Indigenous, Indian, and Aboriginal Law Commons^™

The Human Costs Of “Free Association”: Socio-Cultural Narratives And The Legal Battle For Micronesian Health In Hawai'i, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1377 (2014), Susan Serrano

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Red Law, White Supremacy: Cherokee Freedmen, Tribal Sovereignty, And The Colonial Feedback Loop, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1227 (2014), Jeremiah Chin

UIC Law Review

This paper attempts to unpack questions at the intersections of race and sovereignty by analyzing two federal court cases involving Cherokee Freedmen and citizenship: Vann v. United States DOI and Cherokee Nation v. Nash.

Rethinking Resistance: Reflections On The Cultural Lives Of Property, Collective Identity, And Intellectual Property, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1349 (2014), Caroline Joan Picart

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Person(S) Of Interest And Missing Women: Legal Abandonment In The Downtown Eastside, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Women are disappearing. Sixty-nine of them disappeared from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver between 1997 and 2002. Northern communities in British Columbia believe that more than 40 women have gone missing from the Highway of Tears in the past thirty years. The endangered do not come from every walk of life. Most of these women are Aboriginal. Many of them are poor. To be more precise then, poor women and Aboriginal women are disappearing. Aboriginal women in particular are the targets of an irrefutable epidemic of violence in Canada today.

Robert Pickton is thought to have murdered almost 50 of …

Tribal Disruption And Indian Claims, Matthew L.M. Fletcher, Kathryn E. Fort, Dr. Nicholas J. Reo

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Legal claims are inherently disruptive. Plaintiffs' suits invariably seek to unsettle the status quo. On occasion, the remedies to legal claims can be so disruptive-that is, impossible to enforce or implement in a fair and equitable manner-that courts simply will not issue them. In the area of federal Indian law, American Indian tribal claims not only disrupt the status quo but may even disrupt so-called settled expectations of those affected by the claims. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has dismissed a round of Indian land claims at the pleading stage, includingOnondaga Nation v. New York, because …

It's Worth The Hassle Part Ii: How Does The Baby Veronica Case Impact Cases Involving Indian Children?, Elizabeth Brandt

Articles

No abstract provided.

Water Governance Challenges In New Mexico's Middle Rio Grande Valley: A Resilience Assessment, Melina Harm Benson, Dagmar Llewellyn, Ryan Morrison, Mark Stone

Publications

No abstract provided.

Jump In Before It's Too Late: Protecting And Increasing Streamflows In New Mexico, Sharon Wirth

Publications

Freshwater ecosystems need adequate streamflow to supply clean water for humans and maintain healthy habitat for wildlife. Over-appropriation, overuse, climate change, and drought plague New Mexico's rivers, taxing many rivers beyond sustainability. Despite the myriad of problems caused by little or no water in our rivers, policies and procedures to protect and increase streamflows in New Mexico are limited. While most Western states have made demonstrable progress in alleviating various legal and technical barriers to protecting and increasing streamflows, New Mexico has made only limited, recent progress towards solutions for our drying rivers. This article takes a critical look at …

Developing The Law Of The River: The Integration Of Law And Policy Into Hydrologic And Socio-Economic Modeling Efforts In The Willamette River Basin, Adell Louise Amos

Publications

A legal and policy infrastructure -- referred to as a "law of the river" -- exists for every river basin in the U.S. an can be as important as natural processes in terms of managing the future of the resource. Because of the way that water law and policy have evolved in the U.S., this infrastructure involves a matrix of state and federal law that governs the choices that policymakers, end users, and agencies make. This "law of the river" provides the context in which decisions are made and not made. It also draws the boundaries within which decision makers …

A Strange Kind Of Identity Theft: How Competing Definitions Of "Indian" May Deny Individual Identity, Suzianne D. Painter-Thorne

Articles

To the extent we think about it all, most of us believe what our parents tell us about where we came from-about who our grandparents are, who our ancestors were, our ethnic background, our family histories. My own family story includes claims to Scottish, Irish, French, and English ancestry. It also includes the Cherokee great-grandmother so popular in American genealogical stories. I have not undertaken an extensive genealogical search to more accurately pinpoint the threads of my ancestral quilt; I have simply accepted the family lore without much thought to whether it was verifiable.

My family's claimed link to the …

In Plain View, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

In this tightly argued and thoroughly engaging article, Gregory Ablavsky makes the case for a revisionist history of the U.S. Constitution that places Native American Indians at its center. While it isn’t hard to show that conventional constitutional histories largely neglect Indians, it isn’t easy to prove that such neglect is not benign. That is, it’s one thing to argue that standard accounts should include a discussion of Indians, but it’s another thing entirely to make a convincing case that core constitutional understandings would be fundamentally altered if historians fully and prominently integrated the history of relations with Indians into …

Protecting Traditional Knowledge In International Intellectual Property Law: Imperatives For Protection And Choice Of Modalities, 14 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 25 (2014), Tesh Dagne

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

The need for protecting traditional knowledge (TK) has been acknowledged in discussion and negotiations under the umbrella of a number of inter-governmental organizations that deal with biodiversity, the environment, indigenous peoples’ rights, human rights, food and agriculture, among others. It has, however, proved difficult to arrive at a consensus on the proper modality that can serve the needs and desires of Indigenous and Local Communities (ILCs) in their economic and cultural participation. The article examines the imperatives for the protection of TK and explores the modalities of TK protection at the international level for regulating the control of, access to …

