Oral History Interview with Gloria Valencia-Weber

Oral History Interview

with

Gloria Valencia-Weber

Interview Conducted by Jennifer Paustenbaugh October 23, 2010

Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project

Interview History

Interviewer: Jennifer Paustenbaugh Transcriber: Micki White Editors: Latasha Wilson, Jennifer Paustenbaugh, Tanya Finchum

The recording and transcript of this interview were processed at the Oklahoma State University Library in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Project Detail

The purpose of the Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project is to document the development of the state by recording its cultural and intellectual history.

This project was approved by the Oklahoma State University Institutional Review Board on April 15, 2009.

Legal Status

Scholarly use of the recordings and transcripts of the interview with Gloria Valencia-Weber is unrestricted. The interview agreement was signed on October 23, 2010.

Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project

About Gloria Valencia-Weber…

Gloria Valencia-Weber, a pioneer in establishing the first and second Indian Law Certificate Programs in United States ABA-approved law schools, earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1970 and a master’s degree in communications from Oklahoma State University in 1974. After graduation she worked with the American Civil Liberties Union, taught psychology at OSU and coordinated a program at Oklahoma State University, the Psychology Diversified Students Program, which sought out talented minority students who were underrepresented in the post-graduate degree area of psychology. This program has now produced more doctorate degrees in psychology by Native Americans that any other in the United States.

In 1986 she obtained a law degree from Harvard Law School. While at Harvard she served as Comments Editor for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, was a C. Clyde Ferguson International Human Rights Fellow and received a fellowship from the American Unitarian Universalists Association. Due to a lack of classes on Indian Law at Harvard, she studied this area of law on her own. After law school, she completed federal judicial clerkships for Judge Lee R. West of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, and for Chief Judge of the Tenth Circuit William J. Holloway, Jr.

In 1990 Valencia-Weber established the first Indian Law Certificate Program in the United States at the University of Tulsa College of Law. In 1992 she moved to the University of New Mexico where she began work to establish the nation’s second Indian Law Certificate Program. She served as director of this program from 1992 to 2002 and as Henry Weihofen and Regents Professor.

In 2010 Valencia-Weber was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the Board of Directors of Legal Services Corporation, the single largest provider of civil legal aid for the poor in the United States. She was inducted in the American Law Institute in 2007, is a member of the Southwest Intertribal Court of Appeals, and has served on the Oklahoma Indian Legal Services Board. Her efforts to include Indian Law on state bar exams were successful in New Mexico, making it the first state to do so; she chairs the Indian Law on State Bar Exams Committee of the Federal Bar Association and as of late 2010 South Dakota and Washington had also decided to include Indian Law on their state bar exams.

Valencia-Weber was interviewed on behalf of the Angie Debo Series of the Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project chronicling her relationship with the historian beginning with their tie through the ACLU in Oklahoma to her role in the making of the WGBH/PBS documentary Indians, Outlaws, and Angie Debo.

Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project

Gloria Valencia-Weber

Oral History Interview

Interviewed by Jennifer Paustenbaugh October 23, 2010 Stillwater, Oklahoma

Paustenbaugh Today is Saturday October 23, 2010. We’re at the Stillwater Public Library, and this is Jennifer Paustenbaugh, Associate Dean of Libraries at Oklahoma State University, with Gloria Valencia-Weber who is a distinguished legal scholar, among other things, and who knew Angie Debo well. The purpose of our interview today is to talk about her relationship with Angie Debo. I’m going to start out, as we previously discussed, by asking you a little bit about your background and how you ended up in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and what was going on with you professionally at the point that you met Angie Debo and started working with her.

Valencia-Weber I met Angie as the result of what started out as volunteer work after my husband and I came to Stillwater. In 1967, my husband accepted a job teaching in the psychology department. We moved here from Ohio, and we were trying to get to the west. We were both raised in the west in Arizona and having gone to school in the east, we were working our way westward. Shortly after our arrival in 1967, I began getting involved with civic groups, local groups, and then became quite involved with what was then a very critical set of people working on protection of civil rights through volunteer organizations. One of those organizations ultimately became a big focus for me, and that was the American Civil Liberties Union.

At the time of my arrival, Oklahoma was one of the states that did not have an operating full-time American Civil Liberties Union affiliate. It was largely a volunteer group of people, a committee, a statewide committee, of good-hearted people, but as I also said at one time— perhaps uncharitably—since it was all male members, it was sort of liberal gentlemen that met periodically to feel good about being liberal gentlemen in Oklahoma. To try to move that commitment to protection of constitutional rights, which is the main commitment of the American Civil Liberties Union, became a very core commitment of a number of

us, including Earl Mitchell and Richard Cummins. It was a time of particular social controversy and upheaval. We were already involved in the Vietnam War. The concerns of people, why we were there and how they would express their dissent against the US presence in Vietnam became one of the many critical issues along with what was still the vestiges of discrimination most often against people of identifiable minority: African Americans, some Latinos in this area, sometimes women.

So, attempting to make real the rights that were promised in the 1964 Civil Rights Act that in everyday life individuals could exercise was hard because even though the law was on the books, a number of places, like for instance the public schools in Stillwater and other towns, would capriciously eject students out of school, place them immediately in institutionalized settings, that is, juvenile settings for behavior that was not threatening to others physically. I mean, badmouthing, talking back—I’m not saying that’s desirable behavior on the part of high school students, but you don’t jerk a student, deprive him of a high school education and immediately place him in one of our juvenile reformatories where we normally place very hardcore juveniles who have actually committed acts of violence against others.

And so, you were throwing, without any hearings or due process, what should be done with a badmouthing student versus somebody who had actually physically injured somebody. So, that’s a typical kind of thing that happened along with what were burgeoning numbers of people expressing their dissent against the Vietnam War by demonstrations, particularly outside Tinker Air Force Base and other military facilities. A number of other issues that arose when women felt that they were being denied opportunities either in employment or being treated differently than males in some educational programs.

I don’t think that’s atypical of what was happening across the United States, it’s just that in Oklahoma at that time it was very hard for individuals, especially if they did not have the money to hire a private attorney to really use those rights, make them part of their life as opposed to being written somewhere on the books. So, over time, I’ve served on first the Oklahoma board, and we …

Paustenbaugh This was the Oklahoma board of the ACLU?

Valencia-Weber The Oklahoma board of the ACLU, the Oklahoma ACLU. We established it. We hired what was first a part-time and then a full-time director of that office. We enlarged that board of directors that would have more knowledge and reach across subject matter and across the state about the problems that were showing up. That was also a time of

awakening among the American Indian or Native American population about how their rights were being abused. It’s not surprising that after the African American leadership in the civil rights movement, other groups, women and others, awoke and began to organize and demand the protection of their rights.

Oklahoma was also a central place in which some of those events occurred. There were demonstrations here. It was also the period where the Pawnee office of the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] was taken over by AIM, the American Indian Movement people, kind of as a practice run before they went to Washington D.C. to take over that office and occupy it as part of their demands. So, there was a constant traffic of AIM and other activist American Indians through this area, and they ultimately held their national meeting outside of Tulsa. There was a great concern among the state leaders, political leaders, and law enforcement people whether these people were going to cause crime and disorder, which they did not. And so the ACLU was part of a group that the AIM people turned to to make sure that they could peacefully arrange a meeting. It was going to be in the countryside at private land that was made available to them. And so, in working with them, we made sure we met all of the Oklahoma laws for sanitation, for water, for the number of portable toilets, all the things that could’ve been used to deny them that time, that opportunity.

Oklahoma was a fertile place for continually arising constitutional rights: issues of free speech, of right to assembly, to make known views, as well as to demand the real use of the rights promised in the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution of the United States in the Fourteenth Amendment for equal protection and due process. That board eventually included Angie Debo, who Dick Cummins and I talked to, and she gladly joined. She was a very wise contributing leader. I remember some very strong statements she made that guided us as we did some hard wrestling with issues as they arose, because when you have this whole array of populations and issues that I’ve just mentioned, there seemed for a period a continuous set of issues presented to us about whether we would act and in what way to act, were we going to put out statements objecting to what was being done to repress an individual right, were we going to move to try to get legal representation of those individuals who claimed their rights were being violated? For the first time in the Oklahoma affiliate, we not only had a director but we had what was called a legal panel, and still is, a panel of volunteer attorneys who agree to take representation of these cases, represent them without a legal fee. We also had for the first time a legal counsel, a person who agreed to serve as the primary attorney of the ACLU.

Again, the main requirement of all this was not that one be of any

political party or another, because our legal counsel was Stephen Jones, a well-known Republican from Enid, Oklahoma. Stephen had a good mixture that you found in many Republicans at that time who were maybe economically, in the economic beliefs, conservative but very strong and committed to the core constitutional beliefs and principles involved with individual rights, so that was no problem for Stephen. He was our legal counsel, and then we started getting an array of private attorneys who would agree to take representation of these cases. Sometimes the issues were quite controversial, like when an African American man in some kind of confrontation with the Oklahoma City police ended up being charged with killing an Oklahoma City police officer, and in this country, then and now, the killing of a police officer always invokes lots of passion on all sides, and that was one of the cases we had to consider. Stephen was committed that we should represent this individual because the way that the arrest, the investigation, the withholding of evidence was occurring was totally counter to the core protections of the Constitution, especially the Fourth and Sixth amendments about how the criminal charged—defendant—is entitled to certain key protections. After all, the structure and principle in the constitutional individual rights is when the whole weight and power and resources of a state are pressed against an individual, that he or she should have the right to fairness and due process, to be able to confront the accusers, to be able to get access to all the information upon which the criminal charge is based, to have a fair trial and all of those protections that most Americans consider key, and the fact that in this instance the victim was a police officer should not prevent that individual from getting those constitutional rights.

So, one of these discussions was very heated and some of the more reluctant members of the board said, “We already are involved with so many controversial issues, this is just going to make more enemies for the ACLU.” And Angie at that point said, “Look, we have to be realistic and understand what we committed ourselves to when we said that the most important client, if you will, of the ACLU in its fundamental commitments nationally and when it started, is to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It’s not even perhaps to an individual, but to what the Bill of Rights provides for all individuals. We have to understand that that means that we’re not going to be universally loved. Whatever we do, whatever case we accept, we will never earn universal love, and we shouldn’t hope to get it if we do our job correctly.”

