Wampum

Four years ago this week a group of Rhode Island State Police executed a Rhode Island warrant on the premises of a Narragansett Tribal business. The RISP force inflicted injuries upon the person of the elected executive and seven members of the Narragansett Tribe. The order for the raid was issued by Rhode Island Governor Don Carcieri.

You may not remember this, but we do, and Joe Trippi does, as does Dr. Howard Dean, former governor and leading presidential candidate at this point in the previous cycle ("the Sleepless Summer", replacing Senator Joe Lieberman, then a Democrat, as the candidate to beat), and now Chairperson of the Democratic National Committee.

This is were the bones are ... Inyo County v. Bishop Paiute Tribe.

Can States physically seize documents from Tribal government offices under some "evidence" claim arising in a State court action? It is a question everyone in Maine knows, and we know the answer too, where the tribes are jurisdictionally mere townships of the State. We posed the general question, and failing to elicit the required response, we set out to ... ensure that authors of the wrong response did not advance.

Today the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Carcieri v. Kempthorne, joining the 8th Circuit, the 10 Circuit, and the 2nd Circuit on a fundamental test of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.

Narragansett 1, Rhode Island 0.

You have to wonder if all those DNC Dems who are lining up behind the junior Senator from New York and her constituent pleasing stands against Native land claims in that state are as full of themselves as the Deaniacs of the Sleepless Summer, right up to the post-Iowa nails in their campaign's coffin in Oklahoma, Washington, and New Mexico, or if they are taking their "inevitability" to novel heights.

Making nice to some Nevada Chiefs last week doesn't really offset most of a decade of making ugly to all Native land claims.