Tag Archives: Native Peoples Law
Mar 5, 2026 Aila HossLexNative Peoples Law
In its foundational Indian law decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently recognized federal supremacy on all matters regarding Indian affairs. This plenary power can preempt both Tribal and state authorities. SCOTUS granted certiorari in Haaland v. Brackeen to assess the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), with some of the challenges being on the basis that the law infringes on state authority under the Tenth Amendment’s anticommandeering doctrine. Indian country anxiously awaited to see if the court would once again abandon longstanding Indian law precedent in favor of state rights, as it recently did in Oklahoma v. Castro Huerta. The court concluded that ICWA was valid. But, the decision left me confounded on the continued viability of anticommandeering arguments to strike down federal Indian affairs legislation. Fortunately, Professor Ann Tweedy’s recent article, Anticommandeering & Indian Affairs Legislation, published in the Harvard Journal on Legislation, considers the applicability of anticommandeering to Indian law following Brackeen.
The anticommandeering doctrine holds that when Congress requires states to adopt or enforce federal law, such actions violate the Tenth Amendment. First articulated by the Supreme Court in the 1990s under the Rehnquist court, the doctrine has been successfully used to strike out provisions of various pieces of federal legislation including the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act (required states to take title and assume liability for radioactive waste within their borders), the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act (required state and local law enforcement to conduct background checks on prospective gun buyers), and the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (prohibited states from establishing sports gambling regulatory schemes). Continue reading "Against Anticommandeering in Indian Law"
Aug 28, 2025 Bethany BergerLexNative Peoples Law
Alexandra Fay,
Courts of Indian Offenses, Courts of Indian Resistance, __
Mich. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2026), available at
SSRN (April 8, 2025).
Much of the history of federal Indian policy is a story of failed attempts to make Native peoples give up what makes them distinct. The complement of this history is the way Native peoples resisted each of these attempts, often using the implements of federal policy in doing so. Failure of U.S. treaty negotiators to recognize differentiation between tribal groups led some Native peoples to develop centralized political structures to coordinate their response. The devastation of federal boarding schools created a generation of Native people who formed the Society of American Indians, the first modern pan-Indian advocacy group, and communicated their resistance in ways familiar to non-Native policymakers and the public had to acknowledge. Mid-twentieth century relocation of Native people from their tribal homelands into American cities brought together people from many tribes to unite against Termination Policy. This is not a triumphal history—many lives, lands, and lifeways were lost in the process. But it underscores the ways that Native people have transformed the tools designed to destroy them to survive and fight back.
In Courts of Indian Offenses, Courts of Indian Resistance, Professor Fay adds to this history. She examines how Native people transformed the Courts of Indian Offenses created by the Department of Interior in the late nineteenth century. Interior created these courts for the express purpose of “civilizing” the Indians, directing them to punish the practices of medicine men, plural marriage, religious dances, and other “heathenish rites and customs.” Although their judges were tribal members, local federal agent appointed these judges and could remove them. Most tribes have now replaced these courts, and the old rules criminalizing tribal culture no longer exist. But five such courts still exist, serving sixteen tribes; their judges are still appointed by the federal government, and their current title, “CFR Courts,” reflects the federal regulations that govern them. Continue reading "Transforming the Master’s Tools: The History of Courts of Indian Offenses"
Mar 18, 2025 Aila HossLexNative Peoples Law
Nothing ruins my appetite for research and commentary on elections and politicians more than a presidential election. Civic duty and guilt keep me engaged, albeit begrudgingly. So, when my initial intrigue in picking up Professor Elizabeth Reese’s recent article, Tribal Representation, and Assimilative Colonialism, turned into captivation, I knew this piece was something I had to share.
Tribes have been exercising their authority as sovereign nations since time immemorial. Tribal sovereignty is an inherent authority that originates from a social contract between a government and its citizens. It predates the United States and colonial governments. Although colonization and genocide diminished Indigenous populations and impeded Tribal governments, Tribes persisted. Today, Tribes occupy a unique status in the United States. They maintain their nationhood while being part of the American family of governments—federal, state, local, and territorial. Continue reading "Tribal Representation in American Democracy"
Jul 1, 2024 Ezra RosserLexNative Peoples LawPoverty Law
Vanessa Ann Racehorse,
Tribal Health Self-Determination: The Role of Tribal Health Systems in Actualizing the Highest Attainable Standard of Health for American Indians and Alaska Natives, __
Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming), available at
SSRN (April 10, 2024).
