John Echohawk was working for California Indian Legal Services in 1970 when the Ford Foundation provided a grant to start a pilot program to provide legal services to American Indians on a national level.
The program led to formation of the Boulder-based Native American Rights Fund, to preserve tribal sovereign governments; protect land, water and hunting and fishing rights; assure voting rights; and hold governments accountable to American Indians.
Echohawk, a Pawnee and the first graduate of the University of New Mexico’s special program to train American Indian lawyers, jumped at the chance to work on the project.
Along with other attorneys and tribal members, he established NARF, modeling it on the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and other civil rights legal organizations.
The organization has pursued cases in Colorado and across the country from a former fraternity house in Boulder for 45 years. From Thursday through Saturday, NARF will celebrate its 45th anniversary with events including a benefit concert and gala dinner.
“It was the time of the civil rights movement, and we all saw how the courts were making a big difference in bringing justice to minorities and poor people. We saw what was being done by the NAACP, which was basically a national defense fund for African-Americans, and thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we could get something like that going” for Indians, said Echohawk, NARF executive director.
“NARF is clearly one of the most prominent Indian organizations that has represented tribes and individuals in very current and relevant cases,” said Helen Padilla, director of the American Indian Law Center in New Mexico.
Among cases handled in the organization’s early days was a lawsuit against Colorado and Fort Lewis College that guaranteed Indian students a free education at the school, Echohawk said.
The land on which the college was located was originally an Army base outside Durango and the site of an Indian school. When the school was turned over to Colorado for a college, a condition of the transfer was free tuition for Indians.
As the number of Indian students grew, the state became concerned about the cost and began charging them tuition.
NARF joined with a Denver firm and sued, and a federal judge ruled free tuition for American Indians was a binding obligation.
Fort Lewis, which has since moved into Durango, “now has more Native American students than any other college or university in the country,” Echohawk said.
In September, NARF reached a settlement in a case brought by indigenous Alaska plaintiffs who argued the state’s voting information materials were badly translated and violated the federal Voting Rights Act.
It was the second time NARF had sued over the materials provided to the tribes, said Ray Ramirez, NARF corporate secretary and grant writer. “I don’t think we will have to sue again. I think the state finally got it.”
NARF is presently part of a coalition working to raise awareness of the federal government’s efforts following the Civil War to force tribal members to adapt to white America’s culture.
As part of President Ulysses Grant’s 1869 Peace Policy, Indian children were forcefully taken from their families and placed in boarding schools run by Christian denominations.
They were punished for speaking their native languages, banned from dressing in traditional clothing and taught that their cultures were evil, Ramirez said.
They often were neglected and psychologically and sexually abused, Ramirez said. When they returned to their tribes, many of them were broken people.
The trauma they endured at the schools, which operated into the 1950s, led to alcoholism, domestic abuse and other problems that continue to plague Indian communities today, Ramirez said.
Remedies could include some funding for programs to address the issues, Ramirez said. “Hopefully, enough people out there in the general population will support our efforts and write to Congress and ask them to recognize what this policy did, the cultural genocide it caused.”
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671, tmcghee@denverpost.com or @dpmcghee