And so, we made a series of decisions on that case and others that the core issue that was being raised, whether it was free speech, or maybe it was in fact in a criminal case where an individual’s rights were really being abused and treaded on in the name of having law and order and peaceable relations in a community and the protection that people are

entitled to as community members, but we’re trying to get at a higher cost to the individuals who were charged because some of those individuals were not guilty of what they were charged with. So Angie, in her wisdom, kept reminding us of why we had joined in this endeavor, why we were building this organization to respond to the various issues as they arose. One of the issues, which she was most heartily committed to, was the First Amendment—the right to express one’s views in print, in writing, through conduct, through presentation of petitions orally or in writing to public officials about what one feels—is the proper public policy on any issue. And the Vietnam War kept increasing the numbers of people who were dissenting and who were now arranging and doing demonstrations outside of the military bases, and of course there were inevitably some people arrested.

Sometimes some of the better peaceful dissenting groups were very careful planners and very considerate about the well-being of their members who were going to dissent peacefully with signs and assemble themselves. They were not attempting to trespass on the military bases, but they also wanted to make sure that their views were known at the entryways and if there was a public event, and there were many at the air force bases that they have periodically, that they also, like others, would be allowed to come in. Some would consult the ACLU ahead of time and would even obtain some guidance and instruction on the proper way of which to plan and to ahead of time alert and see if we could have attorneys present to respond if people were unlawfully arrested simply for being present, and that people, if they were picked up, detained, arrested and placed in jail, they would know who to call and how to make sure that their families knew where they were and all of this. So, those people generally were pretty successful at making their First Amendment views known; but nonetheless, some of them still got arrested. Then, there were others who did it their own way, and sometimes in an undisciplined way, and inevitably got arrested. So, we had some of those issues come up, and some of those individual instances became cases that we represented.

But as the controversy about the Vietnam War, as part of the social and political dialogue, became a very big part of local and state elections, and then the presidential election of 1968 where Senator Eugene McCarthy and others were running on the platform against the war, you have more and more interactions at various levels occurring. You have the bumper sticker wars of “Love it or leave it,” and then if you were dissenting against the war then you were not a loyal American, you were not a patriot, and it’s getting ugly. So, there were forums set up, sometimes on television, the PBS station in Oklahoma City had some, at university campuses, sometimes public civic groups would have debates about the war and what the constitutional rights at issue were. Angie

Debo stepped forward and said, “I’ll take those. I’ll take them.” And they were amazing to watch, because some of these forums were set up by people who expected, from their point of view, a stereotypic dissenter who would be some sort of long-haired, shaggy hippie of some kind to walk in and mouth totally uninformed, unknowledgeable views about why this war was wrong.

Sometimes the opponent, the people questioning the war or who had made the decision to dissent against the war were what I call the “bumper sticker patriot people” who I think meant well but whose test for patriot[ism] was much too narrow and had too narrow a view about what it was the people presumably that we send to war are fighting. They are, in fact, protecting our constitutional rights and defending the constitutionally-based republic, and they never saw it that way. So, at these debates were some of these not well informed opponents. They were not all that way, but many of them were not very knowledgeable.

They were taken back when Angie walks in. By now, she’s a senior, very gray-haired woman, and she was always a small, petite lady, and she walks in, and they’re not prepared for that. They’re not prepared for the extreme level of knowledge she has. After all, she held a PhD in history, the highest level of education. She’d gotten a master’s in history from the University of Chicago. She had written extensively. She was a scholar. She knew, especially as one with views that she published first as a historian and then in a very separate and discrete role, she didn’t mix the two as a scholar, and then as an advocate of a group of people working to see that the rights of Native Americans were protected by statutes of Congress and through other kinds of government action. She was quite aware that censorship is not healthy in this republic. A constitutional republic that censors either in print or in other forms of speech is not good, and as an author, she was committed very much, but also as a believer in political discourse. So, it was rather amazing because these people often showed how little they knew about how this constitutional republic came into being, what the Fourteenth Amendment said about both the states and ultimately through application to all levels of government between the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment, how the First Amendment must be protected.

She would sometimes talk to me about these events, and she was very committed and she would do them, and sometimes as she was getting older, we didn’t want her to drive herself. Angie was, among other things, one of the thriftiest persons in the world, and Dick Cummins and Earl Mitchell and I began to worry about her driving herself to our board meetings and to these events because she had a twenty-some-year-old car, (laughs) and Oklahoma roads can be lonely places if you have car trouble. So, we made it our work to pick her up. She would not drive

herself. We would pick her up and drive her to our board meetings and to these events, and they were wonderful enriching conversations.

She made a comment once about one of these debate events where she said, she would keep doing them, but she said in many ways, pitting her against unarmed people was not an even contest. (Laughs) She was quite right. I mean, many of them were not armed sufficiently in knowledge to be truly her equal or an opponent to be meaningfully engaged. But she did it. She was a wonderful leader in that way for us. She also had a leadership role at a national level in the ACLU, at the big national board for the ACLU, and I served on the national board at this time. They had gone through a great deal of support, a great deal of effort to be allied with the African American-led civil rights movement to provide lawyers in the south. It was largely in the south, against the worst of the abuses against the African American populations, whether it was violence and abuse or keeping them from being able to register to vote. So, that was sort of in the minds of the big national board, the prototype of how one goes about protecting constitutional rights. They had no way of dealing [with] and understanding Native Americans who were now arriving on the civil rights scene and stating first of all their rights as sovereigns who had never given up their sovereignty once the entry of the Europeans came, and that pre-constitution and in the constitutional provisions and post constitution they were still sovereigns and in a nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government. So, some of their rights were difficult for the board of the ACLU, with its very individually-based rights in the Constitution as the guide for them, to understand when you have in the aggregate as a political entity trying to say, “Our rights are being violated, and we have a special right as a sovereign, preexisting the United States under international law of the time of entry as well as now.”

And then when you had individual members of the tribes having the kinds of violations that were similar to what was happening to other people, how to deal with them. This was pointed out to them time and time again not only by members, like myself, of the national board at that time, the national board member for New Mexico, a woman that’s a dear friend. And I tried to educate the national board. You’ve got to understand this is a different context, and you can’t just shift what you did in the south to the southwest and to the Dakotas, South Dakota and North Dakota. The ACLU set up a national study group, a commission, to undertake a study of the Indian issues in the constitutional civil liberties context, and we recommended that Angie Debo be placed on that because somebody had to inform these people, as strongly committed as they were, to protect individual rights, that you have to expand the legal context to truly understand what Native Americans are raising in this country when it’s not only about the individual rights they

have, maybe because they also have been wrongfully arrested and mistreated and thrown into jails like other individuals with rights abused, but when they began to press that the water has been taken, that they have water rights as a political entity, then those water rights were protected and promised to be protected in treaties, that’s a whole different context. So, Angie was a major force to try to open the eyes of those people.

This is a rather volatile period, at times disconcerting to the Native American communities while because some of the activists didn’t want to go through all the refinements of educating themselves about what the Constitution says, what the treaties say, they just wanted to act and be on television, and you have all kinds of activism going on that ultimately leads to the long siege at Wounded Knee where a whole range of activists, not just people from the Lakota, Dakota confederacies of tribes, but outsiders take on the FBI and the federal marshals and other people, and deaths result. When deaths result, you have a whole different set of problems that arise and at that time, you have the takeover of the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] building in D.C. Again, an attempt, as they claimed, to bring justice to the violations of the treaties as well as to the way individual Indians are being treated in the areas they live by the non-Indian jurisdictions. The police felt free, law enforcement officials felt free to do what they wanted to Indians, and nobody would ever account for it.

A continuing problem, for instance, that occurred in Oklahoma but all through the west and northwest states where Indians were a strong visibly present population and who were sometimes in conflict with the local and state jurisdictions, officers around them, was the number of Indians who would get arrested, be thrown into jails and die. You had people who might be arrested for drunkenness or public disorderliness and would die in those prison cells. Inevitably, if there was an investigation of some type, it was very minimal, and the excuse given for why they died is they had fallen down the steps. This happened in one-story jailhouses. So, I mean, you can’t have this continuing cover up. This happened in some places in Oklahoma, but it also happened elsewhere. It was a real contentious issue of how these deaths could be investigated, how their families, the survivors of some of these people could raise these issues, as civil rights cases. What was happening in Oklahoma was sometimes in the hint of what was to come, or it was also part of the stream that was happening nationally.

Angie was part of the board here, was part of the board nationally for the ACLU. She was a very proud member of the ACLU, never was hindered by the controversy, and believe me, the ACLU was marked here and in other places with charges, false charges, that they were disloyal, that

they were undermining the country, that they were a communist front. I’ve been present at the Oklahoma legislature when people spoke and claimed that the ACLU was a subversive anti-American organization, which was just a surprise when we are people committed to the most American-type commitment there is: the full defense of the Constitution and the Rights. But, of course, that was not part of what these people saw.

Then, when that was the period in which the Equal Rights Amendment that promised to provide full equal rights to women was also before the legislature here and in other states for whether it would be ratified. That was another area in which we at the ACLU provided testimony during the hearings. And it was in those hearings and in the sessions that, as soon as the ACLU was presented as one of those providing testimony, well, why do we need to pay attention to them? It was an unembarrassed attack by uninformed people.

Paustenbaugh So did Angie participate in the testimony pertaining to the Equal Rights Amendment?

Valencia-Weber I don’t remember that she did. I do remember that she signed the statement that we issued, and when asked, she always said, “Absolutely.” Because Angie knew, in a way better than most, what gender inequality, when it actually is at work, can do to you. If we think back to her own career and how she suffered the loss of opportunities as a professional historian because she was a woman, she had to wait to go and get a college education because first there was no high school in the Marshall area where she grew up as a pioneer child, and then had to wait until there was a high school that was created. Then she went to college at the University of Oklahoma, and then wanted to go to graduate school, and she was accepted at the University of Chicago—at that time, and still, among the leading graduate training centers for historians. And if you look at the people who were in her cohort at the University of Chicago, the people who go on to become the leading historians, the males, Henry Steele Commager, others of their period. She got a master’s degree; [her master’s thesis, The Historical Background of the American Policy of Isolation, co-authored with J. Fred Rippy,] was published. It was on from the President Washington period on, what was to be the new republic’s role in international relations, and she was encouraged by her advisor.

Then she discovered that she had to go find a job and that, as she puts it, the doors of academia were shut to women historians. They were simply not seen as people you could hire. So, she ends up accepting, ultimately, a job at [West Texas State Teacher’s College in Canyon, Texas,] outside Amarillo, and it wasn’t even in the history department. It was preparing

teachers, people in the education program, for how they would teach history. She continues her academic work as best she can as a historian and continues working on history.

