Here’s the entire story from the Associated Press about today’s ruling in a case in Martin, S.D., a town that lies between the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian reservations:

MARTIN, S.D. (AP) – A federal appeals court has sided with the South Dakota city of Martin in a lawsuit alleging that its city council districts diminished the voting rights of Native Americans.

The American Civil Liberties Union said in its lawsuit that the district boundaries spread out the Indian vote and kept the voters from electing an Indian to the city council, even though Indians represented one-third of the city’s population.

The case has been back and forth between federal court in South Dakota and three-judge panels of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since 2002. In a ruling Wednesday, the full 8th Circuit Court in a 7-4 vote affirmed a federal judge’s ruling five years ago to dismiss the lawsuit.

Tags: 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, buffalo post, Gwen Florio, Martin South Dakota, Native American news, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Rosebud Indian Reservation, voting rights

You saw this one coming, right?

This Wonk Room report interviews Vee Newton, a Native American man who says he was stopped by Arizona police at a checkpoint after three cars full of white people passed through. He was wearing traditional attire at the time. He blames Arizona’s new law that requires police to check people suspected of being in the country illegally.

Newton tells Sarah Reynolds, a freelance journalist (there’s an audio link to the interview): “The questions were stated to me in a tone that I felt was very degrading to me. So I simply stated to them that I am a native of America, I am a native to the land and I am Native American.”

As Wonk Room points out:

Since Arizona enacted a set of draconian immigration laws which many claim will “exacerbate racial-profiling,” much of the focus has been on the effect its implementation will have on the state’s Latino population. However, along with being home to almost two million Latinos, Arizona has the second largest total Native American population of any state. While Native American tribes possess claims to Arizona lands that date back farther than any other group, they are often racially profiled and mistaken for undocumented immigrants of Latin American descent.

Indian Country Today, meanwhile, has this report by Rob Capriccioso that says Arizona’s new immigration law has left Native people “alarmed that tribal sovereignty has been violated, with the looming possibility that individual liberties will be threatened.”

Members of the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, which opposed the S.B. 1070, traveled to Washington after Gov. Jan Brewer signed it into law in hopes of educating policymakers on its potential effects.

“We have a range of concerns, including tribal sovereign nations not being recognized as able to define and protect their own borders as they see fit, and the possibility that tribal citizens will be profiled by police,” John Lewis, director of the organization, tells Capriccioso. Both the Tohono O’odham and the Pascua Yaqui Nations share borders with Arizona and Mexico.

The American Civil Liberties Union has vowed to monitor the situation as it pertains to Native Americans, Capriccioso reports.

We’ll be keeping an eye on the situation as it unfolds.

Gwen Florio

Tags: ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, Arizona, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, buffalo post, Gwen Florio, immigration law, Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Native American news, SB 1070

Ben Neary of the Associated Press has the following report from Wyoming. Also, see last year’s ACLU report, “Voting Rights in Indian Country,” here:

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Three years after presiding over a trial on an American Indian voting rights case, a federal judge in Wyoming has yet to rule on it. Now, the American Civil Liberties Union is taking the extraordinary step of asking a federal appeals court to force him to decide.

The ACLU represents five members of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes. They claim at-large elections for county commissioners in Fremont County violate federal law by diluting the Native American vote.

U.S. District Judge Alan B. Johnson of Cheyenne presided over the trial in the case in February 2007. Despite repeated letters from the ACLU since then asking him to rule in the case, he has yet to do so.

The ACLU late last month asked the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver to order Johnson to rule. The appeals court on Wednesday gave Fremont County 30 days to file a response and “invited” Johnson himself to address the ACLU’s request.

Johnson’s office said he has no comment.

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Tags: 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ACLU, ACLU Voting Rights Project, American Civil Liberties Union, buffalo post, Eastern Shoshone, Fremont County, Gwen Florio, J. Scott Detamore, Laughlin McDonald, Mountain States Legal Foundation, Native American news, Northern Arapaho, U.S> District Judge Alan B. Johnson, Wyo.

It took a lawsuit, but now Yup’ik voters in Alaska will receive voting materials and see ballots in their own language.

That’s under the terms of a settlement announced yesterday in a suit brought by Yup’ik elders and tribal councils against the state and the city of Bethel, according to the Anchorage Daily News.

The suit was filed in 2007 by the Native American Rights Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“We are extremely pleased the state of Alaska will provide Yup’ik-speaking voters in the Bethel area with the tools they need to fully participate in the political process,” NARF senior staff attorney Natalie Landreth says in a statement. “That is what this case was all about – equal access to the polls.”

Read the text of the settlement here.

Gwen Florio

Tags: Alaska Attorney General, Alaska Native, American Civil Liberties Union, buffalo post, Native American news, Native American Rights Fund, voting rights, Yupik

Bethany Cajune is a young woman in western Montana who sought treatment from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal Health Clinic Behavioral Health Program for an addiction to the painkillers she was given following a surgery. She made good progress there. As part of that recovery, Cajune – who was five months’ pregnant – sought to complete an outstanding sentence at the Lake County Jail. That’s when things began to go downhill. The Missoulian’s Vince Devlin tells her story here:

POLSON – A Ronan woman who says she was repeatedly denied a prescribed medication while pregnant and serving time in the Lake County Detention Facility for traffic violations has sued the county, Sheriff Lucky Larson, chief detention officer Luke Mathias and Dr. Stephen Irwin, the jail’s medical doctor.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Montana announced the lawsuit in a news release issued Thursday, shortly after the suit was filed in Missoula District Court.

It says that over the course of nine days in jail last spring, Bethany Cajune, 25, experienced constant vomiting, diarrhea, rapid weight loss, dehydration and other symptoms, all “extremely dangerous” to her fetus.

Rather than receiving the necessary medical care, it says, she was instead placed in solitary confinement.

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Tags: American Civil Liberties Union, buffalo post, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal Health Behavioral Clinic, Lake County Jail, Native American news

American Indians continue to face discriminatory policies and actions that deny them their constitutional right to vote, according to this report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The report gives a historic overview of discrimination against Indian people that limits their participation in local, state and national elections. And it focuses on the ACLU’s legal challenges on behalf of Indians to unlawful election practices in five western states: Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming.

“Every American deserves an equal voice in the political process,” says Laughlin McDonald, Director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project and one of the principal authors of the report. “The effects of discrimination against Indians continue and so must the fight for the fundamental right to vote. Compliance with the Voting Rights Act is not optional.”

Gwen Florio

Tags: ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, Indian Country, voting rights