Expect fireworks from the CCA

Interior Department lawyers issue legal opinion on compliance with the Carcieri decision

By Will Collette

Joe Larisa is ready....to rack up some billable hours

Expect Charlestown’s “Town Solicitor for Indian Affairs” Joe Larisa to include a lot more time on his monthly bills for work on “the Carcieri Fix” especially if the Charlestown Citizens Alliance reacts the way I expect they will.

On March 12, lawyers in the Solicitor’s Office of the Department of Interior released a long-anticipated opinion on how the Interior Department will handle requests from the 500+ Indian tribes that were stripped of sovereignty rights by the 2009 decision by the US Supreme Court that originated in Charlestown’s fight with the Narragansett Indian Tribe over its planned low-income senior citizens housing development off Route One.

Click here to read the entire opinion memo.

Charlestown wanted to block the Interior Department from honoring the Tribe’s request to take the site of the housing project “under trust” because that would put that land outside of Charlestown’s control.

In a widely criticized decision, the majority of Supreme Court justices held that Congress was not clear enough in its language of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act that they intended all Indian tribes to be covered by the Act and accordingly ruled that the 500+ tribes that received federal recognition after 1934 were not covered. Among the 500 are the Narragansetts.

Since the Carcieri decision, Indian civil rights activists have been trying to get Congress to enact a “Carcieri Fix” – a bill that states that the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 does indeed apply to all Tribes, regardless of when they were recognized. However, the Carcieri Fix has failed to even pass one house of Congress and is woefully if not permanently stalled.

Bill S. 676 failed to pass in the last Congress and died. A replacement bill has not been introduced. However, the effects of the Supreme Court decision remain as presented in this graphic

The Charlestown Citizens Alliance is fine with the status quo, even if it means screwing 500+ tribes to preserve Charlestown dominion over the Narragansetts. Since this is an election year, and the CCA Party traditionally campaigns on fear – usually trumped up and sometimes simply made up – you can be sure the CCA will be blowing the bugle to assemble the town militia over this latest activity.

According to Indian Country Today, one reason the newly released Interior Solicitor opinion is overdue is that the Interior Department has been pretty much following the prescribed measures anyway.

Among the prescriptions in the Solicitor opinion are to (a) treat each Tribe individually; (b) conduct a historical analysis to determine what the federal government’s relationship has been with that tribe; and (c) if the history shows any sort historic jurisdictional relationship between the feds and that tribe and that the relationship was intact in 1934, then that Tribe should be treated as “recognized” under the 1934 law.

This probably has no effect on the Narragansetts since the Supreme Court used their circumstances as the basis of their decision, not to mention the Tribe was subjected to unjust “detribalization” (declared to no longer exist) well before 1934.

However, one analysis claims that the Solicitor’s “opinion, for instance, implies that the Narragansett Tribe, at issue in Carcieri, likely would have been able to make the required showing had the Court allowed.” That comment ignores the fact that the Court didn’t allow the Tribe to make that showing.

But this policy could provide some relief to many of the 500 other tribes that became collateral damage in Charlestown’s war against the Narragansetts. However, there are at least three major federal lawsuits challenging various Interior Department attempts to place tribal lands in trust and any one of them could simply void the Interior Department’s legal opinion. A federal judge trumps an agency lawyer every single time.

Remember that when the CCA Party sounds the emergency klaxon and tells all concerned citizens to man the barricades surrounding the Narragansett lands.

Meanwhile we’ve got Injun Joe Larisa on the job, charging the town $2,050 a month to watch to see if the Narragansetts are making any alarming moves, real or imagined. According to the two most recent invoices Larisa submitted to the town and that the town released to me under the Access to Public Records Act, Larisa spent five hours working on the town’s Narragansett issues in January and February.

In January, he was paid $2,050 for three and a half hours working on ways to block the state of Rhode Island from transferring the old Camp Davis property to the Tribe. That comes to $586 an hour. Click here for his January invoice.

In February, he was paid $2,050 to work on the behind-the-scenes fight over Camp Davis for an hour and for another half an hour of work monitoring the “Carcieri Fix.” That comes to $1,367 an hour. Click here for his February invoice.