Declaration, which could be taken from the United States? I mean is there some teachings of United States Native culture, which is endorsed by the United Nations Declaration?”

Walter Echo-Hawk:

“Well, I feel that it’s very important for the United States to take a leadership role in implementing these standards in its own backyard. As President [Dwight] Eisenhower said, ‘Whatever America wants in the rest of the world first has to take place in our own backyard,’ and we hold ourselves out to the world as a human rights champion. We’re always running to the UN to have humanitarian intervention, to get support of the UN, and so I think that we don’t want to be the last nation on earth to implement these standards. We want to be among the first and the rest of the world is already embarking upon implementing these standards and that train is leaving the station and we need to be in there because I think that we are a very strong world power, we have influence around the world and if we’re able to successfully implement these human rights standards here in our own land, in one of the hard-core settler states or settler nations, then that would provide, I would hope, precedent for other nations to do the same thing around the world. It’s getting to be a smaller globe and we need to look across our boundaries to other lands. Certainly that’s what happened in the making of this declaration when Indigenous peoples came together and went to the UN. But I think it’s important for America not to be the last country on the planet to fully implement each and every one of these standards, that we should be among the first to try to take a leadership role to redeem our place as a champion of human rights worldwide because we use this as a tool in our foreign policy. Human rights is an important tool in our foreign policy and so we need to get matters fixed in our own backyards before we can do that in a legitimate way. Ma’am?”

Audience member:

“What suggestions could you give us in regards to getting such a national campaign you’re calling for moving, to find who needs to listen, who can move things and basically who can do what? Do you have any suggestions of how to achieve this, how to support and contribute?”

Walter Echo-Hawk:

“I think that…well, I have a couple, two chapters in the book that’s devoted to that, chapters nine and 10, so you’ll have to read it. You have to buy the book and read it. I think we have to mount a social movement, maybe a mother of all campaigns. To do that we have to internally put in place the machinery to do that, we have to go to our tribal leaders, ask them to get out of the casinos for a little bit, uplift their vision to see this new framework. We need a cadre I think of tribal leaders that can lead us into the light of justice. We need to staff them with some of our best attorneys that we have that are versed in human rights law and we need to have a lot of ingredients internally to vet some of these remedies that we’re talking about. We want to be sure we’re not going to make bad law or we’re not going to weaken our rights as Native Americans that we already have, rather we want to be sure that we strengthen them. Then we have to develop a strategic law development strategy and guided by astute political strategists with a…armed also with a very vigorous public education campaign. So I’m talking about the entire race of people and all of our assets and I think that we’re in a much better place to do that, Native America, in the year 2013. We’ve come a long way. We’ve got the experience, the capability and the resources to do that. Our survival, cultural survival depends on it. And you can look back to when the national…the NAACP was founded in 1910 and they were trying to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson and they had enormous hurdles in front of them at that time and yet it took them 58 years, but they did it. And I think we’re more poised now, Indian Country, to do that, but it’s going to be…take a lot of work. I think our young attorneys have to talk…learn the parlance of human rights, international human rights because we are now in a brand-new era of federal Indian law, a human rights era. And when President Obama endorsed this declaration, it ushered in a brand new era for federal Indian law and I think that the task for this next generation is to implement that declaration. Just like back in 1970, our goal at that time was to implement the Indian self-determination policy and it took a couple generations to basically do that in full measure. As I say, I think we’ve made big advances, we’ve come as far as we can though and now we’re in this human rights era of federal Indian law and policy and I think it’s incumbent upon you younger people, it’s easier for me to say, to take that up and carry it forward. Sir?”

Audience member:

“I was wondering, you mentioned some domestic examples like NAACP sort of leading the way for Black America. You also mentioned we should be sort of the leader as the United States in implementing human rights. Are there any…the declaration granted in 2007, are there any countries that sort of set a good precedent for us to follow?”

Walter Echo-Hawk:

“Yeah, I think…was it Bolivia or which country…? It just simply passed a statute incorporating the whole declaration in one fell swoop, but I think Jim may have a better idea on that. But there’s other countries. I think each country is unique. They have their own Indigenous issues, they have their own legal cultures that they’re looking at and I think we can look around the world and benefit from the experience in other countries in implementing it and the book kind of does that in a few limited examples. But I don’t know if you have anything to offer, Jim, from your perspective? Sir, in the back.”

Audience member:

“In your perspective, what is self-determination? Is there a timeframe of that since 1970 to now or further?”

