Native American Law (previously titled American Indian Law) (LWPP557)
Spring 2022
3 credits, Letter Graded
Instructor: Vanessa Racehorse, CalNAGPRA Attorney and former Deputy Attorney General for the Colorado River Indian Tribes
This course provides an overview of Native American law and the legal and political history that has shaped this area of law. Students will gain an understanding of the foundational cases and federal statutes that form the basic tenets of federal Indian law. This course also explores a broad range of topics, including tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, civil rights, economic development, resource rights, civil and criminal jurisdiction, and the relationship between tribal governments, the federal government, and state governments.
The course will be graded by a final paper on a topic of the student’s choosing completed under the professor’s guidance after submission of a first draft.
November 30, 2021 at 12:00pm
Warren Hall, Grace Courtroom
Join Vanessa Racehorse and Angela Medrano for a lunch talk, “The Contemporary Fight for Tribal Sovereignty”. This discussion will cover the social, political and legal foundations of tribal sovereignty, Federal Indian Law, and the case law that shapes current efforts to advance justice, equity, and tribal sovereignty in the U.S.
Vanessa Racehorse is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and a descendant of the Cherokee Nation and Shoshone-Paiute Tribes. She has a JD from Columbia Law School and an LLM in International Criminal Law from the University of Amsterdam. Ms. Racehorse has worked in-house for the Colorado River Indian Tribes, was an associate with a boutique law firm that provides general counsel services and represents tribes across the country in litigation, and is currently an attorney for the California Native American Heritage Commission where she focuses on cultural resources protection. Ms. Racehorse will be teaching Native American Law at USD Law in Spring 2022.
Angela Medrano is a member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians and is an alumna of University of San Diego School of Law. She operates her own law practice in North County specializing in general civil, tribal, and federal Indian law. Ms. Medrano is a current board member of the San Diego County Bar Association and is President of the Native American Lawyers Association of San Diego County. In 2019, Ms. Medrano joined the Intertribal Court of Southern California as a pro tem judge.
Co-sponsored by the Student Bar Association, American Constitution Society, Black Law Students Association, Law Students for Cross-Racial Understanding, Public Interest Law Foundation, and Women's Law Caucus.
In 1990, President George H. W. Bush approved a resolution designating November as National American Indian Heritage Month, thereafter commonly referred to as Native American Heritage Month. Native American Heritage Month focuses on the cultures of American Indians and Alaska Natives, groups indigenous to our country. Here at the University of San Diego, our campus's story is intrinsically tied to the Kumeyaay band of indigenous peoples, who owned the land upon which the university was built prior to its founding in 1949.
In 2019, USD endeavored to recognize the history and legacy of our local indigenous tribes on which our campus was built with the renaming of several buildings on campus. Serra Hall was renamed Saints Tekakwitha and Serra Hall in honor of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American Catholic saint, and the Mission Crossroads facility was renamed Mata'yuum, which means "gathering place" in Kumeyaay. The Mata'yuum dedication ceremony (above) featured a group from the Campo Band of Kumeyaay performing music traditional to the indigenous people of the Southwest United States.
Check out the resources on this page for a sampling of the great resources about this topic available on campus in the LRC's collection, online with USDOne login, or free on the Web. Explore the library catalog to find more related resources.
*Formerly the American Indian Law Collection.
Indian Pilgrims by 
Blood Will Tell by 
Documents of Native American Political Development: 1933 to Present by 
Encyclopedia of North American Indians by 
Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power by 
The History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New-York in America by 
How the Indians Lost Their Land by 
The Place of Stone by 
American Indian Law in a Nutshell by
This guide provides a reliable resource on American Indian law. Its authoritative text covers the essentials of this complex body of law, with attention to the governmental policies underlying it. The work emphasizes both the historical development of Federal Indian Law and recent matters such as the evolution of Indian gaming, issues arising under the Indian Child Welfare Act, and the present enforcement of treaty rights. It addresses the policy and law applicable to Alaska Natives, but does not deal with Native Hawai'ians.
Freedom's Law and Indigenous Rights by 
Landmark Indian Law Cases by
Landmark Indian Law Cases presents fifty-three groundbreaking decisions made by the United States Supreme Court in the area of federal Indian law. Since the last revision (entitled Top Fifty and first published in 1988), the Court has made new pronouncements on tribal hunting and fishing rights, Alaska Native sovereignty, and tribal sovereign immunity from suit and tribal court jurisdiction. These have helped define the powers of the more than 550 American Indian and Alaskan Native tribes that represent the third sovereignty in the United States (along with the federal government and the states) and provide a glimpse into future decisions of the Court. The cases examined represent not only the decisions that resolve important questions and set forth broad principles of federal Indian Law, but also ones which have practical implications for real-life situations currently affecting American Indian and Alaska native tribes. The book's subject index of cases provides a quick reference aid, and allcases are listed under one or more relevant subject headings. The federal Indian law jurisprudence of the Court spans two centuries of U.S. history, and the decisions have reshaped the federal-tribal relationship and the role of states and tribes in the nation's federalism. This work is tremendously useful to lawyers, scholars, judges, and other practitioners, and it is certain to become a fixture in law libraries throughout the United States.
Religion, Law, and the Land by
Examining a series of court decisions made during the 1980s regarding the legal claims of several Native American tribes who attempted to protect ancestrally revered lands from development schemes by the federal government, this book looks at important questions raised about the religious status of land. The tribes used the First Amendment right of free exercise of religion as the basis of their claim, since governmental action threatened to alter the land which served as the primordial sacred reality without which their derivative religious practices would be meaningless. Brown argues that a constricted notion of religion on the part of the courts, combined with a pervasive cultural predisposition towards land as private property, marred the Constitutional analysis of the courts to deprive the Native American plaintiffs of religious liberty. Brown looks at four cases, which raised the issue at the federal district and appellate court levels, centered on lands in Tennessee, Utah, South Dakota, and Arizona; then it considers a fifth case regarding land in northwestern California, which ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In all cases, the author identifies serious deficiencies in the judicial evaluations. The lower courts applied a conception of religion as a set of beliefs and practices that are discrete and essentially separate from land, thus distorting and devaluing the fundamental basis of the tribal claims. It was this reductive fixation of land as property, implicit in the rulings of the first four cases, that became explicitly sanctioned and codified in the Supreme Court's decision in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association of 1988. In reaching such a position, the Supreme Court injudiciously engaged in a policy determination to protect government land holdings, and did so through a shocking repudiation of its own long established jurisprudential procedure in cases concerning the free exercise of religion.
Tribal Justice by
Tribal Justice is a book that provides an in-depth review and survey of tribal appellate court jurisprudence. The particular topics covered include enrollment and disenrollment, civil rights, elections and political participation, criminal law and procedure, rights of juveniles, tribal constitutions, and tradition and custom. The book focuses on the procedure and substance of tribal court appellate decision making as revealed in the text of actual court opinions. The decisions and accompanying notes are further amplified by the development of a model of tribal court jurisprudence and a discussion of various theories of tribal court judging.