At some point, she undertakes and does her PhD at the University of Oklahoma which was then having a history PhD program led by Dr. Edward Everett Dale. And he had also, like Angie, come from a pioneering western background and had managed to go to Columbia University for his studies, and he knew about the west and also some of the difficulties of getting some of the history people to look at the history of the west in an honest way. And then he comes back to head the program at the University of Oklahoma, and Angie became one of his students. It was there that she did this totally new research on what had happened in Oklahoma after removal and the treaties of removal that had promised the tribes that they would be undisturbed in the lands that were reserved for them. They would continue as sovereigns, as governments, and then what happens when these treaties are violated, which were promised to be in effect and to be honored by the federal government “while the waters run.” And hence, the title of her book about the violations, [And Still] the Waters Run, and what happened in Oklahoma.

Dr. Dale told her that this would be a brand new area of research, and so she spent many, many hours in the bowels of the BIA and literally, she said, in the red tape (the bundles of documents were tied with red tape) and looking at what happened in not only the breaking of the treaties but the violations of law by corrupt officials, state and federal, in the Dawes Commission to take the lands and the resources from the tribes. So, her book, and her scholarship, was published. She angered her department head in Texas, that she had all of these academic credentials, and when her publication won the award from the American Historical Association for the best new scholarship, that really did it for her in his eyes. She was a threat. He fired her. She was left with no income. So you have this—and Barbara Abrash and the scholars at the Institute for Research in History, who continued the work that Glenna Matthews, Aletha Rogers and I began in the oral tapes with Angie--found some of the newspapers from the Texas college that show her winning this award, but they don’t say anything about her being fired. She’s left without income. So, to save the face of the university, the college as it was called at the time—I don’t believe it was called the university at that time.

Paustenbaugh I think it was West Texas State Teachers College.

Valencia-Weber They had to find something, so the president of the university appointed her to be some sort of curator, associate director, of the university’s museum [the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum]. I mean, how could

you have this nationally recognized scholar fired by a mean-spirited, threatened department head? And so, that is how she finished her time there.

Then she comes back to Oklahoma and continues to write and lives with her parents. She told us in the interviews how her mother said, “Angie, you’re working on this so hard and so diligently, but what you’re putting in there, your book will never be published. I just fear that your book will not be published.” There was reason to fear for it because when the book was submitted to the newly-born University of Oklahoma Press that the legislature had established, in the first manuscript, Angie had named the names of the wrongdoers, the people who had benefitted from corrupt, dishonest, fraudulent transactions to take the land, not only of the tribes, but what’s even more disgraceful, of the orphan children, the individual inheritors of this land, by becoming trustees of those Indian orphans so they could get the land and, what was very important at that time, the immense oil riches, royalties. She named the names, and they were the names of the leading families that she said you could pick up the newspaper and see the pictures of their wives and their daughters in the society pages. They were the families whose members were in the legislature, and she did not hesitate.

So, the book was sent to the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Dale, her mentor, was given the book by the press to review, and he didn’t quarrel with its accuracy. Hard to quarrel with it. Nobody has ever really quarreled with that. She was such an absolute committed scholar about honesty. I mean, to her dying days, she was still making corrections if she could get the University of Oklahoma Press to make them. By then, they were publishing her books to the next edition because she had uncovered something that she didn’t know at the time the current book had been put out. His review was that the author had been much too strong about some of the description attributions of what had been done and that he feared that the newly-born University of Oklahoma Press was going to suffer when some of the very people whose families, or individuals who were named, would take vengeance against the newly- birthed press and kill it. And when Angie learned that this was his review and she also shared his view, that the vindictive legislature might just kill this press that was very important because of what it said about the University of Oklahoma’s development as a university and scholarly actor in the world of universities, and moreover the commitment of the University of Oklahoma to particularly publish books about western history and about Native Americans, she really feared for that, so she withdrew her book. She wasn’t willing to change the story. The facts stood for themselves. The narrative which is her work, the construction of the story of that history was not going to be changed for that, so she withdrew it.

So, then when the university press at Princeton University hired away from the University of Oklahoma one of its associate directors and editors, one of the first books that he wanted to publish was her book. They also had the book vetted. They knew what had happened and she was very honest with them. So was he. His name was…

Paustenbaugh Joseph Brandt.

Valencia-Weber Yes, Mr. Brandt. She always called him Mr. Brandt, even though they were good friends. But Joseph Brandt went there. They submitted it, and as I understand it, the university legal counsel at Princeton University reviewed it because of the fear of lawsuits. Lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, had also occurred at other times of Angie’s publications because of her insistence first on factual scholarly honesty, and secondly, the narrative that she constructed based on that, like any good historian, she presents her conclusions. So, the review by the legal counsel wasn’t given the way that Angie produced her work. There was no real concern then about a basis for any lawsuit, if it would be for libel or something that’s based on misrepresentation of fact, or presenting a fact that which is untrue. What the editors had as a concern was Angie’s meticulous writing for the University of Oklahoma Press mentioned many individuals by name who were in a large national scope not really perhaps worthy of identification, if you consider the national perspective of Princeton University Press. So, what they did was edited it in such a way so that if you follow her footnotes and go to the source in the footnotes, there’s the names of all the small-time bad actors, and the key bad actors, of course, are in the narrative. And that includes the people who served on the Dawes Commission. She was unhesitating about calling some of the Dawes commissioners corrupt as a people who committed fraud to accumulate wealth and pursue their own best interest out of what was done. And so, she didn’t hesitate, so those bigger actors were left in, but anybody who reads her book and pursues the footnotes can find all the small-time Oklahoma actors.

That was not the first time that she had been threatened by a lawsuit. She ultimately was never sued, at least about that book and any others, but for that book, her response was that, well, she figures that she wasn’t sued because they were either too ignorant to read the book and realize that they had been identified for their bad deeds, or if they had or anybody told them, that they would be in many ways hesitant or afraid to sue out of concern of what more she would reveal about them that they didn’t—she’d already revealed a lot, but she obviously knew more, and they would risk her telling more about their other bad acts. I mean, one of her heroines was Kate Barnard who she saw destroyed as Commissioner of Charities in Oklahoma because when this corrupt practice, assigning trustees for Indians who had land that was rich in oil

and other resources, it first starts out with orphans, and then it goes so that every adult Indian is not capable of protecting his or her interests and needs a trustee also. And it became a major industry for corrupt lawyers.

Angie had named a lot of names in her lifetime, and there was much to be revealed, and she knew that what had been done to Kate Barnard when Kate Barnard tried to stop, especially since as Commissioner of Charities, it was her job to protect children and that included orphans, Indian orphans, that they had had their rights and wealth abused. Money that should have gone for their care and their education went to the pockets of corrupt people. In trying to protect those orphans and to expose that, Kate Barnard, who also had initially been part of the designers of what was to be a progressive design for corrections, which ultimately became corrupted too, if you see what happened to our state prisons, she was politically destroyed. And so Angie knew well that exposure of that kind of political actor who has his self interest, because these were male actors, takes the public money or takes the resources that belong to helpless orphans, is really something that’s risky.

As Kate Barnard and others revealed, when it wasn’t enough that there were naturally-occurring orphans, some people resorted to the killing of Indian people so that there could be orphans or there could be a family to have a trustee to be appointed to take care of them, particularly in the Osage country and others. You would have Indians found killed with gunshot bullet wounds to the back of the head listed as suicides—a very physical impossibility. The federal government would not investigate no matter how many times it was pointed to them how impossible these deaths were. And this ultimately became so bad that there finally were some investigations, and you have a whole body of literature that comes out about this cycle of the killings of Indians, adults, in order to be able to get the trustee business. You have people that write about those deaths and investigative reporters, even in our own twentieth century, who have done reports on them and you have people like Linda Hogan who write about that period of life.

Linda’s book, it’s a fictionalized account of the killing of the Osages, Mean Spirit. Linda Hogan, a fine writer and poet. Her book Mean Spirit is about these murders done in the Osage country, and if you look at the back of her book, she has some of the federal investigation documents listed as sources that she went to. That’s part of what happened in this time. Earlier, she had also revealed in some of her other books and in her articles that became part of books some of what happened. Some of them were people who were Indian people who felt that their ancestor was mentioned in a way they didn’t want them to be. One of them was Muriel Wright, whose grandparents and parents had been part of the

delegations that had gone to Washington D.C. for negotiations with the federal government involving treaties and treaty rights, and Angie in studying what had happened during those treaty rights and then subsequent negotiations on how to protect them had discovered that some of the Indian members of those delegations, and that included Muriel Wright’s relatives …

Paustenbaugh Right, Allen Wright, I think.

Valencia-Weber Yes, Allen Wright and some other relatives I believe as well, but I know Allen Wright was one of them, had accepted gifts that were not appropriate and prohibited. They might be called bribes. They might be called something else, but in any case, they were not gifts that should’ve been accepted. And so, she noted that this was used as part of the way for the negotiators to gain favor and to soften the position of the Indian negotiators. And Muriel Wright felt that this was a wrongful way for presenting her family and the pride they had in these members of her family. And certainly Muriel Wright, who was a very noted writer herself, she was more of an oral historian, and she has the book on The Ten Grandmothers [Alice Marriott authored The Ten Grandmothers] and the others that we use to learn much about what happened with tribes in Oklahoma. I understood her pride, but Angie said it was all there in the documents, and she was describing those negotiations and how they occurred. And she would not back off. And it made for some nasty relationships after that. Muriel Wright did not sue. I guess she went to an attorney. I don’t know that she did, but since everything was there, what was there to sue about? Not misrepresentation of fact.

Angie told me that she felt that later when her subsequent books were reviewed in the The Chronicles of Oklahoma, the publication which Muriel, and I believe her son at some point became an editor of that, some books were not favorably reviewed even though there were favorable reviews in The New York Times and in the history journals, but in The Chronicles of Oklahoma they were not because Angie felt there was this lasting animosity from Muriel Wright. So, it cost her. It cost her because, for instance, when professor positions opened at the University of Oklahoma and Angie applied, she was not considered. At that point, she had been published, she had won the award from the American Historical Association…

Paustenbaugh The [John H.] Dunning Prize.

