By Lewis I. Rice

The French legal philosopher Jean Bodin formulated the modern concept of sovereignty. To learn about it, you could read Bodin's 1576 treatise Six Books of the Commonwealth.

Or you could talk to Margaret "Peg" Bad Warrior, L'04, a tribal attorney for the Cheyenne River Sioux. She may not have devised her own treatise on the subject, but she certainly expresses her feelings about sovereignty clearly and directly.

For instance, when asked why it's important for Indian tribes to have sovereignty—the independence and self-government that gives them jurisdiction over their members and territories—Bad Warrior first draws a simple parallel. The Indian people want sovereignty, she says, for the same reason the people in her ancestral home of Ireland want it, for the same reason people in countless nations have struggled and died for the right.

She goes on to decry recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have curtailed the sovereignty of the Indian people. Then she gets to the heart of the matter: "Why is sovereignty important? It's important for controlling the choices in your life."

Making her own decisions is something Bad Warrior, thirty-eight, has been doing since she was a teenager, often defying convention and parental influence along the way—going off to a series of eclectic jobs, then to the University of California, Berkeley, and Northeastern's School of Law, and finally to South Dakota, where she's an Indian law practitioner who never formally studied the subject.

Where she's an outsider who's found an unlikely home.

On behalf of the tribe
The former Margaret Eagan has put down roots in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, having married Dugan Bad Warrior, a Cheyenne River Sioux tribe member. They have a child, Martha, born November 2004, and another due in June.

She lives and works on a reservation that's nearly the size of Connecticut but, with about 14,000 residents, has roughly a tenth of the population of Hartford.

As one of three tribal attorneys, working out of a basement office at tribal

headquarters, Bad Warrior defends the Cheyenne River Sioux against lawsuits, "mostly small-potatoes housekeeping kind of stuff," she says. Many are employment cases brought by people who work for the tribe, for which the tribe has the benefit of the same kind of sovereign immunity enjoyed by any government entity.

The meatier cases involve lawsuits brought by the tribe, typically against the U.S. government. Under various treaty obligations, the federal government provides services and money to the tribe. When those obligations aren't met, Bad Warrior negotiates with the applicable federal department, then sues if necessary.

She cites a recent case in which the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs threatened to withhold education money in the middle of the school year, contending that the tribe's contract for providing education services didn't conform to the No Child Left Behind Act. Pointing to a clause in the contract that stipulated at least four months' notice to renegotiate its terms, Bad Warrior threatened an accelerated appeal, and Indian Affairs released the money.

Over the centuries, the U.S. government and the Indian people have had a troubled history, one that clouds the current relationship and the laws that govern it. Bad Warrior mentions an infamous battle cry from the 1860s, "Nits make lice," a call for Western settlers to wipe out Indian children.

And she points to the boarding schools that operated into the mid-twentieth century to house Indian children who were removed from their families and culture. "The idea was to kill the Indian to save the man," she says of the children. "Dress them in Western clothing, cut their hair, forbid the speaking of language and the practice of Indian customs, and send them back to their families basically strangers."

Indian policy, Bad Warrior says, has swayed back and forth between attempts at forced assimilation to recognition of self-determination, leading to a morass of contradictory laws and regulations still on the books.

Mistreatment continues today, she notes. Even before she received her law degree, she worked with the Cheyenne River Sioux as an Indian child-welfare attorney, her first job with the tribe. She'd write briefs for state Supreme Court appeals on cases that terminated the parental rights of Indian families. She says she saw Indian children in state custody who didn't belong there.

If a family is Indian, the state is much more likely to "remove children first and ask questions later" than if the family is white, Bad Warrior says. Indians make up only about 12 percent of the state's population, she says, yet two-thirds of the children in the South Dakota social-service system are Indian. Many of these children are placed in foster care and adopted by non-Indian families.

"A lot of times the reasons for removal are pretty flimsy, racially motivated, and also class motivated," says Bad Warrior. "The child welfare system is really based on middle-class values. When [state authorities] look at a family that's poorer, oftentimes they see neglect. If that were a child of a bank president, they would not see neglect."

Bad Warrior has worked with fellow advocates to pass a state version of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, which she says would give a higher level of protection to Indian families. Though a commensurate law has passed in several states, thus far it has not been successful in South Dakota.

Outside of work, Bad Warrior tries to change the prevailing culture by leading a class in anti-racism training, similar to one she took in Cambridge while she was at Northeastern. She's currently teaching in Rapid City and hopes one day to offer the class elsewhere in South Dakota. The curriculum challenges white people to recognize the privileges their status grants them and, in Bad Warrior's words, "undo networks of racism that white people continually generate amongst ourselves."