The life expectancy of Native Americans is almost eleven years less than the average of all races in the United States. (P. 20.) And across countless other metrics—from drug addiction to diabetes—Natives suffer disproportionately high rates of illness and death compared to other Americans. (P. 20.) Despite this, funding for Indian Health Services (IHS) remains below the level of support given to non-Indians and well short of what is needed to provide adequate health care to tribal communities. (P. 19.) Professor Vanessa Ann Racehorse’s article, Tribal Health Self-Determination: The Role of Tribal Health Systems in Actualizing the Highest Attainable Standard of Health for American Indians and Alaska Natives, does a fabulous job describing the linked problems of health disparities and insufficient funding for Native communities, while also offering suggestions on how health outcomes might be improved. But the article’s contributions extend beyond laying a foundation for better understanding tribal health care; Professor Racehorse also shows that when Indian nations assert their powers of self-determination in the health care space, outcomes for tribal members can improve.
Tribal Health Self-Determination is a reminder of the relatively high levels of reservation poverty and the ways that poverty, subordination, and health intersect. As Professor Racehorse highlights, Indian health is made worse by past injustices such as forced sterilization that contribute to historical trauma. (Pp. 11-12.) But health disparities are not inevitable. Under international law, tribal members have a right to the highest attainable standard of health. (Pp. 34-39.) Moreover, tribal takeover of IHS facilities can lead to better health outcomes through culturally competent care and local accountability. (Pp. 40-58.) Under-funding remains a challenge, but Professor Racehorse’s article provides a strong argument for supporting tribal assertions of authority over facilities that were previously run by the federal government. Continue reading "Improving Health Services for Tribal Communities"
Apr 26, 2024 Bethany BergerLexNative Peoples Law
During Elouise Cobell’s campaign against federal management of Indian trust accounts, she learned that the U.S. did all sorts of things with the money. In the 1970s, for example, trust funds went to bailing out New York City and the Chrysler Company. Meanwhile, Native beneficiaries of the accounts couldn’t get payouts to rebuild destroyed homes or care for ill loved ones. And the records of who the accounts belonged to and what should be in them were out-of-date, kept in garbage bags and dilapidated boxes, destroyed by water and gnawed by rodents.
The history of federal Indian trust funds might be seen as simply another example of bureaucratic mismanagement and lack of concern for Indigenous property. But Emilie Connolly’s research shows that it is something more. In, Fiduciary Colonialism: Annuities and Native Dispossession in the Early United States, Professor Connolly examines the early history of such trust accounts to show that their creation and management was itself a tool of colonial domination. By holding and gradually paying out moneys owed to tribes, the United States could achieve expropriation without expensive wars, encourage tribal dependence, and invest the funds to finance further dispossession. As Connolly writes, “[a]nnuities and trust funds anchored . . . a mode of territorial acquisition and population management carried out through the expansion of administrative control over Native peoples’ wealth.” (P. 227.) Continue reading "Twisted Trust"
Mar 5, 2024 Aila HossLexNative Peoples Law
Professor Troy Andrade chronicles the distressing hundred-year history of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act in his article, Belated Justice: The Failures and Promise of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, published in the American Indian Law Review. This history is marked by racism, the indulging of non-Native business interests, and political retaliation. Professor Andrade describes it as “the journey of a people forced to demand, decade after decade, what they were entitled to by law.”
Prior to European contact, Native Hawaiian social and political structures were based on chiefdoms with communal land ownership and management. European contact, the Western-backed establishment of the Kingdom of Hawai’i, and American colonization disrupted traditional land systems and displaced Native Hawaiians from their homelands. The United States has acknowledged that the annexation of Hawai’i as a territory included the transfer of lands from Native Hawaiians without consent or compensation. Continue reading "Native Hawaiian Homelands for Native Hawaiians"
Jul 13, 2023 Bethany BergerLexNative Peoples Law
Debates over Founding Era constitutional understandings proliferate in scholarship and litigation. The understandings examined, however, are almost exclusively those of the white men who either drafted the constitution or could vote on its ratification. In We the (Native) People?, Professor Gregory Ablavsky and doctoral candidate Tanner Allread broaden this focus, uncovering what Indigenous people said and thought about the Constitution’s meaning. Like Mary Bilder’s recent article on the influence of Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw delegations’ visits to the constitutional convention in 1787, and earlier works by Robert Clinton, Maggie Blackhawk, and Ablavsky himself, the article confirms the influence of tribal actions on the Constitution and its interpretation. But in foregrounding Indigenous people’s perspectives, Ablavsky and Allread open a new window on those actions as well as on constitutional history and law.
