“Trust case headed for settlement in joint bill,” read the headline from the March 3 Indian Country Today.
The article went on to describe a potential legislative settlement of Cobell v. Norton. The suit, a class action brought by a member of Montana’s Blackfeet Nation, charges the federal government with mismanagement of billions of dollars in Individual Indian Monies accounts.
“What is this case about?” the Law School instructor asked, as students finished the one-page newspaper article. “Right—that the government violated its ‘trust responsibility.’”
But the 14 students in the Monday-evening course wanted more. Mostly, they wanted to know how the concept of “trust responsibility” had originated. So Joseph Thomas Flies-Away, a member of the Hualapai Nation, dug into almost 10 years of experience as a tribal court judge and offered his perspective.
“Trust responsibility comes from an unfortunate relationship, from derogatory thinking about tribal people,” he began. “The government historically saw Indians as children and savages—as in, ‘We have to take care of these children and civilize these poor savages.’”
Judge Flies-Away, ’89, who was known as Joey Thomas in his undergraduate years on the Farm, is teaching Federal Indian Law at Stanford Law School for the first time. Only 128 faculty nationwide teach courses on Indian law, according to the Association of American Law Schools. Flies-Away also is teaching Community and Nation Building in Native North America to undergraduates this spring.
Flies-Away had finished only one year of law school when the elders of his tribe appointed him chief tribal judge in 1996. He served for two years, then studied at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard for a master of public administration degree and earned his JD at Arizona State University.
When Flies-Away studied federal Indian law at Arizona State, it was a yearlong course, scrutinizing statutes and cases. It’s challenging to cover the subject’s vast landscape in one semester, because federal Indian law interacts with that of hundreds of sovereign tribes and, since the transfer of jurisdiction that began in the early 1950s, the laws of many states. So Flies-Away aims to provide a comprehensive survey of contemporary issues: economic development, health care, tribal jurisdiction, sovereignty and gambling, among others.
“We discuss methods of getting at these problems through the federal government, and through litigation,” says third-year law student Colin Sampson, past president of the Native American Law Students Association and a member of the North Carolina Lumbee tribe. “And the judge is tackling these issues every day. He has tons of anecdotes.”
Flies-Away has served as chief judge of the Karuk tribal court in Northern California, judge pro tem of the Fort Mojave tribal court in Arizona and California, visiting judge for the Gila River Indians in Arizona and associate judge of the Hualapai nation and has consulted for Alaska’s Chugachmiut, Yukon/Kuskokwim, Chefornak and Napaskiak tribes. “When I go to Alaska, they have a unique way of handling tribal court,” he says. “They have five to seven elders who sit as judges, and most of them have no GED or college [education]. It’s a different world.”
