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Sally, cont. Following two years at DNA, we moved to Philadelphia, where Dick went to work for the Health Law Project at the University of Pennsylvania, and I worked remotely at the NLSP Welfare Law Center advising legal services attorneys in local offices about BIA welfare. Ed Sparer started both of these programs. Like others with different specialties, they functioned as backup centers with expertise in their areas of poverty law to assist the legal services attorneys in the field whose clients posed wide range of important legal issues. (The Welfare Law Center was headed for more than 50 years by another Ed Sparer protégé, Henry Freedman, YLS ’67, our neighbor in New Haven.)
Eventually Dick returned to his original career path by getting a Master’s in Taxation at NYU, and we moved back west to Albuquerque in 1976, where the large firm where Bill Dixon worked contracted with me to assist with the Navajo Nation’s Indian Claims Commission Act cases against the United States. The firm was the third contingent fee claims attorney for these cases which had begun in 1951. The work dealt with valuing the land taken from the Tribe as of their treaty date in1868 (without interest per Claims Commission rulings), and employing and coordinating with historians, accountants, and experts in grazing, timber, sawmill and uranium management. My first task was to determine how the Tribe had acquired every piece of land it owned at that time, in order to prepare for the U.S. Government’s inevitable counterclaims for the value of lands it had “returned” to the Tribe after 1868. We were able to have virtually all offsets disallowed. Our claim for the subsequent taking of lands at the Bosque Redondo (NM) that had been set aside by Executive Order in 1868 as a reservation for the Navajos (and Mescalero Apaches who all left one night), however, fell flat: to paraphrase the tribunal, “That would be with first concentration camp owned by the prisoners.” Our claim for the value of the Tribe’s uranium extracted by the U.S. for the Manhattan Project from the tailings on the reservation from which only the vanadium had been removed was also a disappointment; having turned down a settlement offer, we later learned that the tribunal seemed to think it was the Tribe’s patriotic duty to donate to the war effort most of the uranium’s value (which wasn’t really known at the time). Finally, by the mid-1980’s, the claims resulted in awards of many millions of dollars (although in no way commensurate with the Tribe’s losses) and the Tribal Council established a fund for annual support of the Nation’s 36 chapters, its local governmental units, which, to my knowledge, still exists.
For 17 years I worked on legal matters for Taos Pueblo and even became its General Counsel after the death of their long-time male attorney I had worked with. I often wondered how I got there while attending the gaslit tribal council meetings (men only in blankets and moccasins, speaking Tiwa). I was told that it was good I didn’t understand the language, but I did recognize the word for attorney. Some issues involved protection of sacred sites and others dealt with matters left over from the Pueblo Lands Act of 1924, like the unrecognized Pueblo ownership of the streets in the Town of Taos and trespasses by noon-Indians. Our small firm, including Scott Borg a DNA alumnus from the early 1980s, also represented Santo Domingo and San Felipe Pueblos, the Crow Tribe in Montana and handled personal injury cases & medical malpractice cases from offices we established in Ya-Ta-Hey and Shiprock, NM, and for a while, as Dan Press mentioned, from a mobile office that traveled around the Navajo Nation.
I am fortunate that DNA began an amazing career for me in Indian law.

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Dan, cont. For me, DNA also produced a partial change in lifestyle. Shortly after moving to Window Rock, I bought a pickup truck, (first picture) bought a horse (second picture) and began a 50 year friendship with a Navajo family that has a working ranch in the beautiful mountains on the Reservation north of Window Rock. They taught me how to round up cattle, (third picture) to brand, to string barbed wire fence, and other ranch work.
Though it is now almost 50 years since I moved to DC, I still spend three to four weeks a year at the ranch, shedding my city clothes, saddling up a horse, and fulfilling every boy’s dream of becoming a cowboy, along with enjoying the 50 year-old friendships.

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Indians? Native Americans? -- What's in a name? Peter has put together some thoughts: A Digression on names.
"We're too busy trying to protect the idea of a Native American or an Indian - but we're not Indians and we're not Native Americans. We're older than both concepts. We're the people. We're the human beings."[i]
Names. It's often been asked, "What's in a name?" Sometimes the answer is everything, as when the name is Rumpelstiltskin; sometimes nothing, as with the fragrant rose. N. Scott Momaday, in The Names: A Memoir (Tucson: University of Arizona (1976)), writes about the meaning of who we are that is contained and not contained in our names. "The man inside was merely motion, and he had no face, and his name was the name of the mask itself. Had I lifted the veil beneath the hat, there should have been no one and nothing to see."[ii] Names are mysterious—sometimes revealing, sometimes concealing.
