Last Friday, Gabe Galanda delivered the opening remarks at the Legal Foundation of Washington’s event, Changing the Way We See Native America, at Seattle’s iconic Town Hall.
The event celebrated LFW’s $4 million investment in Indigenous civil legal aid.
Gabe also emceed the event and introduced the night’s keynote speaker, Matika Wilbur. Here’s the first part of his opening remarks.
We are here in celebration and the Legal Foundation of Washington’s $4M commitment to expand Indigenous civil legal aid in our state.
This investment is crucial because only 1 on 10 Indigenous persons in our state receive civil legal assistance.
9 out of 10 Indigenous people don’t get legal help, whether for housing, family, employment, public assistance, civil rights, other problems.
90% don’t get the legal help they need, when they need it the most. That is a truth that we cannot accept.
According to a 2015 Washington State Supreme Court Civil Legal Aid report, the top problems faced by Indigenous people includes:
· Denial of services from a Tribal government or community organization that serves Indigenous people; and
· Discrimination or employment termination by a tribe or tribally owned business.
That results in large part from the fact that Tribal citizens are the only so-called natural born citizens in this country that do not universally enjoy federal Bill of Rights protection.
That thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978, when Thurgood Marshall ruled that the federal Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 did not allow Indigenous people to seek protection in federal court when their personal freedoms were violated by Tribal governments.
The Supreme Court’s concern was flooding the federal courts with Indigenous civil rights cases.
Nearly 50 years later, the overwhelming majority of Tribal citizens in this country have nowhere to turn legally or judicially when their safety net it cut out from under them.
What this means is our Tribal citizens live their daily lives without the freedoms lived as a result of constitutional legal protections: freedom of speech/assembly, the right to personal privacy, the right to equal protection, the right to due process at law, to name a few. That reality breads an acutely unhealthy insecurity in Indigenous daily life.
We don’t even enjoy so-called birthright citizenship according to the 14th Amendment.
Sunday was the 100th anniversary of the federal Indian Citizenship Act, which granted Tribal citizens American citizenship.
It took this country 150 years for the first people of these lands to be recognized as U.S. citizens, for voting purpose.
And today, our U.S. citizenship exists only at the will of the United States Congress, not by virtue of the 14th Amendment. Think about that for a moment.
Even worse, there isn’t a single national organization in the country that is dedicated to the advancement of Indigenous civil liberties or human rights.
There is no Southern Poverty Law Center or NAACP Legal Defense Fund for Indigenous people. Pioneering human rights organizations like the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, are afraid to intercede, for fear of being seen as anti-Tribal or racist.
Which gets me back to the 9 out of 10 Indigenous people who don’t get civil legal aid, especially when being denied services or being discriminated against by Tribal governments or community organizations.
Without Bill of Rights protection, any legal aid effort very well may be futile, and that is another truth that we cannot accept.
And that unacceptable truth is why the Legal Foundation of Washington’s $4M investment in Indigenous civil legal aid is so important, and so commendable.
Gabe’s remarks have been edited for clarity.
Gabe Galanda is an Indigenous rights attorney and the managing lawyer at Galanda Broadman. He has been named to Best Lawyers in America in the fields of Native American Law and Gaming Law from 2007 to 2024, and dubbed a Super Lawyer by his peers from 2013 to 2024.