Talking about racism is one thing, she says. It's also important to move from talk to action.

Growth of an advocate
One day, when she was a little girl, Bad Warrior and her mother drove past a field with a solitary tree, which had grown into a perfectly round shape. Her mother said she wanted her daughter's mind to develop like that—without a lot of influences, so that it could take whatever shape it would naturally form.

Years later, Bad Warrior was reminded of that moment by her mother. The grown daughter says she was touched by the sentiment.

Her mother, on the other hand, thought for a moment and said, "Gee, that really backfired."

Indeed it did, from the perspective of a religious, politically conservative woman raising a daughter with a mind of her own in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Bad Warrior sums up the experience of growing up in the small middle-class city west of Boston in a single word: "White." The state never removed any of the kids in her neighborhood, she adds.

Bad Warrior left home at sixteen, having graduated from high school early, and made her way to California. She worked a series of jobs that required no professional skill, from delivering tickets for a travel agency to dealing poker at a Los Angeles casino. While studying at a community college, she was accepted at Berkeley, where she got a bachelor's degree in music in 1993. After graduation, she worked as a choral director and a graphic designer.

But it was as a volunteer for Oakland's Prison Activist Resource Center, which calls itself "the source for progressive and radical information on prisons," that Bad Warrior says she felt "like a fish in the sea." She liked visiting prisons and interacting with the inmates. "When I go to see someone who's in prison, I'm not seeing someone who's 'other,'" she says. "They're just like anyone else. You've got to learn the facts of the situation."

Her social conscience derives from just scraping by in her twenties, she says, which exposed her to a world different from the privileged white neighborhood of her youth. She believes those who work in low-status jobs work just as hard, if not harder, than those at the top of the economic ladder. During her years in California, she met all kinds of people, from sex workers to transients, people who struggled day to day to survive. The experience educated her as much as her studies have.

"She has a very curious mind and an open heart toward people," says Northeastern classmate Judith Moman, L'03, a juvenile court clerk in western Massachusetts. "That naturally brings her into contact with a broad spectrum of people and makes her aware of the realities of their circumstances."

Before coming to Northeastern, Bad Warrior worked for Berkeley's Young Musicians Program, which trains musically gifted students who can't afford specialized training. Many of the students go on to prestigious conservatories, where some hit a wall and fail. Teaching kids about the mechanics of an instrument doesn't necessarily prepare them for a rigorous program, Bad Warrior realized. Law school, she hoped, would allow her to address some of the deeper issues that prevented those kids from succeeding.

At Northeastern, she continued working on behalf of prisoners, joining the school's Prisoners' Rights Clinic as well as the Poverty Law Clinic. She also enrolled in a joint degree program with Tufts University that would earn her a master's in public health along with her juris doctor.

Despite her activist passions, Bad Warrior rarely spoke out in class. She describes herself as shy, so much so that a trial practice teacher told her that perhaps she wasn't suited for the courtroom. But, says Moman, "when she spoke, everybody was definitely going to pay attention to her opinion. She had the ability to express herself clearly and be very persuasive without being aggressive."

Since Northeastern doesn't offer classes in Indian law, Bad Warrior wasn't exposed to a subject that now dominates her professional career. But the school gave her something she says will endure no matter which specialty she's in.

"Most people who go to Northeastern have the opportunity to go to fancier schools," Bad Warrior says. "The reason why I picked it was I figured the people who choose to go to Northeastern were the people I'd want to make connections with and work with after I was done with school. That was a heck of a good thought. I did meet a lot of superb people whom I'm very glad I know and depend on all the time."

Two of those classmates, Alex Cleghorn, L'03, and Theresa Witherspoon, L'03, currently work for California Indian Legal Services. Cleghorn and Bad Warrior were in the Prisoners' Rights Clinic together, where, he says, she "helped remind me in difficult times that what we were doing was the right thing." Cleghorn, who's a native Alaskan of Aleut/Alutiiq ancestry, today confers with Bad Warrior on Indian law issues. He says he's seen her command of the subject develop over a short time.

"I value her friendship, and I value her as a long-distance colleague," Cleghorn says. "I'm glad to know her. And I'm glad to have gone to a school like Northeastern that fosters a noncompetitive environment. It allows students to form strong friendships with one another that carry out in our lives as practicing attorneys."

Home on the plains
Bad Warrior came to practice in South Dakota by a typically circuitous route. Through her work at the Prison Activist Resource Center, she had become friends with a woman incarcerated in a California federal prison. When Bad Warrior visited the woman's family in Rapid City, her hosts urged her to do a co-op in South Dakota to see if she would like the area. They led her to state representative Thomas Van Norman, a senior tribal attorney for the Cheyenne River Sioux and a member of the tribe, who hired Bad Warrior as a legal/legislative intern.

