At the 2nd annual Indian Law conference sponsored by the Spokane County Bar Association, Indian Law Section one of the speakers was Walter Echo-Hawk. Walter also gave a lecture the evening before at Gonzaga Law School, but I was not able to attend that. At the conference however Walter spoke on the role of culture and tradition in practicing law in Indian Country.
I must confess to being a little disappointed by the presentation, however I wanted to know more and so I took advantage of the fact that they distributed his email address and shot him a short note on my Blackberry while he was talking – asking for a time to contact him when he wasn’t “on the road” but back at his offices with a little more time to spare.
Later in the week I bought the book he recently published “In the Courts of the Conqueror – the 10 worst Indian Law cases ever decided.” I am about 1/2 way through at this point and decided to suspend calling Walter until I was finished so I could avoid asking questions which may be answered in the book itself – I’m so very grateful for the book. Rarely have I read anything which within a few hours changes my perceptions, refines my perspective and informed me as much as the first few chapters of this book. Amazingly enough I’ve been practicing law on an Indian Reservation for a year and a half now and while I realized that the Tribes treasure their sovereignty, I don’t think I really understood why in anything but a very abstract sense.
In the lecture Walter conceded that our American legal system frequently is just and founded upon sound logic and reason he cited Brown v. Board of Education, Wisconsin v. Yoder, and Worcester v. Georgia. But he added that justice only truly occurs “when the law reflects and protects the needs and values of all segments of society.” and pointed out some of it’s failures: Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Korematsu v. United States.
In his book he covered Johnson v. M’Intosh, through which the Supreme Court used a legal fiction—the “act of discovery”—to deprive Native Americans of legal title to land they had occupied for generations. This was for me the missing link – of course I knew that this land was occupied by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years before Europeans appeared, but I had never given a second thought to how the title to this land was legally removed and vested in the conquerors – or of how twisted the legal justifications upon which these decisions were based actually were.
Of course, now I see that the conflict between Euro-American law and traditional notions of cultural and traditional justice are not just in conflict on a values level. There is also a strong historical-cultural-emotional component involved that is rooted in the fact that the very system which the Colville Tribal Court is based upon is the same system that forced some bands from their ancestral lands, the same system that invaded families and stole away their children and the same system that justified the genocidal practices which punctuated the history of relations between the US government and Indigenous Americans.