Walter Echo-Hawk:

“Well, I think that in the United States we reached our low point in 1950. In the ‘50s it was the termination era. It was a low point in Native life in our country it seems to me. The policy was termination, to make Indian tribes disappear as quickly as possible. And our activists and tribal leaders in the 1950s and in the 1960s worked as best they could to resist immediate and wholesale termination by the federal government. And their work…in the ‘60s, Vine Deloria was the Executive Director of NCAI and Clyde Warrior was the President of the National Indian Youth Council. They were articulating, especially Vine was articulating this self-determination principle to set our Indian tribes on a different path to the promised land in the civil rights movement, which was implementing Brown v. Board of Education. He articulated the self-determination policy to -- ultimately, that was approved in 1970 by President Nixon in a historic message to Congress -- and that Indian self-determination policy broke from termination and forced assimilation to transfer power back to the tribes as much as possible. And so from that point, from 1970 to the current date, I think that’s been at the center of our tribal sovereignty movement and I think it will continue to be. The UN Declaration, at the very core of this declaration is the self-determination principle, and so it shows us that our nation is sort of on the right path here with our self-determination aspiration, self-government, Indigenous institutions, tribal cultures, the right to culture. All of these are related to our self-determination or sovereignty -- political sovereignty, cultural sovereignty, economic sovereignty. And so I think that this, as far as I can see, it’s still…and it’s the centerpiece of this UN Declaration and that’s why it’s pretty compatible with our existing U.S. policy and we need to continue on that path by just simply uplifting these different areas where our existing laws fall short of the UN standards.” 

Professor Breaks Down Sovereignty and Explains its Significance

Year

Sovereignty is one of those terms we toss around without much thought. It is an important word within contemporary American Indian discussions. The term itself draws from legal, cultural, political, and historical traditions, and these traditions are connected to both European as well as Indigenous philosophies in complicated ways. A shared understanding of the term would be helpful to both local people working on their own issues, and working with surrounding communities. Rather than defining sovereignty as a term, what I hope to do here is acknowledge aspects of sovereignty that have become sticking points as Indigenous people assert their own self-determination. I won’t go into Indigenous philosophies about sovereignty because it’s probably none of your business...

Resource Type
Citation

Chad Uran, Shaawano. "Professor Breaks Down Sovereignty and Explains its Significance." Indian Country Today Media Network. January 2, 2014. Opinion. (https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/professor-breaks-down-sovereignt…, accessed March 2, 2022)

Indian Nations Are Still Fighting the U.S. Cavalry

Producer
Indian Country Today
Year

Throughout the 19th Century the U.S. Cavalry perpetrated the genocide of Indian People. Today’s Cavalry–federal, state and local police–are no longer committed to extermination. But American cops’ flagrant disregard for tribal self-governance when carrying out law enforcement activities on Indian lands, threatens the existence of Indian People.

Thankfully Indian inherent sovereignty and treaty rights can halt non-tribal cops who encroach upon Indian country under the guise of the Major Crimes Act or Nevada v. Hicks and while doing so, threaten tribal territorial autonomy and Indian civil rights.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Galanda, Gabriel S. "Indian Nations Are Still Fighting the U.S. Cavalry." Indian Country Today. September 04, 2013. Article. (https://ictnews.org/archive/indian-nations-are-still-fighting-the-us-cavalry, accessed July 24, 2023)

Native American Lands and the Supreme Court

Producer
C-SPAN Video Library
Year

Tribal judge and legal scholar Angela Riley (Citizen Potawatomi) spoke in the U.S. Supreme Court chamber about the history of the Supreme Court and Native American lands. The lecture was one in a series hosted by the Supreme Court Historical Society on the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and property rights‚ Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg introduced Professor Riley...

People
Resource Type
Citation

Riley, Angela. "Native American Lands and the Supreme Court." Supreme Court Historical Society on the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and property rights, Supreme Court Historical Society. Washington, DC. Nov 14, 2012. Presentation. (https://www.c-span.org/video/?309427-1/native-american-lands-supreme-court, accessed August 21, 2013) 

Indian Pride: Episode 102: Treaties & Sovereignty

Producer
Prairie Public Broadcasting
Year

Indian Pride, an American Indian cultural magazine television series, spotlights the diverse cultures of American Indian people throughout the country. This episode of Indian Pride features John Echohawk, Executive Director of the Native American Rights Fund, and focuses on understanding Indian treaties and tribal sovereignty. (Segment Placement: 1:08 - 14:43)

People
Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

"Treaties & Sovereignty." Indian Pride (Episode 102). Prairie Public Broadcasting. Fargo, North Dakota. 2007. Television program. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpa4DK0vXyU, accessed July, 24, 2023).

The Jurisdiction of Inherent Right Aboriginal Governments

Author
Year

Since the recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights in Canada by section 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982, the inherent right of the Aboriginal peoples to govern themselves has become a generally accepted aspect of Canadian constitutional law. But what is the scope of the governmental authority, or jurisdiction, that is exercisable by inherent right Aboriginal governments? And how does the jurisdiction of Aboriginal governments interact with the jurisdiction of other governments in Canada, especially the federal and provincial governments? This research paper will attempt to answer these questions in a general way, without attempting to determine or assess the jurisdiction of any particular Aboriginal government. 

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

McNeil, Kent. "The Jurisdiction of Inherent Right Aboriginal Governments". Research Paper for the National Centre for First Nations Governance. National Centre for First Nations Governance. Canada. October 11, 2007. Paper. (https://fngovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/kent_mcneil.pdf , accessed February 12, 2024)