Misadventures In Indian Law: The Supreme Court's Patchak Decision, Anna O'Brien

University of Colorado Law Review

"After today, any person may sue under the Administrative Procedure Act . .. to divest the Federal Government of title to and possession of land held in trust for Indian tribes . . . so long as the complaint does not assert a personal interest in the land.' - Justice Sotomayor, dissenting in Match-E-Be-Nash- She- Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians v. Patchak. Ever since European colonization of the Americas began in the fifteenth century, there has been friction between the new arrivals and the native inhabitants. The United States has dealt with its "Indian problem" through assimilation, reservations, and eventually, …

Comparative Institutional Competency And Sovereignty In Indian Affairs, Michalyn Steele

University of Colorado Law Review

While vigorous debate surrounds the proper scope and ambit of inherent tribal authority, there remains a critical antecedent question: whether Congress or the courts are ultimately best situated to define the contours of inherent tribal authority. In February 2013, Congress enacted controversial tribal jurisdiction provisions as part of the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization recognizing and affirming inherent tribal authority to prosecute all persons, including non-Indian offenders, for crimes of domestic violence in Indian country. This assertion by Congress of its authority to set the bounds of tribal inherent authority-beyond where the United States Supreme Court has held tribal inherent …

Meaningful Consultation With Tribal Governments: A Uniform Standard To Guarantee That Federal Agencies Properly Consider Their Concerns, Michael Eitner

University of Colorado Law Review

"Mount Tenabo is the source of our creation stories and is a central part of our spiritual world view. . . . It holds the Puha, or life force, of the Creator. We pray to the Mountain for renewal, which comes from Mt. Tenabo's special place in Western Shoshone religion.' ' - Sandy Dann, Western Shoshone The obligation that federal agencies consult with Indian tribes regarding undertakings that impact tribal interests is grounded in various statutes, implementing regulations, and Executive Order 13,175. Currently, tribes confront a variety of approaches to consultation because each agency develops its own standards for conducting …

Sacred Rain Arrow: Honoring The Native American Heritage Of The States While Balancing The Citizens' Constitutional Rights, Amelia Coates

American Indian Law Review

Many states’ histories and traditions are steeped heavily in Native American culture, which explains why tribal imagery and symbolism are prevalent in official state paraphernalia such as license plates, flags, and state seals. Problems arise for states using Native American artwork when a citizen takes offense to the religious implications of Native American depictions, and objects to having it displayed on any number of items. This Comment will examine the likely outcome of cases involving Establishment Clause and compelled speech claims arising from Native American images and propose a solution for balancing the constitutional rights of the citizens while still …

The Right To Safe Water And Crown-Aboriginal Fiduciary Law: Litigating A Resolution To The Public Health Hazards Of On-Reserve Water Problems, Constance Macintosh

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Canada is at a crossroads. The gap between our national self-image as a country that respects human rights and the reality of socio-economic inequality and exclusion demands a re-engagement with the international human rights project and a recommitment to the values of social justice and equality affirmed in the early years of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This book sketches a blueprint for reconceiving and retrieving social rights in diverse spheres of human rights practice in Canada, both political and legal. Leading academics and activists explore how the Charter and administrative decision making should protect social rights …

Person(S) Of Interest And Missing Women: Legal Abandonment In The Downtown Eastside, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Women are disappearing. Sixty-nine of them disappeared from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver between 1997 and 2002. Northern communities in British Columbia believe that more than 40 women have gone missing from the Highway of Tears in the past thirty years. The endangered do not come from every walk of life. Most of these women are Aboriginal. Many of them are poor. To be more precise then, poor women and Aboriginal women are disappearing. Aboriginal women in particular are the targets of an irrefutable epidemic of violence in Canada today. Robert Pickton is thought to have murdered almost 50 of …

The Door Has A Tendency To Swing Shut: The Saga Of Aboriginal Peoples' Equality Claims, Naiomi Metallic

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This paper tracks the history of Aboriginal peoples' equality complaints against the state. From the time Aboriginal people started to bring discrimination complaints before the courts, there have been significant obstacles that have operated to effectively — and sometimes even explicitly — prevent Aboriginal peoples from advancing pressing discrimination complaints against governments. Although there have been changes made in the law over time to attempt to eliminate such barriers, what we see is a pattern where new obstacles crop up to replace the old ones. Over and over, Aboriginal peoples see the door to equality open up only to have …

Tsilhqot'in Nation V. Bc: Reconfiguring Aboriginal Title In The Name Of Reconciliation, Constance Macintosh

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In the text that follows, I start by explaining how Canada's behaviour in the Tsilhqot'in litigation undercuts, rather than fosters, the potential for a relationship of trust, which is foundational for reconciliation. In particular, I argue that Canada's behaviour suggests federal disregard for the state roles and responsibilities that the Supreme Court of Canada has found are mandated by the recognition and affirmation of Aboriginal and treaty rights in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982. I then focus on the judgment of the Court of Appeal. As discussed below, the Court of Appeal upheld the trial judge's decision, but …