Raymond Cross, a University of Montana School of Law professor and former tribal attorney for the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, will deliver a speech tonight about Native Americans and land laws.
Cross will give the speech, entitled “Law, Progress, and the American Indian,” which will also cover Native American religion, in 182 Lillis Business Complex at 7:30 p.m.
Cross is the great-great-grandson of a Mandan/Hidatsa chief who sheltered explorers Lewis and Clark during the winter of 1805. He has represented Native Americans in some landmark trials, including the compensation claim against the U.S. government for destroying 156,000 acres of reservation land in North Dakota in 1949. The tribe was eventually awarded $149.2 million in 1992 for its loss, according to Cross’s biography page on the UM Web site.
His legal career is chronicled in a recent book by Paul Vandevelder entitled “Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes and the Trial That Forged a Nation.”
Cross said in a phone interview that he wants to lay out concepts of law and progress that altered ecological realities in the West, including how non-Native Americans dammed the Missouri, Columbia and Snake rivers, and other land developing projects that destroyed grass prairies while also harming other environments.
“It will focus on how a new view of law and a new concept of what America could and should be in light of the idea of progress,” Cross said.
He explained that when pilgrims came to the North American continent, they threw out old European laws and rules about developing and preserving resources because America’s resources seemed inexhaustible.
The new settlers, however, did not respect that the billions of acres of land before them belonged to the Native American inhabitants, he said.
John Marshal, former chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, changed land laws and altered the property rights of Native Americans, giving the federal government control over the entire continent, Cross said.
Cross represented Oregon’s Klamath tribe from 1976-1980 and helped secure the tribe’s water rights in the Klamath Marsh region, which, he said, the tribe uses for fishing and trapping and is important for migratory birds. Experts from the University testified on behalf of the tribe.
Professor Mark Unno invited Cross to the University to speak about Native American religion in conjunction with an innovative class he’s teaching, Dark Self East and West, which explores and compares Eastern and Western religions. Unno said that while he knows a lot about Eastern religions, he knows very little about some Western religions, so he is trying to bring in speakers who do.