WASHINGTON: American Indians have mobilized to press the US Supreme Court to revisit old rulings, claiming the legal decisions did tremendous damage to their sovereignty as Indian nations.
A delegation of some 100 Indian nations members gathered in front of the Parthenon-style US Supreme Court building on Monday, as the country’s nine top magistrates convened inside.
The group had just finished a 4,500 kms trek from Washington state on the US west coast.
“The US Supreme Court is the site of a number of devastating court decisions that have been delivered against tribes over the past two decades,” said Liz Hill, spokeswoman for the National Congress of American Indians, an organization representing Native Americans.
Leader of the Navajo Nation, Kelsey Begaye underlined the hardships experienced by the Indians’ ancestors. “I ask that we continue to support our brother and sister nations who are also preparing for battle in the Supreme Court,” said Begaye.
“Our ancestors faced unimaginable adversities and had tremendous courage to overcome those adversities,” Begaye said. “Many didn’t survive but it made our people stronger.”
The group, whose traditional garb, including feather headdress, caused heads to turn and cars to slow, included Cherokees and Chickasaws from Oklahoma, Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene Indians, members of the Nez Perce tribe, Montana Crows, Florida Seminole Indians, and Navajos from Arizona.
All of them have come to protest decisions made in the 1980s and 90s, such as the Nevada vs. Hicks and Atkinson Trading Co. vs. Shirley rulings, which stopped Indians imposing taxes on non-Indians residing on tribal lands.
The ban throws into question their rights to exercise sovereignty over tribal lands, they say. The Indians’ major contention is that the states where their lands are located unceasingly raise tax levels on Indians living on reservations.
“These decisions made by the highest court in the land are responsible for the continued erosion of tribal sovereignty,” according to National Congress of American Indians spokeswoman Liz Hill.
“The Supreme Court is abandoning its enshrined principle of deferring to the Congress, and is itself reshaping and diminishing tribal rights,” said professor of law David Getches, of the University of Colorado, speaking recently to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.
That does not mean that the nine Supreme Court judges are opposed to Indians, says Getches, just that Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s agenda “seeks to strengthen states’ rights” at the expense of the Indians.
Senators have also been pressed to support Indians in their claims.
One of them, South Dakota Democrat Tom Daschle has expressed solidarity with them.
“Tribal sovereignty is a fundamental American principle that is rooted in laws and treaties and cannot be broken,” said Daschle.
The federal government has unique legal and moral obligations to native Americans and it’s critical that we honour those obligations,” Daschle said.
All American Indians — some 2.3 million people, or 0.9 per cent of the US population, spread among 561 tribes, including 227 in Alaska, live today on land representing less than two per cent of the entire US territory.
Between 1887 and 1934, federal authorities seized — without paying compensation — some 40 million hectares of Indian land, which it redistributed to colonialists, according to the National Congress of American Indians.—AFP