Students Help Tribes Resolve Legal Issues

UCLA law student Addie Rolnick has spent the past 18 months working with Inupiat Eskimos in Alaska, drafting laws and setting up a children’s court system there.

Her classmate John S. Brown has clerked for the Hopi Supreme Court in Arizona, researching the Hopi Common Law, preparing memoranda and writing draft opinions.

Yet another student, Cynthia Morales, a member of the Choctaw Tribe of Oklahoma, has spent three semesters helping several Southern California tribes revise their constitutions to better meet their current needs.

For Rolnick, Brown, Morales and nearly 100 participants in UCLA Law School’s Tribal Legal Development Clinic since its inception three years ago, such work experiences are at once routine and special.

“It’s just so neat to know that there are actual, distinct, autonomous nations on American soil,” Brown said. “People just assume that the age of Indians is over.”

What they don’t know, he added, is that there are more than 500 American Indian tribal governments that are recognized by the federal government.

Professor Pat Sekaquaptewa, director of the Native Nations Law and Policy Center at UCLA, said these governments have authority over their members and nonmembers within their reservations or other tribal territories, and operate under a system of written laws, customs and traditions.

The U.S. Supreme Court and the federal government consider tribes “domestic dependent nations,” she said.

“Tribes jealously guard their sovereignty to protect and pursue their way of life and to maintain control over their economies,” said Sekaquaptewa, whose uncle is the chief justice of the Hopi high court in Keams Canyon, Ariz.

About 30 students enrolled in the clinic each year spend up to three semesters on projects that take them to Indian lands in California, Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii.

Under the supervision of their professors, aspiring lawyers work closely with tribal councils, attorneys and administrators to build, improve and reform their laws and legal institutions.

They research comparative tribal constitutions and relevant federal Indian laws, offer community education on origins of diverse tribal and other constitutional provisions, and organize community involvement.

Their assignments often involve creating hybrid dispute resolution processes that combine both Anglo and Native American laws and traditions.

For instance, when Rolnick was drafting an adoption law for the Barrow Tribal Children’s Court, she worked with tribal leaders and judges to incorporate traditional practices of the Inupiat into the prevailing Anglo law.

Under law in the United States, a person putting a child up for adoption relinquishes her parental rights.

But in Barrow, where villagers know each other and many are related by blood or marriage, adoption doesn’t mean giving up the child or parental rights, she said. Instead, the adoptive and biological mothers “share” the child.

So, the concept of sharing -- inuguuq -- was incorporated into the law, Rolnick said.

“I think there’s a lot to be learned from participating and observing how groups of people can come together and develop autonomous government and legal systems for themselves,” said Brown.

Rolnick said her work with the Inupiat has been the highlight of her legal education -- “an amazing opportunity” that she does not take for granted.

During her five trips to Barrow, Rolnick has attended long meetings with as many as 15 tribal leaders, judges, social workers and community elders, munching on morsels of whale meat snacks that are served as treats.

Joseph Mirelez, a council member of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Tribe near Palm Springs, said that working with the UCLA group has been beneficial to his community.

“We are on the phone with them a lot,” he said. “Whenever we need anything, we call the clinic.”

Before launching a project, a team of students, accompanied by their professor, visits a reservation.

After that, they work primarily with a drafting committee, representing a diverse group from the tribe.

Drafting a bill can be a long process -- taking up to a year, Sekaquaptewa said.

When Brown worked on a dispute resolution project for the Karuk Tribe in Northern California earlier this year, he first reviewed their existing rules and ordinances.

Then he had teleconferences over a semester to discuss where the tribe wanted to go with the Karuk Tribal Peacemaker Dispute Resolution Mediation Forum.

He researched a similar law used by other tribes in their “peacemaking” forums, drafted a series of recommended revisions to the existing law, sent the revisions, and held further teleconferences to discuss their thoughts on the revisions, he said.

“Since I’d done my homework and paid attention to what the tribe was looking for, the revisions were well received,” Brown said. “It was great!”

The project was the first step in helping the Karuk Tribe institute its own autonomous court system.

Sekaquaptewa gave an example of how a dispute was handled in her Hopi community.

After the death of a mother, her three children went to a clan relative to distribute her property. One of the children was unhappy with the clan elder’s decision, so she went to a tribal court. The tribal court ruling upheld the elder’s decision. She then appealed to the Hopi Supreme Court.

The high court held that the tribal court should not have touched the case, and had erred by taking up an issue that had been handled by a proper traditional authority. The high court’s ruling recognized the traditional dispute resolution authority of the clan relative, the professor said.

Sometimes officials from Indian reservations come to see the students on their home turf.

Last week, members of the Hopi Supreme Court came to UCLA to confer with their law clerks about assigned cases pending before the tribunal.

Chief Justice Emory Sekaquaptewa, who’s been on the bench for 26 years, said he tries to get the students to experience the “uniqueness” of the Hopi world and how it functions differently from the “dominant society.”

As a society that has a continuous history since 1100 in what is today’s Arizona, the Hopi people have “do’s and don’ts of life” that have been established through their social institutions that are “relevant in the courtroom,” Justice Sekaquaptewa said.

“So, we always take the time to introduce the students to the community, so they can experience the Hopi world,” he said.

He said he hoped that the students would be “sparked” by the experience and carry a message to the wider world of his people’s effort to keep up with the changing world with “self-determination” of defining their own rules for modern life.

“I am educating the world to a greater appreciation of Indians in general, and the Hopi people in particular,” he said.