U & D

I read, and filed away somewhere, a recent Maine ruling (by whom?) that would make it possible for the Maliseet band to have their own court. At the time, my students were reading The Heart of a Chief, in which the tribal police are minor characters. How does law enforcement work on the reservations? they asked. I told them what I know, which was not a great deal, mentioned the Green Fleet purchased by the Penobscot nation with federal funding, and then told them some of the stories I have heard about racism directed at Native men by police off-reservation. I filed the bigger question away under “something I need to find out about – don’t make assumptions.”

Today I ran across this NPR archive transcript from last Sunday’s Weekend Edition, Lawmakers Move to Curb Rape on Native Lands. Read it. Your students should know that:

“But the 1978 ruling [Oliphant vs. Suquamish] says Native American police and prosecutors can only prosecute Native Americans. They can’t arrest and charge people from outside the reservation, which is especially problematic…Tribal law enforcement is also hamstrung because even when they have an American Indian offender, the law says they can’t prosecute felonies like rape and they can only imprison an offender for up to one year.”

and also that “This jurisdictional maze could change though, if a new bill before Congress passes. A bipartisan group of senators has introduced the Tribal Law and Order Act, which would allow tribal police to arrest anyone who commits a crime on Indian land, regardless of the offender’s race. The law also calls for better tracking of which cases the U.S. Attorney’s office declines and why. It would give local police and sheriff’s offices grants if they cooperate with tribal police and cross-deputize their officers.”

One wonders how and why this 1978 ruling came to be. What were state governments, state police forces, and federal law enforcement offices afraid of? This is certainly related to issues of sovereignty, but probably also to just plain bias. Read this excerpt from When Tribes and States Collide – biased from the Native side, which is point of view that our students do not access nearly enough, and therefore a good text for class (it’s also short). Students may well conclude from reading about Oliphant vs. Suquamish that the stereotype that “backward, primitive and lawless Indians” can not police themselves or their sovereign territory is alive and well today.

It is interesting to me, as I read the text of the 2009 Act (read it here (.pdf download), that some of the specific jurisdictions relate to social services needs: alcohol, youth services, sexual assault. Others relate to support for better-tech record keeping. Overall, there is an emphasis on both cooperation/communication with other (non-Tribal) law enforcement and on law enforcement (albeit controlled and limited) within the reservations. I fail to see a negative to any of this, except of course for funding of programs. But that is what the Law is responding to: stimulus and other Obama budget funding.

Here are some resources for more information on the proposed Tribal Law and Order Act of 2009 [the Act of 2008 died due to budgetary issues, it seems]:

• What is the Tribal Law and Order Act - download informational .pdf file
• Turtle Talk has a brief editorial on the Act’s limitations

What about the Wabanaki nations? Here are some questions that should be answered and shared online as a Wabanaki resource (a great HS Native Studies course project):

• What is the nature of reservation police organizations?
• What is their funding?
• What is their jurisdiction?
• What are the limits on their activities, if any?
• How do the reservation police interact with local, county, state and federal law enforcement?
• What is the “crime rate” on the reservations (individually), as compared to that in Maine as a whole?

To save you some time, here are quick links to Maine tribal sites to look at:

• Public Safety – Passamaquoddy Tribe at Pleasant Point has an administrative division
• Passamaquoddy Tribe at Indian Township has a phone number for Tribal Police
• Penobscot Indian Nation has phone numbers for the Patrol Room and for Emergencies and Officers
• Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians has a Tribal Court (read this history – it is well done), but does not seem to have a police or law enforcement department of its own.
• The Aroostook Band of Micmacs does not at this time appear to have a tribal law enforcement force or a tribal court.

There you go – Diversity. But the alert student will wonder at the inconsistency and perhaps at the inequality.