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If you use your law degree as an excuse to talk down to other Native people, you are literally the epitome of settler colonialism. We discussed the distinction of legal right vs. reality in all my Indigenous law classes.
If you are going to discuss the Indian Citizenship Act without discussing how it was passed without consent and a form of assimilation that some tribes still do not recognize, you are not being fully accurate. @onondowaga22 talks about this in regards to the haudenosaunee.
I literally got censored in law school by the SBA for asking people not to wear Native costumes. You can talk about constitutional guarantees all you want, but if you aren’t discussing our current reality & how U.S. skirts these guarantees, then what even is the point?
The entirety of learning Federal Indian Law & beyond just taught me that if the U.S. wants something, your “constitutional guarantees” are entirely negotiable. It gives you a weapon, but they choose the battlefield and they never play fair.
My great-grandmother and mother were involved in the Trail of Broken Treaties fighting for our rights in the 70s, helping to takeover the BIA in DC. They didn’t have law degrees, but they knew what justice looked like!
I also don’t like giving any credence to idea that law is the only mechanism to obtain justice, because that sort of respectability politics is exactly the type of rhetoric used against Indigenous & Black movements as a means to discredit and hold us back from true freedom.
The law is used way more often as way to legitimize injustices done to BIPOC, than it is to give any power back to us. When they can’t stop us, they will find mechanisms to criminalize our existence.
