Join us at MSU Law for Treaty Waters at Risk: Tribal Sovereignty and the Line 5 Challenge in the Great Lakes, a one-day conference on Friday, April 17, 2026, examining the legal and environmental stakes of energy infrastructure in treaty-protected waters.
Featuring a keynote by Whitney Gravelle, MSU Law and ILPC alumna and President of the Bay Mills Indian Community, the program brings together leading voices to discuss treaty rights, co-management, and the ongoing Line 5 conflicts at Bad River and the Straits of Mackinac.
More importantly, I would like to introduce you to a new website that will hopefully be of interest to you and your network: The Supreme Court Indian Law Database. Recently launched, this resource offers a number of important features.
The pages for each individual case identifies the other cases on the list that it cites and the cases where it has been cited. For example, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia cites three cases and has been cited forty-eight times
In the future, we intend on adding additional search functions to the list. Thus, hopefully before long a researcher will be able to easily identify cases decided between a certain date range, or cases that fall under the same four categories, or find out which three justices participated in the same cases or any combination of all three of these things and more.
In addition, there is room for debate for what counts as an Indian law case or for which category a particular case belongs. While acknowledging this certain subjectivity, quite a bit of thought and care went into curating the list. If you have questions about the list or would like to know how we came up with it I invite you to visit the methodology page.
Finally, while a lot of thought and care has been put into the list and the website, it is still very new and there is always room for improvement. To that end, if you have any constructive feedback you would like to share my email address is at the bottom of the main page.
I am so happy to be able to share this research with you. I, along with a small team (who you will eventually get to meet once we get our “contributor” page running), have been working diligently on this website for the past two years. It is free and available to the public and will be so as long as I have any say about it. My hope is that it will be a valuable resource for practitioners, scholars, students, tribal nations and peoples, and anyone else with an interest in Native America and a desire to see Indigenous peoples thrive. Thank you and happy searching on SCILDB.com!
Trevor Reed has posted “The Intangible NAGPRA,” forthcoming in the Maryland Law Review, on SSRN.
Here is the abstract:
Following a 2023 regulatory update, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (“NAGPRA”) of 1990, which recognizes Tribal Nations’ ownership interests in their ancestors and artifacts, now expressly includes a controversial public display right that has shuttered museum displays across the country. Though functionally similar to widely criticized provisions of Italian cultural heritage law, I argue that the new regulations are justifiable given the unique status of Tribal Nations in U.S. constitutional law and Congress’s intent to negotiate a remedy for long-standing human rights abuses. Indeed, the Intangible NAGPRA is precisely what Tribal representatives on the Congressionally mandated year-long Panel for a National Dialogue on Museum/Native American Relations believed they were working toward in the lead-up to NAGPRA’s passage. Thus, this paper encourages the continued exercise of Indigenous peoples’ rights to protect their ancestors, belongings, sacred and cultural materials and the corresponding intellectual property rights that pertain to them.
Highly recommended. This is highly original and thoughtful scholarship on tribal law and the important role it plays in American legal theory.
Here is the abstract:
By standard accounts, there are fifty-four constitutions across the federal, state, and territorial governments of the United States. But in fact, there are 230 other governmental constitutions that currently govern peoples and territories within the United States. These constitutions not only flow from a sovereignty that existed prior to the United States but also came out of a legal movement that asserted its independence from both the U.S. Constitution and state constitutions. This Article tells the story of these constitutions — the constitutions of Native nations. Having existed for over two centuries with an archive of thousands of constitutional documents and amendments, tribal constitutions have been left out of the narratives of American constitutional history while being obscured within the fields of American constitutional law and federal Indian law. This Article corrects these oversights and calls for the recognition of a tradition of “Indigenous constitutionalism” in the United States. This Article’s aims are both theoretical and historical. On one hand, it conceptualizes Indigenous constitutionalism as a distinct and shared constitutional practice through which Native nations claim and exercise self-governance while embedded in the wider constitutional — and colonial — landscape of the United States. On the other hand, this Article draws Indigenous constitutionalism’s features from the two-hundred-year history of tribal constitutions. It explores, for the first time, three major eras of tribal constitutional development: the first constitutions during the early nineteenth-century period of Indian Removal, the explosion of constitutions under the Indian Reorganization Act in the early twentieth century, and the movement for tribal constitutional reform that has stretched from the late twentieth century to today. But this Article also brings theory and history together to rethink the prevalent narratives surrounding tribal law, federal Indian law, and American constitutionalism. Indigenous constitutionalism reveals the fundamental and persistent questions around which a tribal constitutional law framework can be constructed. It also revises the origin stories of federal Indian law, demonstrating that the field did not coalesce in isolation from tribal law but was actually cocreated with tribal constitutions. Finally, by placing tribal constitutions into conversation with other American charters, Indigenous constitutionalism disrupts and expands the category of constitutionalism itself. This Article demonstrates that tribal constitutions — unique among American constitutions — showcase how these documents can appear in many forms, function as external-facing declarations of sovereignty, and exist alongside other forms of fundamental law.
Eric Hemenway, Mae Wright, and Emily Proctor — all citizens of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians — spoke today at the Living with Treaties conference. Eric worked for two decades with the tribe as historian and archivist; he now works for UM SEAS, focusing on public education. Mae is the tribal historic preservation officer. Emily is an elected official, formerly serving as tribal child protective services worker.
None are lawyers but every lawyer who represents tribal interests should listen carefully whenever people who are their clients speak. Eric, known to some wags as the “bones guy,” brought home dozens, if not hundreds, of ancestors from their places of exile. Mae must make decisions about which cultural resources to pursue under NAGPRA. Emily must make decisions on which portions of the Waganakising homeland the tribal council should pursue (she buys a lot of wetlands). They all work with extremely limited resources, forcing them to make existentially challenging decisions.
Many of these decisions involve trauma. It’s one thing to acknowledge the trauma caused by dispossession of Indigenous relatives and resources. It is another to make decisions to expend limited tribal resources to bring home relatives, sacred objects, and land. Successes happen, but disappointments do, too, and they can build up, sometimes becoming overwhelming.
Not long ago, the tribe sued Emmet County and the State of Michigan, seeking judicial recognition of their reservation boundaries established in 1836 and 1855 treaties. They did so for two reasons. First, to assume authority under NAGPRA to be able to respond to the discovery of ancestors remains and funerary objects. Second, to assume authority under the Indian Child Welfare Act. Both laws establish territorial jurisdictionwithin reservation boundaries. Close to LTBB is the footprint of Holy Childhood Indian Boarding School, where dozens of Anishinaabe children perished and were buried in mass graves. In the absence of recognized reservation tribe has no authority to properly bring home those relatives. Similarly, Emmet County judges long have been reluctant to transfer ICWA cases to tribal court, which would stop being a problem if the reservation boundaries were recognized. The tribe lost the reservation boundaries case, however.
These issues show reasons why tribes do what they do. From a tribal lawyer’s perspective, Eric, Mae, and Emily are clients.I don’t mean clients like the Indigenous statesmen that show up at conferences like NCAI and testify in the Senate Committee. I mean real tribal leaders, mostly unelected bureaucrats who do the real work. A panel like this should be at every Indian law conference.
LSA Dean Rosario CeballosJay Cook, Jonathon Quint, Gabrielle Ione Hickman, Michael WitgenNed Blackhawk, Jon Parmenter, Mary Mount PleasantAugustin Hamlin
Alphonse PitawankwatStick City SingersBethany HughesOpening talk show guests: Fletcher, Michael Witgen, Greg Dowd, and Ned Blackhawk (Maggie Blackhawk arrived later)
Turtle Talk 
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