Native American Press/Ojibwe News

The rule that almost was: the saga of ‘full faith and credit’

March 7, 2003
The Minnesota Supreme Court made their decision on Wednesday, March 5th to not accept the ‘full faith and credit rule’ proposed by the Tribal Court / State Court committee.

We have written a lot of words on this important issue, and if you look at the money, time, and effort that has been spent by the proponents of the rule, mostly tribal attorneys / judges who don’t have to be under the jurisdiction of tribal courts, it all seems like just a big waste. The whole Tribal Court / State Court Forum was a sham, because key members had already made up their minds and plotted out their agenda before the seven-year process even started.

The tribal establishment tried to push ‘full faith and credit,’ which would be a substantial expansion of tribal jurisdiction and authority, through a relatively obscure part of the least-scrutinized of Minnesota’s three branches of government: the committees formulating court rules. The Forum never allowed anyone contradicting their agenda to be heard, either as member of the Forum, or by actively participating in the discussions of the Forum. It seems to me that these advocates of the tribal establishment do not very much concern at all for the rights or well-being of tribal members, and instead are focused on expanding the jurisdiction and power of tribal courts.

Press/ON has followed the issue of tribal court orders, judgments, and other rulings coming into state jurisdiction ever since the paper was founded, and in fact Indian Civil Rights is one of the issues that this paper was founded on.

We have done extensive coverage of tribal courts over the years, and I filed several hundred pages of this newspaper’s news coverage of tribal courts with the Minnesota Supreme Court as it was considering ‘full faith and credit’ petition.

When the Tribal Court / State Court Forum was established, I was concerned about the process that was being put into place. The modus operandi which has tainted many tribal courts over the years seems to have affected the process of the Tribal Court / State Court Forum. Despite our persistently hounding them to keep us informed of this purportedly public process, this newspaper was not notified of a number of Forum meetings held on-reservation, we were notified at the last minute, or in some cases received official notification after the meeting was over. Press/ON writers were told that on-reservation Forum meetings were “closed,” and in one instance one of this newspaper’s writers was barred from a Forum meeting by banishment.

It’s been a long and one-sided saga. The tribal establishment was getting paid, state court judges were getting paid, and I can only imagine how much the tribal attorneys were getting paid. Especially toward the end of the tortuous process, the tribal attorneys / tribal court judges who are forum members were sending out hundreds of packets of information to influential organizations like the Minnesota State Bar association, the County Attorneys’ association, the Chief of Police and Sheriffs’ association, Judges’ associations, and almost every other legal association in the state. They traveled all over the state to lobby legal and law enforcement organizations, seeking support of their proposed rule. Who paid for all that?

Members of the Indian community who wanted to participate were barred from the process of considering what should be done, or could be done, to address the acknowledged problems between tribal courts and state courts. A former member of the Minnesota Supreme Court, along with a present member of the Court of Appeals, seemed determined to exclude community participation.

If Indian people from around the state had been allowed to participate in the process from the beginning, using our understanding of the tribal court system as people who have lived under it and who deal with it on a regular basis from the perspective of an ordinary citizen, then it is likely that we could have come up rules and procedures which would have been both just and acceptable to Indian people.

With the Supreme Court’s March 5th directive that the Rules Committee receive “input from all interested parties,” it’s possible that another go-around with the long, time-consuming, and expensive process of the tribal establishment manipulating the system for its own gain can be avoided.

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