Addie C. Rolnick

Addie Rolnick is the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians Professor of Law. She directs Boyd’s new Indian Nations Gaming & Governance Program and is also a co-facilitator of the Race, Gender & Policing Program. 

Her latest project combines her work in racial justice and indigenous rights. The article, “Indigenous Subjects,” which will be published in the Yale Law Journal, looks at legal challenges to indigenous self-determination and land rights in the U.S. territories, such as Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. In these cases, the plaintiffs argue that laws that apply only to indigenous peoples are illegal because they classify by race when they identify the indigenous peoples as a distinct group using descent or ancestry as a criterion. While American law schools often ignore the experience of people living in the territories, these are significant outside the territories for at least two reasons. 

First, they argue that using ancestry to identify a group of people is illegal. If this argument is taken to its logical conclusion, it could prevent the U.S. from recognizing and protecting indigenous and colonized peoples for any reason. It has been most damaging to indigenous peoples in Hawai’i and the territories because those groups are not recognized as Indian tribes by the federal government. The most common way to identify the members of these groups in law is by reference to having an ancestor who experienced colonization. If ancestry can’t be used, governments can’t define the group and therefore can’t protect its rights. In Guam, a place where military and tourist interests have long threatened indigenous communities, litigants have attacked laws that extend housing rights to “Native inhabitants” and elections to determine the future of self-determination. However, the argument has also been used in legal attacks on laws that protect federally recognized Indian tribes, including the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Second, these cases are a little-known part of a strategy by conservative think tanks to dismantle voting rights. Many of the cases are claims about race discrimination in voting brought under the 15th Amendment. While they seem unique because they involve indigenous peoples, they use the same arguments advanced in cases where the Supreme Court has limited states’ ability to think about race when drawing district lines, even when they are trying to correct a history of racist voter suppression. These think tanks have used the Pacific territories cases to refine arguments that will later be used to undermine voting rights in other places. One example of the connection between these campaigns is that some of the main figures involved in the Guam cases also created the Trump Administration’s campaign against alleged voter fraud that nearly undermined the 2020 election.

The U.S. territories are home to thousands of indigenous peoples. They face a significant threat from climate change and are struggling under the cascading effects of covid-19. In these cases, federal courts have restricted their ability to exercise land and self-determination rights protected by international law. In Indigenous Subjects, Professor Rolnick shows how these communities have been casualties in a larger legal battle over race and voting rights, and how they have been left out of mainstream legal education. 

For a non-academic account of the damage wrought by these cases, we recommend the book "The Properties of Perpetual Light" by Julian Aguon.