Valencia-Weber Yes, the Dunning Prize. Any male graduate of that period, even if it’s during the Depression, would have been able to get a job as an academic in any number of history departments in American universities, but because she was female, she was not considered. And so, it was very

heartbreaking for her to apply for a job at the University of Oklahoma, now with this clearly undeniable set of accomplishments and to not be considered. When you start doing this research into the life, you find things that are saddening and that was when Barbara and I, Barbara Abrash, discovered with Glenna Matthews, we got some of the archival material from the University of Oklahoma that were there, and the correspondence to Dr. Dale. It’s a heartbreaking letter. Angie presents an application. She writes a statement about her accomplishments in a very sort of objective way, you know, listing them, and then she talks about her view of history and her interest in teaching and how she has used every opportunity she could to do short courses and other things whenever opportunities arose, especially the work she did with the American Association of Librarians [American Library Association] who were her lifetime supporters, and she would teach seminars and courses for them. And she ends with a statement that, for those of us who have in many ways fought our way into academia as well, that her only disadvantage is that she is female.

Paustenbaugh It is really heartbreaking, even today.

Valencia-Weber It’s heartbreaking even today to talk about that. I mean, she lists all her pluses, and to have her gender be a negative… I’m not citing the text completely verbatim, but that is what she said. And she was rejected. Even though Dr. Dale, in letters to her—and you can read it in his writing—that of all the students he had mentored and supervised in their theses, she was the best of his doctors, but he could not move to hire her. And it hurt her to see males hired, and at this time we’re talking white males only, with lesser credentials than her as a history professor. It was not to be her experience in her lifetime to be hired as a full-time tenure- track tenured professor of history.

She was ultimately saved, she said, as she’s getting on in age that she has to build up something for retirement, so she had a friend. The director of the OSU Library, Edmon Low, had always been a friend and admirer of Angie’s, and he told her that with her background and all that he could perhaps find a way to hire her at the library, with her immense knowledge. So, he did. He hired her and gave her a title as curator of maps. I think Angie accepted the title as curator of maps because she also would have free access to all kinds of other resources and could help with many of the ways in which the library provides services to train students, including graduate students, and how to use resources for doing the best quality scholarly research. And so, to her, this was going to be her access to students in many ways, the students she would not have in a formal sense had she become a history professor.

So she became the curator of maps, and that further strengthened her

relationships and her belief in how wonderful the librarians were in their work. And she received awards from the Association of Librarians [Southwestern Library Association], and she felt very honored one year [1978] when the awards were given to her and Eudora Welty. She just felt like, “These people not only love me as a person but most of all, in some ways, respect the quality of my work.” So, she thrived here, and she would teach periodically, I think, a course in the history department here.

But where she really developed her teaching, which led to her outstanding book on the history of American Indians [A History of the Indians of the United States] was at that time, there were, as a result of the Johnson and other administrations, attempts to try to train public school teachers more adequately in the history of our country and how to teach history and a more fully-inclusive view of history. One area, among the subjects they should get history training in the summer, was American Indians, to move away from this idea that Columbus discovered America, and then the British, largely European colonists came and found nothing here and established civilizations, which is totally counter to the historical fact. I mean, yes, the colonists came to the northeast, but they were long preceded many years before by the Spanish in 1540, contacting the Zunis and the Pueblos in New Mexico, and the Huguenots landing in Florida before they’re exterminated by the Spanish. And these are before you have the first of the colonies in Virginia, Roanoke Island, which is long after—Roanoke Island is 1585, and it disappears five years later.

This whole view of opening the story more fully to that which actually happened, not removing the credit from the colonists in the Plymouth Colony, but, you know, let’s put the full story, and how did the natives view their history. The remarkable thing about Angie’s histories is that if you look at the first chapters, she always gives a description of the indigenous people, the Native Americans, as their societies, their cultures, and their governments existed before the Europeans enter. And then there’s always some description, if not a separate history, of the environment, the landscape, the geography, the plants, how this was part of the productive economic cycle. The first two chapters, for instance, in [Road to Disappearance: A History of the Creek Indians], is a perfect example of that, of how the Creeks had established their confederacy and their strong power and the world in which they lived, and then comes the entry of the Europeans and the contact and the relations that follow.

So, through a number of summers teaching these courses to public school teachers, she developed a body of materials, and that becomes the basis for the book on the history of American Indians which has, again,

like all her books, subsequently become published by the University of Oklahoma Press, and that includes the first one that they rejected. And it comes back to the University of Oklahoma Press, but all her subsequent books are. And that particular book, on the sort of broad, general history, on all of the Indian people of the United States, is in constant use. It is a book I assign still to my Indian Law students because they can’t assume that where they come from or their background they understand the history. And so, that’s a required reading for before we begin the study of how the law from the initial pre-republic period, where you have European powers negotiating with the tribes over treaties, and the necessity of those treaties to keep the tribes as much as possible in peaceful relations with the breakaway colonies while they’re carrying on the Revolutionary War against the crown, this is all part of understanding that.

Her time as the curator of maps gave her a strong foundation from where she could continue her scholarly work. It also gave her financial security. She could build a retirement, and many people don’t realize how much, at times, Angie faced economic hardship. She got fellowships. Like for instance, she got an [A. A.] Knopf Fellowship for the writing of Prairie City and she lived very, very cheaply. There’s no other way to say it. She counted every penny. She lived in the home that her father and her brother had built in Marshall. She made every penny count. I don’t think people realize how, at times, she was truly on the short end of covering her living expenses, so the job here at OSU was really a godsend. She could then begin to think and research more freely what, for a while, was very constrained, because once her parents died and then her brother died—they had never been wealthy people, but I mean, they were small and, as she called it, meager resources. If you look at the original manuscripts and her materials in the archives at OSU, the cost of typewriter paper alone was a concern to her, so she types on both sides.

In all the time I knew her, as well as when we were doing these oral history tapes, you become quite aware of how absolutely tough it was to have made the decisions she did as a young child. Angie was one who early on thought independently and, I think, had an amazing ability assurance, even as a very young person. As a child, she said that she had told her classmates—a very young child—that there was no Santa Claus. Not endearing in a young child. And she persisted. Early as a young woman, she looked in the world around her and knew that she wanted to write, to make a career of writing, and if it turned out, she could teach. And wanting to teach became, later, a more formed goal.

But she knew she wanted to write, and that if she was going to have that kind of opportunity, she would not be able to have a family of her own.

She would not marry, and she would not have a family of her own. Raymond Bryson, a childhood friend of hers growing up with her in Marshall, said it was not for lack of suitors. Angie, if you look at the pictures of her, was a very attractive young woman of her time. She was charming. Anybody who met her at any time in her life could not help but be charmed by her, and she was generous. One reason the Marshall community loved her and valued her to the end of her days and did everything they could to help her stay healthy and to live among them and not go to a rest home, was the way they cared for her. To have people come into her home and help her with meals and help her get up every day, to take care of herself and bathe and dress and all. Because she was loving about her community. And, for instance, during World War II when there was a shortage of males, she became the high school principal.

She also became the sort of make-do minister. She would marry people, and she would always incorporate part of the pioneer experience that these families in Marshall had been through because they weren’t part of the Oklahoma Run. They had come over before that from Kansas and other places. Angie’s family came from Kansas and settled there and started their wheat farm there. She would marry and she would bury people. She would bury people and at the time that they’re being buried, she’d say, “And with this soil that you have so loved, that you have so taken care of …” She knew this is what their lives were about. She was a strong person, respected for her individualism by the people in the community who called her Miss Angie. Some called her Dr. Angie. At the same time, she had the courage to be herself. So, they were, in effect, her extended family that she never had.

I count myself lucky among a number of people that in effect became her surrogate daughters. We were more than just people who worked on the ACLU board. She was always loving and concerned about me, about my family. She always asked about how our family was doing. She was that way with everybody, but she constructed her own circle. In other ways, she had surrogate students that she was denied otherwise by not having become a history professor. Like Professor Michael [D.] Green, who writes in Indian history, as a young PhD candidate sent his manuscript to her, and she reviewed it as meticulously as she would any doctoral student that would be her own, and he was grateful. He wrote back this amazing letter to her about—he was amazed that somebody not formally bound to help him had invested so much and guided him, and she did that for any number of scholars. So, she would read some of my ramblings, and she was a hard critic but she was wonderful because she was a hard critic.

Paustenbaugh At this point, you met Angie through the ACLU. How did the project with

Glenna come about?

Valencia-Weber Well, by the time the oral history project begins, Angie has retired from OSU as a librarian, is at home. She was still writing and working, and that’s when she was working on Geronimo, her last book. I mean, it’s astonishing. She publishes Geronimo, her last book, I believe she was eighty-five.

Paustenbaugh It would’ve been ’76.

Valencia-Weber She said it would be her last book, but she’s going through her materials once she retires and she realizes that in her research for her prior books, she had had interviews with Geronimo’s followers, family, kinfolk, the people who were imprisoned at Fort Sill. Remember, those Apaches at Fort Sill were, until World War I occurred, prisoners of war. Children born to the Apaches at Fort Sill were born as prisoners of war. The last child born as a prisoner of war was the late elder, Mildred [Imache] Cleghorn. The first child born not as a prisoner of war is the wonderful artist Allan Houser, and Mildred and Allan were good friends and it was my privilege to know them both, and they regarded each other as sort of almost some sort of cosmic twins.

Paustenbaugh Metaphysical twins. (Laughter)

Valencia-Weber Metaphysical. The two faces of the Apache existence, and the markers of the Apache life, the last one as prisoner, and the first as the free-born child. And most people don’t realize this comes into the twentieth century. So Angie, in researching for her earlier books, had interviewed a number of those people, including some who by the time of our documentary had died, but many of them, a sufficient number of them, were still living. They were on canes and stuff, but they had been her lifelong friends because they respected her, her honesty, and moreover the fact that she had preserved their story. She had accurately recorded their story.

So, she undertook the writing of her book Geronimo, and as she’s getting to the last stages, she doesn’t accept another term on the board of the ACLU. She wants to make sure she finishes the book. For much of the writing, we would pick her up and take her back home. At that point in 1976, I accepted a job working for the psychology department to do some teaching but primarily recruit students for the graduate programs who were underrepresented in the post-graduate degree areas of psychology, especially in the area of clinical psychology. That program, while we were recruiting across all four of the major federally-protected minority groups, African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, and also people who have disabilities of some kind,

the department especially focused in our part of the world on Native Americans, and that program has ultimately been the program that has produced more Native American PhDs than any other in the United States, PhDs in psychology, in clinical psychology, especially.

So, we focused in that area, and I began to really go into the native communities again to find out where are the talented students who might be candidates. In the course of that and teaching, I also met Glenna Matthews who had joined the history department here, and I introduced her to Angie; they took to each other immediately. Over time, Glenna and I were concerned that Angie was going to die without the value of her work being understood. Now, her value of her work in a big national context, the context of historians as I understood it and from my readings of history, is that she was in the group that was tied to the development of the progressive historians, the people that are normally—you know, the Charles Beard, [Vernon Louis] Parrington.

