The Yaqui, Hiaki, or Yoeme, are an Indigenous people of Mexico and Native American tribe, who speak the Yaqui language, a Uto-Aztecan language.
Tribal sovereignty in the United States is the concept of the inherent authority of Indigenous tribes to govern themselves within the borders of the United States.
Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191 (1978), is a United States Supreme Court case deciding that Indian tribal courts have no criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians. The case was decided on March 6, 1978 with a 6–2 majority. The court opinion was written by William Rehnquist, and a dissenting opinion was written by Thurgood Marshall, who was joined by Chief Justice Warren Burger. Justice William J. Brennan did not participate in the decision.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), also known as Indian Affairs (IA), is a United States federal agency within the Department of the Interior. It is responsible for implementing federal laws and policies related to Native Americans and Alaska Natives, and administering and managing over 55,700,000 acres (225,000 km2) of reservations held in trust by the U.S. federal government for indigenous tribes. It renders services to roughly 2 million indigenous Americans across 574 federally recognized tribes. The BIA is governed by a director and overseen by the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, who answers to the Secretary of the Interior.
Ernesto Arturo Miranda was an American laborer whose criminal conviction was set aside in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona, which ruled that criminal suspects must be informed of their right against self-incrimination and their right to consult with an attorney before being questioned by police. This warning is known as a Miranda warning. Miranda had been convicted of kidnapping, rape, and armed robbery charges based on his confession under police interrogation.
Indigenous peoples of Arizona are the Native American people who currently live or have historically lived in what is now the state of Arizona. There are 22 federally recognized tribes in Arizona, including 17 with reservations that lie entirely within its borders. Reservations make up over a quarter of the state's land area. Arizona has the third largest Native American population of any U.S. state.
The Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of 1936 is a United States federal law that extended the 1934 Wheeler-Howard or Indian Reorganization Act to include those tribes within the boundaries of the state of Oklahoma. The purpose of these acts were to rebuild Indian tribal societies, return land to the tribes, enable tribes to rebuild their governments, and emphasize Native culture. These Acts were developed by John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945, who wanted to change federal Indian policy from the "twin evils" of allotment and assimilation, and support Indian self-government.
The Standing Rock Reservation lies across the border between North and South Dakota in the United States, and is inhabited by ethnic "Hunkpapa and Sihasapa bands of Lakota Oyate and the Ihunktuwona and Pabaksa bands of the Dakota Oyate," as well as the Hunkpatina Dakota. The Ihanktonwana Dakota are the Upper Yanktonai, part of the collective of Wiciyena. The sixth-largest Native American reservation in land area in the US, Standing Rock includes all of Sioux County, North Dakota, and all of Corson County, South Dakota, plus slivers of northern Dewey and Ziebach counties in South Dakota, along their northern county lines at Highway 20.
The Brothertown Indians, located in Wisconsin, are a Native American tribe formed in the late 18th century from communities descended from Pequot, Narragansett, Montauk, Tunxis, Niantic, and Mohegan (Algonquian-speaking) tribes of southern New England and eastern Long Island, New York. In the 1780s after the American Revolutionary War, they migrated from New England into New York state, where they accepted land from the Iroquois Oneida Nation in Oneida County.
The Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona is a federally recognized tribe of Yaqui Native Americans in the state of Arizona.
Anselmo Valencia Tori was the former Chairman of the Pascua Yaqui Association, former Vice-Chairman of the Pascua Yaqui Tribal Council and Elder of the tribe. Raised in southern Arizona and Rio Yaqui, Mexico, Anselmo adopted his second surname as a young man. ”Tori” is the family’s clan name. His wife was Kathy Ann Nordin. Their marriage took place on April 26, 1992, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Cherokee Freedmen controversy was a political and tribal dispute between the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen regarding the issue of tribal membership. The controversy had resulted in several legal proceedings between the two parties from the late 20th century to August 2017.
In Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States the term treaty rights specifically refers to rights for indigenous peoples enumerated in treaties with settler societies that arose from European colonization.
Robert A. Williams Jr. is an American lawyer, author, and legal scholar. He works in the fields of federal Indian law, international law, indigenous peoples' rights, critical race and post-colonial theory. Williams teaches at the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law, serving as Regents Professor, E. Thomas Sullivan Professor of Law and Faculty Chair of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program.
Lewis Roca Rothgerber Christie is a U.S. law firm with approximately 300 attorneys across ten offices in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico. Its administrative offices are located in Phoenix, where it was founded in 1950 as Lewis & Roca.
Wendell Chino, was best known as a leader of the Mescalero Apache nation for 40 years and was recognized for his forthright defense of Indian Rights. Chino fought for tribal sovereignty and improvement of the standard of living and develop tribal businesses. Some of these businesses included the Ski Apache, Inn of the Mountain Gods, and Casino Apache located in south central New Mexico. He is also known to have served as chair of National Congress of American Indians from the 1950s to the 1990s and an associate and pastor of the Mescalero Reformed Church for 4 years. Chino is one of few Indian leaders who was a part of the National Indian Council on Aging, Inc (NICOA).
Jamescita Mae Peshlakai is a former Democratic member of the Arizona State Senate, serving from 2017 to 2021. She previously served in the Arizona House of Representatives from 2013 until 2015, and served as co-Minority Whip for the 2018 sitting of the state senate. Peshlakai is a member of the Navajo Nation. She served in the Persian Gulf War. Before her legislative service, Peshlakai provided agricultural outreach to Native Americans on behalf of the USDA.
Marcos Antonio Moreno is an American physician, public health advocate and medical research scholar. He is of Mexican and Native American descent, and an enrolled citizen of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe from the Pascua Yaqui Reservation in southern Arizona. He is a graduate of Cornell University, where he studied Neuroscience, and American Indian Studies. He is the first person from the Pascua Yaqui Reservation to graduate from an Ivy League University, and thus far is the only Doctor of Medicine from the Yaqui's reservation community. He received his Doctor of Medicine degree from UND-School of Medicine and Health Sciences and is a resident physician at Yale University in the Department of Psychiatry.
Veronica Murdock is an American civil servant and of Shasta–Mohave ancestry, as a member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes. She served in the tribal administration, including as vice chair, of the Colorado River Tribe from 1969 to 1979 and between 1977 and 1979 as the first woman president of the National Congress of American Indians. From 1980 to 2004, she served as a civil service employee with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Raymond Darrel Austin is Diné (Navajo) scholar and former Associate Justice for the Supreme Court of the Navajo Nation, where he presided over the case of Navajo Nation v. Russell Means. Since 2016, he is a professor in the Department of Applied Indigenous Studies at Northern Arizona University. Austin has practiced law in both the U.S. and tribal courts systems, and has published extensively on Federal Indian Law and Policy.
