The 2008 Law & History Dinner

"The 'Dark Side' of Federal Indian Law" by Walter R. Echo-Hawk, Jr.

January 24, 2008
John Bunker Sands Photography Gallery

From a January 30, 2008 article from the Cody Enterprise
Image courtesy Ken Blackbird for the Cody Enterprise

Echo-Hawk fights for American Indian rights

By BUZZY HASSRICK
Staff writer, Cody Enterprise

A visit to Cody in January probably doesn’t top the list of most people.

Walter Echo-Hawk Jr., however, isn’t most people. A Pawnee from Longmont, Colo., he’s senior staff attorney for the Native American Rights Fund in the Boulder, Colo., office and also a tribal judge, scholar and activist.

He came here because, as a full-time attorney, he wanted time to work on his book, “In the Courts of the Conqueror: The Ten Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided.”

“I could finish if I stayed two months,” Echo-Hawk said. “But I’m much further along than Jan. 1, when I got here.”

He earned a fellowship from the Cody Institute for Western American Studies at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. His research focuses on American law that has affected the rights of Native people.

“There are two sides,” Echo-Hawk said. “It’s been used as a shield and a sword.

“Over history, it’s been mostly used as a sword.”

In the 1800s and early 1900s, the law took away the human, land and political rights of Native people, Echo-Hawk said. Dispossession characterized the era of Manifest Destiny.

“And it was all done perfectly legally,” he added. “The ideology of race, colonialism and conquest is imbedded in federal Indian law.”

That ideology also colored legal principles to the detriment of Indians.

“These opinions have never been reversed,” Echo-Hawk said.

In comparison, the separate-but-equal laws that legitimized segregation have been overturned.

“The Indian cases have not,” he said.

Thus it’s hard today to win a case when the legal citations refer to the clients as “racially inferior people,” Echo-Hawk said.

Even in that environment, Native Americans and advocates have made the best of the dubious set of legal principles and have gotten the courts to rule favorably, he said.

During a stretch of 15 years, Indians won many legal victories in the courts, which drew from the protective aspects of the law, enforced treaties and utilized the guardianship doctrine for dependent Indian nations. One case, for example, blocked states from crossing reservation boundaries.

Today, Native peoples have established sophisticated sets of tribal governments, pursuing self-governance and sovereignty, he said.

“Native peoples have reclaimed their pride and heritage and solidified their place in American society,” he said.

Despite that progress, “the courts have retreated in recent years,” Echo-Hawk added.

Righting the wrongs of the past could happen with the next generation of lawyers, he said. Echo-Hawk hopes his book, by examining the foundation of federal Indian law, will inspire them to rout out the vestiges of race, colonialism and conquest.

In his career, he said his best reward occurred outside the courts.

“My finest work is legislative,” he said.

Echo-Hawk worked on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a federal law passed in 1990. NAGPRA provides a process for museums and federal agencies to return certain Native American cultural items – human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony – to lineal descendants, culturally affiliated Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations. The results of that law please him.

“Americans are fundamentally fair people,” he said.

His other legal expertise involves Native American religious freedom, prisoner rights, water rights and treaty rights. He’s been in practice since 1973 and is ready to retire.

“I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it,” he said. “But it’s a life in the pressure cooker.

“I’d like to see if there’s a life after litigation.”