Angie had been educated in some ways, and educated herself, that the story of history as told previously had strains that didn’t include all of the actors, and that included Native Americans and that included women. I mean, look at what we’ve had in history about telling the story about what happened to women, and women as actors. So, it’s no longer about great men, Washington crossing the Delaware, a river to save the nation, or other things. You may accept a Beard interpretation that history is the result as you have competing interest groups. But, in any case, Angie went on to be a pioneer in what we really call ethnohistory, where the ethnic populations of this country, not just Native Americans, are part of the actors, they’re not just acted upon by the primary Anglo- American leadership, political leadership or forces. They also are actors of their own destiny in some way, sometimes outnumbered by sheer military and political force, military force, but nonetheless actors making decisions about how they’re going to try to survive and thrive. Angie, as I mentioned before, her books are highly regarded by Native Americans because she tries to include their viewpoint, how they were constructing their societies, how they operated in the world. So, it’s a chain of historians that has continued.

If you look at people like James Ronda and how he writes about the Lewis and Clark expeditions, how also equally important that narrative of Ronda’s is about the different tribes as actors, how they choose to interact, treat, and deal with the Lewis and Clark expedition and what they want to get from those people, Lewis and Clark, in exchange for their tribal interest, and all of that body of literature is part of opening up the historical narrative to be truer and more inclusive. So, that was a good part of why Angie’s role as historian to history scholars in the AHA [American Historical Association] had to be brought to their

attention. Also the role often overlooked of women historians, their exclusion from the academy, which had been experienced by any number of women historians regardless of what their subject matter of interest was.

When the AHA had emerged in its leadership women historians, including the woman who writes about the French, Natalie [Zemon Davis]. She went on to teach history at Princeton. She has written the history of an event in France that then became a film about somebody takes the identity of another man who’s disappeared and comes back, and it’s a wonderful film, [The Return of Martin Guerre]. She was in the leadership of the AHA and eventually became its president, so this thing of recognizing the women historians, what they have done, and in the case of Angie, which she did in terms of expanding the view, the perspective on the history of the west and the history of Native Americans as it happened with their actions and in the west was recognized. That’s what resulted in Angie getting that lifetime achievement award from the AHA. In some ways, that kind of burst her on the scene, exploded in her favor and puts her on the scene. That’s what, in a way, helped to bring her, along with the tapes that we had made that were then edited into a couple of two half-hour programs, I believe, that National Public Radio station at OSU [KOSU] edited and made and then fed into the National Public Radio system. It was those tapes that came to the attention of the Institute for Research in History in New York, at that time headed by Barbara Abrash.

This is part of their view is the historians who have not found a place in academia, including women, and how their contributions, how their work can be supported and that includes the historians in the past, so they were very interested in Angie. That began the project to go further and develop a documentary. We began the work of raising the money, and sometimes it was idiosyncratic. I remember writing many grant project proposals for NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] funding. At some times it stalls, and then sometimes it’s always a question of how really legitimate is Angie as a historian, and is she more than just a highly-regarded local or state historian? I remember this came up in several contexts, but one I will describe. It involves Howard Lamar, the historian and professor of history at Yale who has educated many of the new cohorts of historians of the west including Patricia Limerick and others. In the course of different fundraisings, he told me later when I encountered him at a meeting that he’d been at a meeting where the question of whether or not enough funding finished the film, because we’d sort of done it in chunks, should be forthcoming, and WGBH in Boston, which was the prestigious producer as well as access to the national PBS programming that could put our documentary into national view, into national distribution.

He’s there at a meeting, and the proposal is there. Angie’s credentials come up, and he told me that that day he wasn’t there at the meeting itself. They were having a meeting, and somebody leaves the room, phones him at Yale, and said, “Look, we’re having this discussion, and we need to know is this Angie Debo sort of just…” because they were given some roughs to see if what we had already filmed, “…this idiosyncratic old lady historian from Oklahoma. She has certainly done interesting things, but is she really as important as the proposal people tell us she is?” This person calls him, that’s the only way she can validate [how important Angie Debo’s work is]. And Howard says, “I’m taken back that you’re asking me, but I’m telling you, I stand on her shoulders. Yes, absolutely yes. If you have any questions, I’ll talk to them, but absolutely yes.”

Paustenbaugh Wow, what an endorsement.

Valencia-Weber Yes.

Paustenbaugh But still, after all she had done, that it took the endorsement of a well- placed white male to give the seal of approval.

Valencia-Weber That’s right. I mean, notice again, they went to a white male who got the kind of job Angie truly was qualified for. I thanked him, because that sealed it. There was no hesitation. Then, the work was completed. We still had some bumps along the road, but we had a wonderful set of people working on it as producers and directors and it really made a difference in the unified feeling among all of us: Glenna, myself, Barbara, and Martha Sandlin, who was the actual director.

Paustenbaugh I wanted to ask you about her because I know she was from Holdenville, and I know that she was fairly young. I mean, she’d just finished film school at NYU, and it was really Angie’s, I think, insistence that somebody from Oklahoma had to be involved in this.

Valencia-Weber She wanted somebody who knew Oklahoma to make the film. She was tired of misrepresentation. Angie had several, I would say, set statements she would make about the misrepresentation of Oklahoma. I mean, as highly regarded as John Steinbeck was, she just couldn’t forgive him for the misrepresentation of what happened in the Dust Bowl when, if you look at it, Oklahoma is what, seventy-seven counties? Only two really had that kind of blowing dust that you see in the 1930s film of that time, and how Steinbeck depicted it, but for him, that was all of Oklahoma. And she had her various complaints about misrepresentation against Edna Ferber in Cimarron and other things. She was quite concerned that there not be misrepresentation.

During her struggles to support herself, during the WPA project when the histories of the different states were being written as part of the Works Project [Administration, (WPA)] program that President Roosevelt had authorized, Angie was hired. So, she wrote a truthful history of Oklahoma for the WPA guidebook on Oklahoma, but that was not the popular history that is generally told about the United States: that Anglo European people came, discovered the country, and somehow on this blank land built a civilization and, to quote, “nobody was here.” It was totally counterfactual to tell the story that way. Well then, when Angie left the WPA, it was before the book was published, and they substituted a chapter written by, and this is her words, “an inferior writer, as well as somebody who had no respect for facts,” which tells the story of sort of a great white hope, of people coming and being responsible for establishing on this bare land peopled by nobody to establish the state. And she was angry, still angry, that that chapter was there, misleading people and totally untruthful, and fortunately in her lifetime, thanks to efforts by various people, her chapter was restored and put in the subsequent publications of the guidebook.

Angie had very strong feelings about misrepresentation of any kind of history fact and especially about Oklahoma. She dearly loved Oklahoma, even though she probably revealed some of the worst of facts that people cared about. But she felt that was part of her view of ethics personally and ethics professionally, as a historian. But she loved Oklahoma, and she wanted to write the correct story.

Martha Sandlin grew up in Holdenville, made her way east. She married a journalist, and they worked in the northeast and in New York, and she went to the film school—I believe it was NYU. Like all documentarians, had struggled very hard to be able to do the work she wanted. She had barely scrambled enough money from the ways that documentary filmmakers still have to, have this hardscrabble way to put the money together to make documentaries, and made one on a blind street singer named Baby. Baby had a partner that lived with her, and Baby’s story was a story of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century of what was done with people who were seen as not normal, not desirable, in one’s family or in one’s community and who are institutionalized. Baby lacked eyesight, but she was otherwise an intelligent person obviously as a young person. But she was institutionalized. This was often the case with children who had no vision or no hearing. She had hearing. While she was institutionalized, as she got past puberty and into her early teens, unknowingly, she was sterilized. The institution sterilized—this was part of what was done in those times to all kinds of people, whether you labeled them mentally defective or otherwise. Sterilization for the purpose of protecting them and protecting our public interest.

So, that was Baby’s story, and it’s only later in her life when she manages to get out and tries to put a life together, another struggle, and wants to have a baby but cannot. So, she took on the name of Baby. Martha had filmed this really moving story of Baby telling her story. It’s a very short video, but very moving, and I saw it as part of preparing to know her, to know Martha and her work and her approach to work, because I wanted to assure Angie, “You’re not going to have some person who never has been in Oklahoma, who has preconceived notions of Oklahoma, much less preconceived notions about the role Oklahoma played in the whole history of the United States.”

I looked at the film, and I could assure Angie that we can trust Martha. I talked to Martha. Among other things besides her growing up in Holdenville and like many young people, and Angie had commented about this through many of her books including the book Oklahoma: Foot-Loose and Fancy-Free where she talks about the gifted and talented Oklahomans who are educated here and then leave the state. Well, Martha was one of them. When we told her what we had found in the archives about how Edward Everett Dale had treated her and denied her a position, Martha was enraged at that because she, herself, again as a female trying to enter a field where males are favored, had her own experiences and that this had been done to somebody of Angie’s achievements by her own mentor who called her his best doctor just enraged her. So, Martha was both in her technical skill as a filmmaker, her vision as a filmmaker, I thought, very qualified, but then moreover, her own understanding of what had happened to Angie and connecting her to Martha’s experience was just phenomenal. It was pretty close to love at first sight.

There were a few things Angie was particular about: the way she would be seated or would be positioned for some filming, but you know, I suspect this is true of every subject. That’s a good part of what went into “how do we make this documentary.” Angie’s love for Oklahoma stayed with her even when people did not-so-good things to her. I mean, if you read, for instance, her Oklahoma book about the history here, Oklahoma: Foot-Loose and Fancy-Free, she’s very blunt [about] how, for instance, when there were mining disasters in the mining area around McAlester and miners died, that there was a higher payment made to the survivors of the white miners’ families than the black miners’ families, and she gives the numbers. She doesn’t spare.

We began the film, and it was amazing. The people in Marshall turned out, and we filmed during their Pioneer Days Parade, and it starts with Angie getting ready. She’s the queen of the parade and she’s putting on this heritage dress that belonged, I believe, to her mother and aunt, other people [who] had passed on. She had worn it herself, just a lovely dress

and hat and other things, and she climbs into this old car—Model A car—that an old-car buff has restored and keeps running. It’s open, and she’s riding elegantly as the queen.