The first contribution of the article is to identify pre-constitutional tribal-settler diplomacy as an important backdrop against which the Constitution was drafted and understood. As scholars like Robert Williams and Colin Calloway have shown, established rules, shaped by both Indigenous and English traditions, governed this diplomacy. These practices included both accepted rituals and norms of negotiation, reciprocity, and ongoing relationships that the English violated at their peril. Ablavsky and Allread dub this body of rules the “diplomatic constitution,” invoking the times’ definition of constitution as the practices, institutions, and discourses that disciplined governmental power. Influential founders, they show, like George Washington, Ben Franklin, James Madison, James Monroe, and Thomas Jefferson, would all have been familiar with this diplomatic constitution from their own experiences at negotiations with tribal nations. Continue reading "Expanding the Constitutional Lens"
Nov 8, 2022 Aila HossLexNative Peoples Law
Neoshia Roemer,
The Indian Child Welfare Act as Reproductive Justice, 103
Boston U. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2023), available at
SSRN.
The abolishment of a fundamental right in the recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision sent a shock through communities across the country, including Indian country. Abortion access specifically, and reproductive health generally, has always been limited for Indigenous people. The Dobbs decision will make it worse.
In her forthcoming article, The Indian Child Welfare Act as Reproductive Justice, Professor Neoshia Roemer considers the impact of Dobbs alongside the potential gutting of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in Brackeen v. Haaland. She shrewdly notes that limited access to reproductive healthcare without protections for Tribal rights puts Indian children and Indigenous cultures in jeopardy. Continue reading "Protecting the Indian Child Welfare Act After Dobbs"
Nov 1, 2022 Bethany BergerLexNative Peoples Law
Michael Velchik & Jeffery Zhang,
Restoring Indian Reservation Status: An Empirical Analysis, 40
Yale J. Reg. ___ (forthcoming 2022), available at
SSRN.
In Restoring Indian Reservation Status: An Empirical Analysis, Michael Velchik, and Jeffery Zhang provide some of the most rigorous empirical evidence to date on the economic impact of reservation status. Although I discuss limitations to their data below, the article provides a welcome counterpoint to repeated arguments—to the Supreme Court, Congress, and elsewhere—that affirming reservation boundaries will destroy existing economies.
These assertions gained nationwide attention when the Supreme Court decided McGirt v. Oklahoma. The Court held that Congress had not erased the treaty boundaries of the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation. Lower courts soon applied the decision to hold that the reservations of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Reservations—which occupy the rest of eastern Oklahoma—remained as well. In briefing and oral argument, Oklahoma and its amici insisted that affirming reservation status would be terrible for the safety and economy of the area. I have worked on several reservation boundary cases now, and these kinds of arguments—what Velchik and Zhang call the Falling Sky thesis–are trotted out every time. And for good reason: the Supreme Court allowed current demographics to distort its interpretation of congressional intent in South Dakota v. Yankton Sioux Tribe, and Hagen v. Utah and created an entirely new rule to maintain state jurisdiction over tribal lands within the undiminished Oneida Indian Reservation. (Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York.) Continue reading "The Sky Did Not Fall After McGirt v. Oklahoma"
Jan 24, 2022 Aila HossLexNative Peoples Law
From land theft to child removal to cultural genocide, the horrors and harms of federal Indian law have been well-documented. In his recent article, Professor Crepelle acknowledges this history and literature and asks: “Is it ethical to cite cases that are factually wrong and racist?” (P. 533.) He concludes that federal Indian law practice is “incompatible with modern standards of legal ethics.” (P. 532.) I couldn’t agree more.
Professor Crepelle identifies cases that rely on racial slurs, inaccurate stereotypes, and white supremacist language to reach legal conclusions that undermine Tribal jurisdiction or Indigenous rights. These cases—the Marshall trilogy, US v. Rogers, Ex Parte Crow Dog, US v. Kagama, among others—are regularly relied upon in modern federal Indian law practice.
Professor Crepelle analyzes how the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (MRPC) could be applied to lawyers who cite racist federal Indian law cases or judges who rely on them. For example, the MRPC requires claims to be based in law and fact (r. 3.1); prohibits the use of false statements or inaccurate information (r. 3.3, r. 4.1, r. 8.4(c)); and bars conduct that discriminates based on race, sex, or national origin (r. 8.4(d)). Continue reading "Federal Indian Law is Racist"
