Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Spring 2007
One of NARF’s earliest legal efforts was to assist the Menominee
Tribe of Wisconsin, whose rights had been terminated by the federal government.
Although members of the Menominee Tribe had been told that termination
would benefit them, the tribe lost much of its land and many members endured
economic and social hardships. “We took their story to the Congress
and asked the members of Congress to reverse that termination and to restore
the legal status of the Menominee nation,” Echohawk recalls. “To
the credit of Congress, they listened, they understood and they passed
the Menominee Restoration Act of 1973. That set the precedent for the
eventual restoration of about 100 terminated tribes.”
Native Americans faced many other challenges that NARF has helped address through legal means, including issues involved with jurisdiction and taxation, economic development and the promotion of human rights such as religious freedom and education rights.
Key to success in all these areas was having Indian law information available to attorneys preparing cases. To help meet this essential need, in 1972 Carnegie Corporation awarded NARF a start-up grant of $119,000 to establish the National Indian Law Library (NILL) as a “clearinghouse of Indian legal materials and resources,” with the hope that the service would “encourage more lawyers to undertake cases to help American Indians protect their rights.”
Today, the library has more than achieved that goal. It is the largest repository of Native American law in the United States, and each month more than 150 calls pour into NILL. Requests come from lawyers who rely on NILL for vital information to develop court cases as well as from students, researchers and other libraries. Recent calls have come from a tribe member in Alaska involved with a constitution reform project, from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and from a documentary filmmaker researching American Indian civil rights. In July 2006, the American Association of Law Libraries presented its prestigious Public Access to Government Information Award to NILL librarians David Seldon and Monica Martens for their work in disseminating tribal law.
“The library familiarized everyone with the rights of Indian tribes and Indian people, so that they could work to protect those rights,” says Echohawk.
NILL resources include a comprehensive collection of proceedings from national Indian law conferences, reports from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Indian tribe constitutions, intergovernmental agreements and independent studies. The library’s collection includes a comprehensive group of tribal codes. Since only seven tribal codes had been published, NILL contacted the 562 federally recognized tribes and requested copies of their codes and constitutions. Tribes have concerns about this sensitive information being made available to the public, and the sense of trust that NARF has developed with them over the years helped gain their cooperation. About 70 percent of the tribes have supplied copies of their codes, and more than 100 of these have been digitized and are available on the NARF web site.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Corporation grants established the Indian lawyer intern project that enabled NARF to hire young Native American lawyers as staff attorneys and provide them with the experience of working on Native issues of national importance. At the time there were few Native American attorneys. Echohawk himself entered law school at the University of New Mexico as part of the first federally funded law scholarships for Native Americans and recalls that when he began practicing law there were only a dozen Native American attorneys in the entire country. The internship program helped remedy this situation by providing an opportunity for Native Americans to develop their own law specialty, and today there are more than 2,000 Native Americans practicing law.
Beginning almost from the time that the United States was founded, the federal government effectively stripped Indian tribes of control over the education of their children, establishing a boarding school system that removed many Indian children from their families and communities and contracting with Christian missionaries to educate and convert Indian children. Using education to force assimilation of Indians continued when the government replaced these two education systems with public schools established on or near reservations. In the 1980s and 1990s, Carnegie Corporation funding enabled NARF to help tribes address the failures of these education systems to honor and respect the culture and heritage of the Indian children. NARF worked closely with six tribal communities in Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico, Alaska and South Dakota to assist them in creating a foundation for working collaboratively with public school districts, states, and other parties. Partnerships were established; basic aggregate student data were gathered and analyzed; initial collaborative strategies were determined; and tribal education codes and policy were developed and adopted. This innovative approach established NARF’s client tribes on firm ground for equal partnerships with school districts and states in improving the education of tribal students.
NARF has also been the driving force in the formulation of the Tribal Education Departments National Assembly (TEDNA). NARF assisted tribes in establishing this new national organization for tribal education departments and to develop the new organization’s web site: http://www.tedna.org. The purpose of TEDNA is to bring together tribal education directors, staff and policymakers so that they can share information, develop strategies and problem solve on common issues of education governance, policy and advocacy at the tribal, regional and national levels.