When I show the video to my students, and I show it in a couple of the classes after we study the cases in which Angie’s histories form the basis for the court’s finding of fact, because Angie is an undisputed expert when you can bring her history books into litigation, into the case, because we can’t rely on what the usual is, which is living witnesses. We’re talking about, now, 200-year-ago events in many instances. There are no living witnesses. Her facts can be used. I have the students read some key cases from Oklahoma including a couple of very important cases, and they see her in the footnotes. I say, “Now we have to ask about why the court would rely on this. As law students, you are trained [that] you must have living witnesses. You’ve got to have expert witnesses in the courtroom. You’ve got to have this kind of documentation that the court and the opposing party will accept as truth, not to be questioned or challenged, so we need to look at this.” That picture of her getting into the carriage, it so humanizes her. They fall in love with her. I’m glad they love her, but they also have this enormous respect for the uphill part trajectory of her career. The obstacles she had to overcome and yet not back off from her core ethical principles.

Paustenbaugh What are some of the cases that you have them read? I’m assuming Harjo v. Kleppe [Allen Harjo v. Thomas S. Kleppe, 1976], but what else?

Valencia-Weber Harjo v. Kleppe is the key one because it also introduces into, particularly, cases for tribes in this area and then subsequently for tribes in other places a method of getting into the arguments made by different sides. Usually the sides that are arguing for the tribal rights use Angie, but sometimes it’s the opposing side. A method for getting into the facts upon which the decision will be based, material from her histories. We’ll start first with Harjo v. Kleppe which involves the Creek Nation, and at the time of the appellate court decision which is out of the D.C. Circuit, now called the Federal Circuit in D.C., it was almost 150 years since the core events, and it involves a whole set of treaties. It involves three treaties and about seven pieces of legislation that Congress passed including the application. Most of those enforced the Allotment Act on the tribes here in Oklahoma, even though initially they were to be exempted from allotment, breaking up their lands into individual holdings and then terminating their governments. That’s the two core thrusts of the allotment acts: to terminate the governments and to break up the land into individual field pieces of land and then sell the so-called surplus. So, you have a whole body of treaties, of statutes and other kinds of understandings about whether or not the Creek Council had

ever lost its governing authority. That’s the question before the court because what’s happened over this 150 years is that the federal government has refused to deal with the Creek Council as the voice of the government and has begun to appoint the chief. They don’t even get to select or elect their own chief. The BIA/Department of Interior selects and appoints. So, that was part of the challenge.

First, the bringing in of, “What is the nature of the relationship through the 150 years? What was meant to be the conditions agreed to in the treaties? What was meant in the different statutes that Congress passed?” And the core result the court sees is that the government of the Creek people had never been exterminated by federal legislation, that the Department of Interior in the BIA, by a course of different acts, like denying the Council the right to spend its own money or by appointing the chief, had engaged (and this is the court’s term) “in bureaucratic imperialism,” totally violative of the treaties, totally violative of what Congress had provided in the acts, because never in those acts had the Congress terminated the government, and the Council was the government that remained. And as a result of that lawsuit, there was an act, and it changed so that after that, tribes did not have to deal with a BIA-appointed chief, but could select a chief by their own methods. Sometimes they were elected, sometimes it’s done other ways, but it’s their choice.

Other tribes in Oklahoma then began using that approach. Like the Cherokees used it to sue and have unquestionably the right to establish their own courts because they were also under similar provisions, similar treaties, and their power to establish their own courts, to take care of their own disputes and take care of their own business had never been eviscerated that completely or terminated. And that’s the point at which the Cherokees in Oklahoma reestablished their courts and reestablished them there in that historic building in the middle of Tahlequah. This is all done under then Principal Chief Ross Swimmer and then subsequently [Principal] Chief Wilma Mankiller. They’re saying, “We never lost this power, and we’re reinstating it.” And they have. Anyone can go see at that historic courthouse building in the center in that little square in Tahlequah.

Other tribes tried to use it, some successfully, some not so successfully, in Oklahoma. The Osages and their treaties and their understandings were not quite the same, so they were not as able to do it. But what was interesting was to watch tribes outside of Oklahoma who also, if they were fortunate enough to have had historians write their history in the meticulous scholarship as Angie has of the tribes here, and who have longstanding claims against the federal government that were not resolved either through the Indian Court of Claims or through the Indian

Claims Commission or other mechanisms, that they could raise them now and in the absence of usual kind of living witnesses, if they can invoke and use historical materials from respected scholars, then they are in a better position to use what we call the Harjo Analysis to sustain their claims.

We have that going on. We have it done in, for instance, some Chippewa groups in the Minnesota-Wisconsin area. Starting from the ’70s on, you have a number of tribes throughout all the United States including the northwest, southwest, and in the Wisconsin-Minnesota area who were claiming, “We have never given up this right. In the treaty, it’s there. It’s expressed,” and it often involves hunting and fishing rights and particular kinds of rights that they’re allowed to hunt and fish for a sustaining economy, for ceremonial and sacred purposes, and they are outside the reach of state hunting regulations, state fishing regulations. Well, this was very upsetting to tribes in states like Minnesota and Wisconsin where you have a lot of non-Indian recreational hunters and fishermen, and an industry, you know, fishing and hunting resorts where people go out, rent cabins, the thing of men going hunting or fishing together in groups, and they’re regulated by the state as to season and how much to catch or how much to hunt, what you can kill, how many points on deer. And I have to say I’m ignorant because I don’t hunt, but I know that core of those regulatory schemes in terms of basically when and how much, and in the case of some fish and in the case of some deer, whether you can kill certain-age deer and others. Yet Indians, through their treaties, are outside that because they’re allowed not only over certain hunting and fishing sites, they are not restricted by the hunting and fishing season and they are also not restricted by method, and this method of using traditional forms of fishing, for instance, came up in the northwest tribes.

They’re looking at the histories and the cases of the Chippewa tribes in the Minnesota-Wisconsin area, Lac Courte Oreilles as we call those. It’s long litigation. There must’ve been about ten Lac Courte Oreilles cases (one can find them), or in the northwest fishing tribes. Their treaties say, for instance, that why they’re going to cede land to the federal government to then turn over for settlers, non-Indian settlers, and between 1854 and 1855, in less than a year, the appointed territorial governor, Governor [Isaac I.] Stevens, was directed by Congress to make these treaties and he did. He made, I think, it must be eight to ten treaties in less than a year, and they’re very much like each other because many of those northwest fishing tribes have some similarity. A similar provision in all of them is that while they cede the land, they retain the right to fish in the usual and customary places. That includes fishing for salmon. It includes shell fishing, all kinds of things. So, in the eighties, we have contested fishing rights because now, some of this land

that was ceded is in private hands and people are seeing outside their beautiful home that has a beach and clamshell clams and other kinds of shellfish, as well as people fishing in the water—Indians. They thought they bought that whole piece of land when they bought the land. They didn’t. They were not informed when they bought that it’s subject to treaty rights. And it was resolved in favor of the tribes, and their fishing and hunting rights in their usual and customary places had never been abrogated by the tribes.

The northwest tribes had been a big interest of historians and anthropologists, so you had a lot of scholarly work that you could use where people had observed what they did. And this is very important because some of the recreational fishing, as well as commercial fishing, in the northwest area especially, people who do commercial fishing objected to some of the places in which the tribes would place traps, traditional traps. And the tribes objected to some of the large new technology fishing that the commercial fishermen, non-Indian fishermen, were doing to just totally not only take huge amounts of fish, but interfere with leaving enough so that you have a continuous breeding pool of fish. So, I mean, this is the sort of thing you learn because you’re going to teach Indian law, even though I’m not a water specialist.

They had to use these scholars’ works and then follow the path laid out in the cases that cite Angie Debo. Some of her works are used by tribes outside of Oklahoma for certain kinds of things that happened, because remember in her history on the Indians [A History of the Indians of the United States], she also writes about what happened to the northeast woodland tribes, what happened in the removal of so many tribes in the Great Lakes area. People here in Oklahoma are accustomed to the fact that we have the Sac and Fox, for instance, here. But the Sac and Fox, like many of the tribes that were removed after President Andrew Jackson actually enforced the removal process, the Sac and Fox start in the Great Lakes, then moved in between, and then soon you have the push for non-Indians who want that land, the settlers, the greed, the lust for land, just keeps pushing. So, then they were moved again, the Sac and Fox, to Oklahoma. A number of tribes were moved more than once. The tribes who had been moved more than once and have some treaties made in some of their prior places where they lived, and rights they feel they never abrogated or gave up are making claims now, and they go back not only to the treaties but also what accepted respectable scholars have written about them. The Newberry Library in Chicago is just an incredible resource for lawyers as well as historians, as a result. One of the things I give my students in Indian law and in the advanced seminar where I have them do some historical research is a list of the materials from the Newberry Library.

Why the history of not only Angie but other respected historians? Because we do also know that it is possible to have a history written for a purpose other than the continuous commitment that historians make. I’ve been around and worked enough around historians to understand that the narrative is always open to new facts and new theories. Unlike law, where you do have repose and finality, because new things may be learned, this is what Angie was doing to the end of her days. She’d learn new things, and she’d say, “I have to change this narrative that got published because there’s something in here that I didn’t know originally.” What happens is that one needs to know which historians, because you have custom-made history. There’s a number of historians who complain about what they call law-office history, or what’s worse in some of their eyes is what they call history by judicial fiat, that is, when sitting judges decide they know what history is and dictate it and make it part of the case. This is a recurring national kind of debate that goes on with people like Wilbur [Wilcomb] Washburn, who is now dead but who wrote articles about what he called abuses of history by people like the justices on the US Supreme Court citing, to uphold their case, sources that no professional historian or no respected history professor would have his students/her students read as sources respected in history. So, the question of which history.

We end up talking about why we do that and why we need to know more about how historians approach their discipline. I have usually a historian come lecture in my class, and then we talk about how do you know which ones to use? And I use the Newberry list which is a marvelous archive of materials on Native Americans, on histories on Native Americans, and is still important for the now-being-written histories. And they do have a wonderful set of lists that I got from a wonderful historian of the west who teaches at the University of New Mexico, Margaret [Connell-]Szasz. She provided this to me, and it’s wonderful for telling students, because you can’t have history written and litigation that happens now. Anything involving land or water rights you can bet, besides the geologists and the other people, you’re going to have historians come in to try to explain how it is that this land or this water right has functioned in the history of what’s at issue. It’s not unusual for the historians to be brought in on each side, and you may have this thing of warring, competing historians and that didn’t happen in Harjo, and it doesn’t happen in many of the cases where you are using bona fide historians.

