Court Opinion

ID: 9738951
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:06:00.571244+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:09.458796
License: Public Domain

HENDERSON, Justice
(concurring in result).
I concur in result only because, in my opinion, language in the majority writing waters down the integrity of the sovereignty concept.
Had this case been assigned to me, I would centralize and focus upon the educational process without benefit of general dicta. In Marty Indian School Bd., Inc. v. South Dakota, the Court said:
Removing from the Tribe and the Board the choice of how to spend the finite dollars provided by the federal government for school operations also necessarily affects the Tribe’s ability to make its own rules and be governed by them, (citation omitted) and runs contrary to Congress’ declaration that “parental and community control of the educational process is of crucial importance to the Indian people.”
Essentially, I hew to the belief and would restrict the holding of this Court to be that Indian tribal courts must be left to determine disputes involving personnel matters in Indian schools.
The majority opinion paints with too broad a brush, citing Harris v. Young and Wells v. Wells, both of which, in my opinion, continue to dance with true recognition of the rights of Indian people in this state. We should zero in on the issue before us and not address, by implication, other jurisdictional problems. Endemic to the understanding of the applicability of tribal-state law is a foundational knowledge of the development of sovereignty accords. Until that is accomplished, tribal-state relations *485of states in the West shall flounder. A recent statement of our immediate past South Dakota Attorney General in this state’s most widely distributed daily newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, February 13,1989, quoted him as saying “Indian reservations are a divisive system of government that have outlived their usefulness.” Recently, in fact, in September, 1990, a Deputy State’s Attorney of a county in South Dakota expressed that the contemporary Native American culture was “Godless, lawless, hopeless and jobless.” This statement was widely printed in newspapers in this state. Yet, in an Associated Press article out in Los Angeles, California, on June 15, 1981, President Bush reaffirmed a “unique government-to-government relationship” with more than 500 American Indian tribes. He expressed that “these tribes sit in positions of dependent sovereignty along with the other governments that compose the family that is America.” Bush expressed that “an office of self-governance has been established within the Interior Department.” He concluded by expressing that “the White House will continue to interact with Indian Tribes on an intergovernmental basis.”
For these reasons I concur in result.