Indigenous Rights & Tribal Sovereignty

By Meredith Capps In an “on-demand” session offered to AALL 2021 Virtual Meeting attendees, Darla W. Jackson moderated a discussion regarding current efforts to publish Native American tribal law o…

The DA says eight people who avoided jail completed more than 320 hours of community service.

Native peoples in the U.S. are often citizens of both the United States and of autonomous Native nations. That makes Native environmental justice issues more complex.

A leading United Nations human rights body has issued a report blasting the United States for its systematic abrogation of its treaties with Native Americans, stealing of reservation land, and the loss of billions of dollars of Native American money, among other things. It demanded that the United States grant American Indians and Native Hawai’ians the same basic protections under U.S. law that it grants to nonindigenous Americans.

A novel lawsuit is taking advantage of a local ‘rights of nature’ measure passed in November in effort to protect wetlands

Violence is on the rise at a North Dakota reservation. And tribal officers are often powerless to stop it.

Despite a legal obligation of the United States to provide health care to Native Americans, this group faces significant inequity in health care compared to other U.S. populations.

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — A lawsuit that accuses the federal government of failing to adequately provide for students on a small, isolated reservation in Arizona is set to go to trial in...

José Francisco Cali Tzay (Maya Kaqchikel), a longtime defender of Indigenous rights, completed his term on the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) on January 19, 2020. The CERD is the Treaty Monitoring Body for the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), and one of nine International Human Rights Treaties within the UN system. The ICERD is legally-binding for the 175 countries (State parties) which have ratified it to date.

Elizabeth Reese, Stanford Law School’s first Native American professor, discusses the intentional marginalization of tribal legal structures.

The U.S. states of Washington and Oregon, along with dozens of Native American tribes and cultural groups, sued the federal government on Monday to stop the sale of the National Archives building in the city of Seattle.

On October 4, 2021, the Canadian government informed the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Michigan that Canada would formally invoke Article IX of the 1977 Transit Pipelines Treaty in response to the state of Michigan’s revocation on November 13, 2020, of the 1953 easement it issued for the Line 5 pipeline.Michigan revoked … Continue reading “United States: Canadian Government Invokes 1977 Pipeline Treaty in Ongoing Line 5 Pipeline Dispute”

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties defines “treaty” as “an international agreement concluded between states in written form and go...

We maintain government-to-government relationships with Indian tribes, and facilitate support for tribal people and tribal governments. We promote safe and quality living environments, strong communities, self sufficient and individual rights, while enhancing protection of the lives, prosperity and well being of American Indians and Alaska Natives.

The Department of Justice has selected an additional 12 federally recognized Tribes to participate in the expansion of the Tribal Access Program for National Crime Information (TAP), a program that provides tribal governments with means to access, enter and exchange data with national crime information systems, including those maintained by the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division and the states.

Native American genealogy in Federal records depends primarily upon the use of records created by the Office of Indian Affairs (later renamed the Bureau of Indian Affairs). These records relate to tribes officially recognized by the United States, including the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminoles) and other Native American nations involved in treaties or guardianship relationships with the Federal Government.

A blog post about how to research Native American settlement acts.

Links to high quality Internet sites on Native American people

The Law Library of Congress collection contains a variety of Indigenous legal materials from the United States and jurisdictions from around the world, including historical constitutions and charters.

Indian Law News Bulletins are a current awareness service of the National Indian Law Library. The purpose of the Indian Law Bulletins is to provide succinct and timely information about new developments in Indian Law. See the "about" page for each bulletin for specific information on monitoring, content selection criteria, and timeliness of publication.

The Indian and Native American Employment Rights Program (INAERP) advances awareness of employment rights and job opportunities for American Indians and Alaska Natives who work for or seek employment with companies doing business with the federal government. INAERP accomplishes this mission through compliance assistance and outreach to federal contractors and coordination with tribal representatives, community based organizations, apprenticeship programs, workforce development agencies, and other federal stakeholders. View INAERP Brochure

American Indian tribes and Alaska Native communities have a unique relationship to the U.S. federal government, and face distinctive socioeconomic challenges as a function of their history, as well as other contextual circumstances.

Learn about the treaties between Native American nations and the United States government.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, represented by Earthjustice from 2016 to 2022, sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for violating the National Historic

Search, browse and learn about the Federal Register. Federal Register 2.0 is the unofficial daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents.

Please note: Very few of these records have been digitized and made available online. Snippet [get-content name="historyhubnativeamericanrecords" include-tag="false" /] Among the billions of historical records housed at the National Archives throughout the country, researchers can find information relating to American Indians from as early as 1774 through the mid 1990s. The National Archives preserves and makes available the documents created by Federal agencies in the course of their daily business. Since the U.S.

The Water Protector Legal Collective is an Indigenous-led legal nonprofit that provides support and advocacy for Indigenous peoples and Original Nations, the Earth, and climate justice movements.

A milestone document in the history of human rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights set out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected. It has been translated into over 500 languages.

Native Nations Law & Policy Center trains law students to provide support and legal services to American Indian tribes and their governmental institutions.