I talked once to a group of historians here in Oklahoma who are sometimes involved, called upon, to testify by oil companies, energy companies who want them to testify because the oil company wants to develop or do something on certain land, and either the tribal rights holders or other rights holders may contest it. They want to bring a

historian in on their side to say that these claims being made by the people opposed to it have no validity. I asked—and I don’t think it’s telling stories out of school--that there is a group of historians that say they will not testify against Indians who have their interests at stake. Even if the books published by the historian are ones that have material in them that in some ways weaken the claims of the Indian claimants, they’re not going to be on that side. As Jim Ronda put it to me, “I’m not a public utility. I choose which fights for justice I join. I mean, I can’t keep them from using what I wrote.” This happens all the time in Congress in front of legislative hearings where historians are mortified, anthropologists are terrified, that some yahoo legislature will selectively pick out and use for totally different and an inaccurate purpose, inaccurately use.

This is Wilbur [Wilcomb] Washburn’s complaint. He goes off to Justice [William] Rehnquist in a very contested historic case of the Sioux claims for the wrongful taking of the Black Hills. The majority led by Justice Thurgood Marshall finds for the Sioux, the Lakota tribes, that land was wrongfully taken from them in violation of the Black Hills Treaty, and that the US allowed trespassing and gold miners and all sorts of people in and did not meet its treaty obligation. In that trial, some historians were used who went back and looked at the records and found what every good lawyer looks for: the smoking gun. During the President Grant administration, there’s a meeting with the top generals of the army which supposedly has a treaty obligation to keep the invading trespassing gold miners and others from going into the Sioux territory to keep them out but fails to, and the complaints come from the tribe. At this meeting, it is conceded and agreed to that the army will not obey the terms of the treaty, will not send in its military force to eject those trespassers and to protect the rights of the Indians.

All along in the lawsuit, and this decision had many predecessor lawsuits that failed for various reasons, but finally there is an enabling legislation passed by Congress that allows this final lawsuit to go to court. The tribe prevails by its terms, and then the historians find the smoking gun, which is a letter written by General Sheridan describing the meeting, describing who was there and that President Grant and these military people, policy people, agreed to not protect the rights of the tribe of the Sioux and not to properly use the force it had, the military and other resources, to obey the terms of the treaties. The Sioux had always contested this bad faith decision but didn’t have it, and now they did.

In the decision, Justice Marshall goes back to the Indian Claims Commission records, which the Indian Claims Commission, in order to settle longstanding claims that many tribes had, hired its own

anthropologist, its own historians to do a report on these claims. They thought that was one way to find out what happened. Again, faced with the same problem, no living witnesses, and you’ve got documents, some of which maybe exist but have not been available, so the Indian Claims Commission historians and records had material that were also used. The tribe prevails in the majority decision, but there’s a nasty interchange between Justice Marshall’s majority and Justice Rehnquist’s dissent who claims that the majority has not done a legal decision. It has engaged in what it calls historical revisionism. Even though Justice Marshall and the majority list that they’re talking about what changed over time in law as to the standards by which to measure government compliance with treaties, and there was a change. Initially in the Supreme Court decisions, the government was given a good faith presumption and the court would not go below that presumption and actually do or require factual inquiry of the parties. It just presumed good faith. Well, that later became undone in subsequent decisions by the Supreme Court that said, “We no longer presume good faith. We require the government, like any other party, to provide the facts on their conduct because we’re asking the plaintiffs, the tribes, to establish a factual basis for the claims they make of bad conduct. If the government is going to plead good conduct and compliance, they have to establish the facts, too.”

So, Justice Marshall said, “We were applying the legal standards that we had established. This is not about historical revisionism. The fact that these historians found this in a recent time, but then there was all this other material in the Indian Claims Commission, and prior courts who had also not questioned those factual bases for the tribes’ claims, who are we to challenge that now? We actually see no reason to challenge.” In Justice Rehnquist’s dissent, (and this is where Washburn really criticizes Rehnquist’s dissent) he invokes the names. He invokes his historians that he’s guided by in a misleading way some very respected historians. He first of all cites a major historian of the US whose histories were, at least when I went to college, still the major American histories that people taught, and who by the end of his life, because Wilbur [Wilcomb] Washburn had worked on him and said, “You really aren’t telling the story true, in a true way. There was nothing here.” It’s Euro Americans that made civilization that he changed.

He quotes this historian who had in his fuller histories actually told an account that sustained and agreed with what the Sioux argued in this case. What he did was took another part of the history, which did not apply to the Sioux incidents, the Sioux facts of the treaty on the Black Hills and talked about how there was cupidity (and this was the word: cupidity) and abuse on both sides of some of the Indian-White relationships, which is true. But that was about what another General said, it’s a general statement. The particulars about the Sioux in the

history book were not at all cited, and likewise cited the Oxford History of the [American] West again, out of context. And one of the sources cited by Justice Rehnquist is the guide pamphlet given out at one of the national parks. That is not where most scholars get their information and publish it. Yes, I’m sure it’s true what they published in the national parks guide booklet, but that is not for matters of this importance that one gets the facts. And, again, this guidebook was general, was not about this particular set of facts and this particular set of claims.

Do you think if you hadn’t known Angie Debo that you would’ve focused Paustenbaugh your interest in the law in this particular area?

I was certainly influenced in many ways by Angie. At one point, I Valencia-Weber considered doing graduate work in history and attempting to become a history scholar, professor. But the more that I did the work, not only with the ACLU but other collaborative organizations and focused by accident, you might say, because I’m located in Oklahoma, on issues involving Native Americans, the tribes as political entities, as sovereigns, and their members in terms of their individual rights, I realized more and more how strong my commitment was. After all, I grew up in Indian country in Arizona. I grew up in what is now all urban sprawl, but on the edge of the Salt River Reservation, my family has ancestors in the Yaqui Indians that are now wedged between Phoenix and Tempe, and it’s really a matter of accidents of history where your people were at given points, whether or not you qualify to be a member of a federally recognized tribe. The fact that my relatives and their ancestor’s names are on those street names in Guadalupe, the Yaqui community there, wedged as an indigenous community between Phoenix and Tempe, it’s all part of awareness.

My family is of mixed Mexican Indian, Spanish-speaking Mexican ancestry. Some of my relatives, some of my brothers and sisters have made the commitment of working with Indian people. My sister has worked for innumerable tribes and has her life anchored in that. Her partner is also a former tribal official from the Wisconsin tribes from what used to be called the Winnebagos, but now have a different name. They now are the [Ho-Chunks]. Tribes have gone back to their traditional names. He’s also part of the Rumsey group [Rumsey Band of Wintu Indians]. A brother who was one of the last people to teach at the Indian School in Phoenix before it closed, that was centrally located in the Phoenix Indian School. He worked with and trained Indian artists whose works, for a good time, they marketed through the Heard Museum because they only market bona fide artists. So, I had a foot in that world, as part of growing up, and it intensified. As more and more, and especially as I also got into my work at OSU in the psychology department and saw how tribes were struggling in various ways, while I

was doing educational work trying to find students who would be qualified to be admitted. You know, really we were looking for the stars of those tribes, the right minds, and how hard it was for some of them to get the educational benefits promised in their treaties, how hard it was for even some of them to live ordinary lives and how hard it was for some of them to get in a regular way the earnings they were entitled to from the trust resources that the BIA controls. Of course that was part of what led to the big lawsuit that we are now, hopefully, in the process of settling about the over one-hundred years of abuse of the BIA withholding payment, not keeping proper accounting the monies that individuals as well as tribes were entitled to as the payment for the oil, their gas, their coal, their resources. It is the Cobell lawsuit [Cobell v. Salazar] that results from this pattern that I observed here.

So, I decided that the people I admired a great deal, while I admired Angie, I also greatly admired people like Alvin Ziontz, who was the leading Indian rights attorney from the northwest who was carrying those northwest treaty rights to victory and got decisions from the Supreme Court of the United States saying the treaty rights never disappeared and they do apply and they will be enforced now. Mr. Ziontz was also one of the people who was on that Indian rights body that Angie was on. So, as I saw what that body did and how and where the levers of power might be in our society, however much I admired the work and the utility, if you want to put it in its gross terms, the historical scholarship, I saw that lawyers were the people who were going to be the way to get into the places where policy decisions are made in the federal government across all agencies that affect the lives of Indian people. For instance, a decision on where Indian health facilities will be placed, what kind of services will be given so that Indian families can be healthy. The Office of Indian Education—where will the schools be built, and when and how will Indian people, tribal governments take control of those schools, have the power to decide. And what we see has happened with that shift in power is a setting up of those successful tribal colleges.

I decided, what I observed that trying to even the scales of justice was going to require more than just a PhD. So, I would remain an amateur historian, and I went to Harvard Law School, and it was a sad leaving because I was afraid I would lose Angie while I was gone. And it was a hardship for my family, but my family, and again they deserve great thanks for this, my immediate and my extended family. My immediate family, my husband and two children, allowed our lives to be disrupted. The income stream I had from my job at OSU would cease. The first year, I went to Harvard Law School alone. My family, my daughter, my son, and my husband would come and visit every chance they could, every break. We enriched the airlines. We would meet sometimes in

airports. Like, my son was attending Washington University at that time, beginning his graduate degree. Our daughter we left behind, and she went to the University of New Mexico. She’s entering as I’m entering law school.

So, the first year I was there primarily by myself with these visits, and people would come and stay whenever they could. And because of the timing, I could get two spring breaks: one here and one there. And then, the second year, my husband was able to come for a year and a half. He had a sabbatical leave. He was invited as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Department of Psychology. He took a grant with him so the next eighteen months of the remaining two years, he was there with me, and he could do his work and that was good. And, again, our son and daughter continued their education and we would spend our time there as a family. Then, the last semester, my husband had to return to teach at OSU, and then I graduated.

There were no standard Indian law courses at Harvard. They had visiting scholars who would teach Indian law, and I took such a course from a visiting scholar, but the situation in the Ivy law schools, then and now, is unchanged. They make no commitment to Indian law. It is still not seen as an inclusive part of the law of the United States, whereas the big jumps in Indian law are largely made west of the Mississippi, the state law schools and private law schools in Indian country. They know that well-trained lawyers need to know about Indian law. So, I took what they had, and I also took some international courses, and I also was granted a human rights fellowship named after the [second] black [tenured] faculty member at Harvard Law School, [C. Clyde Ferguson, Jr.], and that helped me as well. I also got a fellowship from the American Unitarian Universalists Association, and that made it possible for me to learn much of what I had been acquiring anyway, learn more on my own.

