Tribal Relations 101 for State Legislators

Peggy Flanagan is Minnesota’s 50th Lieutenant Governor, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, and currently the country’s highest ranking Native woman elected to executive office. At the center of all her work is making progress for children, working families, communities of color and Indigenous communities, and Minnesotans who have historically been underserved and underrepresented. In 2015, Peggy Flanagan was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives, serving her own community of St. Louis Park, as well as Golden Valley, Plymouth, and Medicine Lake. A member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, Peggy lives in St. Louis Park with her husband, Tom, her daughter, Siobhan, and their dog, Reuben.

Robert J. Miller’s areas of expertise are Federal Indian Law, American Indians and international law, American Indian economic development, Native American natural resources, and Civil Procedure. He is an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe, the Interim Chief Justice for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe Court of Appeals, and sits as a judge for other Tribes. He is the Willard H. Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar at ASU and the Faculty Director of the Rosette LLP American Indian Economic Development Program at ASU.  In 2014 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. The APS is the oldest learned society in the United States and was created by Benjamin Franklin in 1743. Thomas Jefferson served as president of the APS for seventeen years overlapping his time as president of the United States. The APS has only elected about 5,600 members in its 280-year history. Before joining ASU in 2013, Professor Miller was on the faculty of Lewis & Clark Law School from 1999-2013. Prior to his career in academia, he practiced Indian law with Hobbs, Straus, Dean & Walker, and practiced litigation with the Stoel Rives law firm. Following graduation from law school, he clerked for Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  Professor Miller’s scholarly works include articles, books, and book chapters on a wide array of Federal Indian Law issues and Civil Procedure, and he speaks regularly on Indian Law issues across the U.S. and in other countries. He is the author of ”Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny” (Praeger 2006), and ”Reservation Capitalism: Economic Development in Indian Country” (Praeger 2012). He co-authored “A Promise Kept: The Muscogee (Creek) Nation and McGirt v. Oklahoma” (forthcoming University of Oklahoma Press 2022); “Creating Private Sector Economies in Native America: Sustainable Development through Entrepreneurship'' (Cambridge University Press 2019); and “Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies” (Oxford University Press 2010). Professor Miller has worked as a consultant with the American Philosophical Society since 2006 on Tribal language and archival issues. He was elected to the American Law Institute in 2012.