American Indian law

This week, Law and Order Commission issued its findings on the lack of public safety on American Indian reservations, according to the Associated Press. Governmental statistics show the violent crime rates can be 20 times the national average, the AP also reported. The commission set the goal of improving those crime rates within a decade, including giving tribes more control over policing crime on reservations.

In 1910, President Taft signed the Buy Indian Act into law, The Washington Times reports. The law requires the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs to give preference to American Indian-owned businesses in awarding contracts and funding. But the Interior Department only just approved the rules that will enforce the legislation, The Washington Times further reports. As a result of the law, an estimated $45 million would go to American Indian-owned and -operated businesses each year.

(I wonder how many other laws never had their implementing regulations put into place.)

When the United Nations Declaration On the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted in 2007, it was seen as a milestone in better protecting the rights of indigenous peoples to protect their lands and cultures. But it is unlikely that President Barack Obama is going to issue an executive order to enforce the declaration, the Indian Country Today Media Network reports. Yet American Indian legal experts who gathered recently say that law to enforce the principles behind the declaration are needed more than ever. Those principles are that free, prior and informed consent from indigenous peoples is necessary before policies affecting them are implemented. U.S. assistant secretary for Indian Affairs Kevin Washburn said in a speech that "free, prior and informed consent" is more like veto power, ICTMN reports.

The Onondaga Nation's land-claim lawsuit ended after an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected. The circuit court had ruled the tribe had waited took long to seek redress for the loss of their territory in New York. The Syracuse Post-Standard reports the tribe may turn to international forums instead: "The nation said it will pursue the claim in international venues -- the United Nations or the Organization of American States Commission on Human Rights."

An Eighth Circuit judge, who dissented in an American Indian's woman's appeal of her 10-year sentence for killing her baby, told a law school forum he supports her early release, The Grand Forks Herald reported. Judge Myron Bright, now 94, said the defendant would have gotten a lighter sentence if she was not on an American Indian reservation. The judge remarked "because of historical jurisdiction taken by federal courts in Indian Country in the 19th century and more recent special laws, Indians convicted of serious crimes on reservations face harsh federal sentences. For the same crimes, he said, non-Indians 'across the road' would get much more lenient state sentences," the paper also reported.

Lawyers for the Onondaga Nation are not very hopeful that their land claim will get accepted for review, much less get a positive ruling, from the U.S. Supreme Court after the justices ruled that the equitable doctrine of laches barred the land claim of the Oneida Nation, another Haudenosaunee/Iroquois tribe based in New York. However: the "Onondaga’s land rights lawsuit is framed differently from the Oneida and Cayuga cases. It brings environmental issues to the forefront for the first time, naming as defendants various corporations because of the destruction they caused to the land and water. The Onondaga claim crucially does not seek possession of the lands, taxing authority, eviction of the people who live on the land or any action other than acknowledgment that the lands were unlawfully taken from the Nation," Indian Country Today reported.

Nonprofit Quarterly reports that many American Indian legal practitioners are finding that “'basically any issue headed for the Supreme Court is probably not going to be decided in favor of the tribes.”' Their advice? Avoid going to the U.S. Supreme Court if at all possible. The other strategy is make the cases as strong as possible: the Native American Rights Fund and the National Congress of American Indians have created the Tribal Supreme Court Project to work up cases before going to the highest court in the land.

In December, the Supreme Court will hear a case about the interpretation of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. My prior post on that case: http://www.cultivatedcompendium.com/news/us-supreme-court-set-hear-argum...

After the tizzy caused by President Obama's suggestion that law schools should be two years, not three years, for full-time students, what will come of the president's suggestion that the Washington Redskins football team should perhaps get a less controversial moniker? Obama made that suggestion in an interview with the Associated Press, The Washington Post reports.

There has been long-running litigation by several American Indian groups or individual American Indian plaintiffs to challenge the registered trademarks that the Washington Redskins hold as disparaging and racist to American Indians. National Public Radio reported on that litigation this spring: http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/05/31/187636561/What-A-Lawsuit-...

A plaintiff's lawyer argues that there was no protection for his client, who worked for an American Indian casino, from allegedly being "repeatedly subjected to offensive and explicit conduct based on race, sex and national origin, including being  'dry humped' by his supervisor, having KKK photos emailed to him, being called a Nazi, being given the 'Heil Hitler' salute, having to hear about his supervisor’s sexual acts and hearing customers being racially denigrated," according to this piece in the San Francisco Examiner. Any sovereign nation sets its own rules on what protection should be given from discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability and other characteristics, and the attorney argues against "using the concept of national sovereignty to deny people their basic rights to safety and fair treatment. Ironically, Native Americans, themselves the subject of genocide and centuries of state-sponsored discrimination and civil-rights abuse, exempt themselves from adhering to any legal protections against discrimination and harassment on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, etc."

A federal judge in New York has ruled the state's banking regulator can control the lending done to New York consumers by online lenders associated with sovereign American Indian tribes, the Washington Post reports. Loans are made by the lenders that violate state law, including on maximum interest rates. "Once states began introducing interest rate caps, some ... lenders began forging relationships with Native American groups to take advantage of their sovereign-nation status," the Post reports. The tribal plaintiffs argued the ruling undermines their sovereignty and their ability to be economically self-sufficient, the Post also reports.