Her first night after arriving for the co-op tested her affection for her surroundings. As she was sleeping, two teenagers crawled through her window. One of them jumped into bed with her, saying, "I'm going to sleep here tonight." She informed him he was not and escorted the intruders out.

Bad Warrior relates the story as if she's telling a joke, betraying no sense of menace in the encounter—probably just two drunk kids fooling around. "If you can kind of roll with things," she says, "you'll find this is a wonderful place to live."

She liked South Dakota so much she decided to go back in summer 2003 after her last quarter of classes at Northeastern, to work a co-op with the Indian child welfare attorney in Eagle Butte. Her first week on the job, the attorney quit.

Bad Warrior took over, thanks to state student-practice rules that allowed her to work as an attorney before graduating from law school. By the time she got her degree, she had worked for six months as a full-time paid attorney. Eventually, she moved into the job of tribal attorney.

"Because of her educational background, she could work on complex legal issues, and she has the skill of being able to get along with almost everyone she meets right away," says Van Norman. "She knew there was tremendous need. We could use twenty or thirty more folks like her."

Bad Warrior acknowledges, however, she faced "a horrendous learning curve" as she worked to understand Indian law. Part of that understanding involves knowing the history of the tribe. She also needs to know tribal codes, the tribal constitution, and federal Indian law. Complex legal issues surround seemingly mundane matters, such as when the tribe decides to open a credit union or a nursing home.

And while Bad Warrior's position makes her a big-time government attorney, her surroundings make her a small-town lawyer. People walk off the street into tribal headquarters and ask for advice, not all of it legal. Bad Warrior listens anyway, because that's how you deal with people in a small town.

She's heard things she would never hear in Massachusetts. For instance, a married couple explaining how much they enjoy washing out cow guts together (cow innards are a delicacy among some locals). It turns out cleaning guts is a more popular pastime than going to the movies—especially since Eagle Butte doesn't have a theater.

Blood ties
Around Eagle Butte, you tend to meet people through your family, which can be difficult for a newcomer with no family around. After Bad Warrior moved in, she says, her legal assistant took pity on her and invited her to various family gatherings.

That's how she met her assistant's younger brother, Dugan. He works for the tribe's environmental protection department, funded through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In his spare time, he likes to compete in rodeos, jumping off horses going 30 miles per hour and wrestling steers to the ground.

Dugan's surname comes from his great-great-grandfather, who was called Zuya Sica—translated as Bad Warrior, or, more precisely, Renegade Warrior—when he defied the U.S. government's demand that he come in to live on the reservation.

After dating for two months, the couple decided to have a child together. When their daughter was six months old, they got married. Intermarriages are common in the area, Bad Warrior says, and her husband's family welcomed her. She's blunt about her own family's reactions, however, using words like "ignorant" and "racist" to describe some of them. Before her family came to the area for the wedding, she apologized to her in-laws for the things she expected them to hear.

Bad Warrior will enroll her children as members of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe. In the past, she explains, the federal government imposed a "blood quantum," requiring proof that a member of a tribe was at least one-quarter Indian. Now any child of a Cheyenne River Sioux member is eligible to join, regardless of quantum. She hopes her children will take pride in their heritage, the blood of all their ancestors.

"For me, being from more than one background does not divide someone so much as it multiplies them, makes them richer," she says. "We both want our baby to speak Lakota, even though my husband doesn't. We'd like my daughter to understand the meaning of being a Cheyenne River Sioux woman and the history and the strength that come with that. And also understand that other parts of her aren't just 'white.' She has an Irish history, an Irish clan, a struggle for independence on both sides of her people."

Bad Warrior is adamant that while her children may call themselves Cheyenne River Sioux, she never will, and can't speak from that perspective. Once, as a co-op, she used the word "we" when speaking to the tribal chairman about an issue relevant to the tribe, then quickly amended it to "you." He told her she didn't have to correct herself.

That became even clearer when she was pregnant with her first child. A group of Sioux women who also worked on child welfare issues held a ceremony for her, a welcome for the baby. They wrapped a star quilt around Bad Warrior's shoulders and tied an eagle feather in her hair.

Then they did something she never expected, bestowing on her the name Oyate Nawica Kjin Win. At that moment, on a reservation in South Dakota, the advocate for the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe was known as She Takes Up for Her People.

Lewis I. Rice, MA'96, is a freelance writer living in Arlington, Massachusetts. He profiled New York Public Library research libraries director David Ferriero, LA'72, MA'76, in the Winter issue.

  Margaret Bad Warrior
  Photography by Kevin Eilbeck