A student once told me her mother was very upset at the name of my course, "Legalization of American Indians." First of all, she said, why was I calling them American Indians instead of their proper name, Native Americans? And second, why did I refer to them as having to be legalized when they were already here when the laws came?
Good questions. Unfortunately, the student only posed them in an end-of-semester evaluation, which I received after the close of the school year. I never got to respond to the student or the mother. So, now here's my answer to the first question. Maybe it will reach them after all.
Most of us know the story about how the peoples of the "New World" came to be called "Indians": Christopher Columbus (his Spanish name reveals his mission: Cristobal Colon—Christian colonizer) intended to go to India and insisted he had done so and named the people Indians. The American part came later, after everyone but Columbus had admitted his error, and the land had been named for another Italian navigator, Amerigo Vespucci. "American Indians" thus derives from the Christian colonizers' world-view. Yet the name exists; probably everybody in the world knows to whom it refers; and even the peoples whom it incorrectly names typically use it. "Indians" stands as a term of art in "federal Indian law."
I venture to say my student's mother was upset about "American Indian" because of the association with Columbus, but that she hadn't considered the equally serious dilemma involved with the use of "Native American." Her complaint was voiced at a time when concern for "political correctness" was coming into vogue. "Native American" emerged as part of an effort to recognize ethnic diversity in the United States while insisting on an over-arching "American" unity. Many people were identified as hyphen-American: African-American, Irish-American, Italian-American, Asian-American, and so on. For the original inhabitants of the land, the correct term became Native-American. In an ironic twist, the only full, un-hyphenated Americans were those who made no claim of origin beyond the shores of the continent. "Native American" may seem correct because "native" refers to something at home in its place of origin, something "first" or "primary." But as we have seen, "American" derives from that other Italian. So, "Native American" does not avoid the problem of naming from an outsider's perspective. Moreover, "native" also carries a pejorative meaning in English—"backward," "ignorant"—as in, "The natives are restless tonight." As with much else associated with political correctness, the concern focused more on appearances than reality. John Trudell (author, poet, actor, musician, and political activist) observed at the time, "They change our name and treat us the same."
We thus have to discard both "American Indian" and "Native American" if we acknowledge the history of colonialism and believe that a people's name ought to come from themselves. There are hundreds of Indigenous Peoples, bearing such names as Wampanoag, Cherokee, Seminole, Navajo, Hopi, and so on. But the conundrum doesn't end there. Some names are not actually derived from the people themselves, but from their neighbors or even enemies. "Mohawk" is a Narraganset name, meaning "flesh eaters." "Sioux" is a French corruption of an Anishinabe word for "enemy." Similarly, "Apache" is a Spanish corruption of a Zuni word for "enemy," while Navajo is from the Spanish version of a Tewa word. If we want to be fully authentic, we have to inquire into the language of each people to find the name they call themselves. It may not be surprising to find that the authentic names are often their word for "people."
In addition to naming entire Peoples, colonizers developed naming practices for individuals. An 1897 essay by the Superintendent of the U. S. Boarding School for Crow Indians, Montana, illustrates the policy: "The Indian Department has continually urged this matter [of "naming the Indians"] upon its agents, superintendents, and other workers 'in the field.' The command to give names to the Indians and to establish the same as far as possible by continuous use has been a part of the 'Rules and Regulations' for years past. ... In this thing, as in nearly all others, the Indians do not know what is best for them. They can't see that our system has any advantages over their own, and they have fought stubbornly against the innovation."[iii]
My student's mother's second question, about "legalization'" raises issues about law itself, which we will deal with later. For now, let us say, "The renaming of Native Americans" constitutes a statist legal and "cultural project: to fashion and normalize a standard patriarchal family-system deemed suitable to citizenship, property rights, and civilized, moral conduct."[iv] Governments want "legal" names, to serve state control systems. "Legalization" includes—perhaps starts with—the process of assigning "proper" names.
[i] John Trudell, Reel Injun, Rezolution Pictures, Montreal, Canada (2009).
[ii] N. Scott Momaday, The Names: A Memoir, Tucson: University of Arizona (1976), 146.
[iii] Frank Terry, "Naming the Indians," American Monthly Review of Reviews. New York: March 1897, 301, 302.
[iv] James C. Scott, John Tehranian, and Jeremy Mathias, "Government Surnames and Legal Identities," in Carl Watner, ed., National Identification Systems, Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Co., 2004. The analysis of this "cultural project" originally appeared as "The Production of Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 44:01, pp. 4-44 (January 2002).