I tried to do the things that are required for maximum credentials in law. I was on the Harvard Civil Liberties Law Review and started what then became a very often-published comment on the status of tribes in the United States. It’s still used. I did not actually write it. I started the project for it because I was the comments editor. I wanted clearly to return to Indian country. Some of my mentors at Harvard Law School thought that my goal in going to Harvard was to escape from Oklahoma, and I said, “No. My job, my commitment is to the west. I’m returning to the west.” And I wanted a judicial clerkship which, in law world is the equivalent of a post-doc in the PhD world if you’re going to do more than the standard work. I applied to judges in the Tenth Circuit because this is where Oklahoma is and that’s the hot house as far as I’m concerned where the Indian law is made. I applied initially to Judge Lee

R. West of the Western District Court of Oklahoma, where many of the Indian law cases that end up in my Indian law case book started. They were going on when I was in his court.

Judge West has to be thanked because, among other things, he was a pioneer, too. He was committed to equality and looked for qualified judicial clerks. They’re very competitive, the judicial clerkships who come from voices not seen, people not seen, and he for instance hired the first black African American law clerk in the federal courts in Oklahoma, [Harry G. Prince]. H. G. preceded me and he went on to become a highly respected law professor at University of California- Hastings [College of the Law]. They’re really one of the landmark law schools. He was a black young man, African American young man, from Duncan. He was not going to apply to an Oklahoma court, even though he had gone to Columbia Law School, been on Law Review, but he said, “The prejudices of Oklahoma—those judges won’t hire me.” To please his mother, he applied to Judge West, and Judge West saw his application, called him for an interview, offered him the job, and the protocol in judicial clerkships is that by that time judge and applicant have screened each other and they know they want to work with each other, so you don’t say, “Well, I’ll call you in three weeks.” No, you have to accept right away. As H. G. tells me, “I had no choice. I had to accept.”

Well, by the time I’d come to Judge West, he zoned in on me, and he loved that I did Indian law stuff. I already had a comment that was being published also in a human rights law review. I came to be interviewed, and at the end of the lunch, he slaps the table and he says, “Well, let’s fix the date you can start working for me.” So, I clerked first for Judge West in the district court, which is a trial court, and we had innumerable Indian law cases. Especially at that time, the big issue in Oklahoma, in other states but especially in Oklahoma the most of all, you had a tax commission which was determined to tax everything it could that the tribes did. Everything. I mean, I understand tax commissions, that their job is to find every conceivable what’s called taxable event and get money for the state. I mean, that’s their job across anything that happens in the state. But they were convinced they could tax everything that tribes did, go and crash through the sovereignty lines and tax all kinds of things that were going on on tribal lands, especially the tribal enterprises. And remember, tribes were developing not just casinos. They were in their early days of bingo parlors, and then they went to casinos, but they had golf courses, they’re developing factories, they’re developing all sorts of things they want, and the state wanted to tax it. It was a toss-up between the Arizona Tax Commission and the Oklahoma Tax Commission as to who was going to file more lawsuits to be able to tax what the tribes did. Tobacco sales were an instant thing that they

were going to tax.

So, that’s where the first cases started, and there were some that started in Judge West’s court. I didn’t get to do all of them. We’d rotate them among the other law clerks, but I saw what was happening and was part of the conversations in the hot house, in the chambers, about, “Well, what do we know about this body of law? What do we know about this? In this particular set of facts, in this claim, where does it go?” It could be comic relief sometimes. There were all these tobacco cases; there were all kinds. Ultimately one of them, the Sac and Fox case, is argued to the Supreme Court of the United States, and it’s a nine to zero decision in favor of the tribe and is this long arm of trying to reach in and tax everything that breathes and moves or can be sold.

And then, occasionally there’s a comic thing. Judge West has a very full view of humanity, including a sense of humor. One of the cases involved the Citizen Band Pottawattamie who had a golf course, and at the golf course in the hot Oklahoma humid weather, they were selling beer to overheated golfers. The state wanted to tax those sales, so they come into the courtroom, and I remember that argument because the judge said, “I’m not convinced yet why you’re here. Remember that beer sales—the Oklahoma Legislature, having been successfully lobbied by the beer industry, excluded beer from the liquor regulation for hard liquor. Whatever it is you call it, it’s not soda pop, and it’s not hard liquor, but it is outside of your jurisdiction by the choice the Legislature made. We may dispute that, but that’s their choice. That’s the law. And now you come in here as the Hard Liquor Regulating Commission saying that you can reach in and regulate beer.” He basically said, “You’ve got to do more than just come in. I mean, give me a break. Show me what you have. This is sort of a comedy. If you want to regulate the beer, you may have to go convince the Legislature to change that.” But of course the beer industry wouldn’t let them because they want to be able to—that’s why you can buy beer in the grocery store and the gas stations and all that. But you have to go to the hard liquor store, which is very regulated in terms of where it is and all that.

It was an eye-opening experience. So much of what I learned for Indian law teaching came from those cases. I also learned a lot about what makes good lawyering, and I try to teach that to my students. I tell them that the honesty that people like Angie Debo do in history is what we expect in law, and it will catch up with you if you try to pull a fast one over the judge. I wrote many, many decisions for the judge. You draft for the judge. First, you have many conversations about which way it should be drafted, and you draft the way the judge orders you. Then you give the draft to the judge, and then he goes over it with you, about which parts he’d like stronger or less of or whatever, or maybe choice of

vocabulary. So, you’re editing and writing and some of these involve historic claims as well in the case of the Indian law cases. So, it was wonderful mentorship in that respect, and when you’re writing you have to be very true to both what the law is and state it correctly and use your facts correctly. Have the facts and use them correctly.

In the judge’s chambers, we sometimes talked about the attorneys who had presented different cases. We’re talking about cases across the whole docket, and I told my students, “You don’t want to be the attorneys they’re discussing when they say, ‘Uh-oh, you got a brief or submission from that attorney. Watch out. That attorney tends to do this,’ or, ‘Check those case cites because the case may not hold what that lawyer is claiming,’ or, ‘Watch for what this attorney does.’ You want to be among the attorneys that they say, ‘Oh, you’ve got a really first-class brief.’” Of course you will check the facts, and you’re going to check the citations. But you’re very likely not going to have a problem and, moreover, that attorney will be very cooperative with you if you call and say, “I’m calling for the judge. I want to check this particular documentation” or whatever. And documentation checking is much of what you do because the lives of people, the rights of people, are at stake. I also did criminal cases and we’re talking about the liberty of people is at stake. It’s very useful for my students.

Did you do two clerkships? Paustenbaugh Yes. Valencia-Weber Who did you do your other one with? Paustenbaugh Well, first my initial clerkship with Judge West, while these clerkships Valencia-Weber are applied for and agreed to almost a year in advance, in that year, we hit a hard national fiscal crisis and so the Gramm-Rudman Act [Gramm- Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act] was passed which mandated cuts across all federal agencies of certain percents and no exemptions, and that included the federal courts. So, the federal courts had, particularly in Oklahoma, supplementary funding because in Oklahoma they were still dealing with the Penn Square Savings and Loan debacle cases. Remember that the crash of the banks and the savings and loans started here.

At one point, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the FDIC, the government’s arm that takes over when a bank fails and attempts to salvage what it can of resources, in some cases it will salvage the bank and reinstate it as a bank, but mostly, it was salvaging what you could. It had over 500 attorneys working on these bank failures, S and L failures, in Oklahoma. Those supplementary monies for the extra clerks were

needed because we had almost twice the case load of other jurisdictions. That disappeared with Gramm-Rudman, so my job disappeared, and so did another clerk’s job, and we needed that many clerks.

Between the time that I had been offered and accepted the clerkship with Judge West and the time I graduated, the Gramm-Rudman Act had taken the funds for that position because it was a supplementary kind of funding for the courts in Oklahoma because they were so overloaded with the failures of Penn Square that led all the savings and loans and bank failures. So, my money disappeared, and to the horror of the Harvard Law School people, a number of us who had been awarded clerkships had them disappear, and we graduated unemployed. That’s not something they like to be proud of there. What happened is immediately then, the judges that headed each of the circuit courts, the federal courts, began a campaign to get that money restored. There is a federal judicial conference, which is the judges of all the federal circuit courts, and at that time, the Tenth Circuit court was headed by its chief judge, William J. Holloway. So, Judge Holloway, who is also in Oklahoma City, (that is where his chambers are) headed the campaign in the judicial conference to get our positions restored. So, I got to meet him fairly immediately because he made a point of talking to us by phone and with his friend who taught at Harvard Law School who had interviewed me, that they were doing everything they could to get that funding restored. So, I made his acquaintance quite soon.

At first, I was disturbed by not having the job I had competed for, but I decided that I would use that opportunity to do things and take my time to find a new job, and in the mean time I was even planning to go hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon with my son. I said, “I’ll use it.” I mean, I’d been working very hard and I’ll just start applying. My husband was still teaching at OSU as a full professor, so we could eat regularly, and he said, “I don’t want you to take a job you don’t want, not just any job.” So, my immediate family, as well as some of my brothers and sisters, had come to Cambridge for my graduation. I graduate unemployed, and we’re going to spend a week or so going around looking at New England, going to the Plymouth Colony. I had taken my mom there, and she wanted to go back again. To her, this story was always intriguing.

We’re into this about a week, and then a call comes, and Judge Holloway and the judicial conference had successfully convinced Congress that they must restore the funding. They’d done it in a very clever way. They said, “Well, if you cut the funding, we will have to give priority in our work, and that will be to the federal criminal prosecutions, and all the people who have waited for some time for their civil private lawsuits are just going to have to wait longer.” Well, there’s

a lot of business and other interests who use the federal courts, and to be told that that part is shut down, we’re using the resources we have just for the criminal prosecution cases, Congress immediately changed its views. Then Judge West called and said, “Because this has happened so rapidly and so quickly as a turnaround, I need you to get here as soon possible. We don’t want to give anybody the excuse that we don’t need this money, we don’t need these clerks.”

So, after all of my family finished their New England visits, we packed and moved rapidly to return, because I graduated quite late compared to the graduation dates here in Oklahoma. About a week and a half after we returned, I report to Judge West’s chambers. So, they’re very good friends, Judge West and Judge Holloway, and I had increasing contact with Judge Holloway. Because I had given Judge West my commitment I would stay with him for two years. Somewhere in there, Judge Holloway is going to have a vacancy for a clerk in his Court of Appeals. He and Judge West talked. It’s very eerie to be the subject of these conversations. They made a deal. Judge West did not want to let me go, but they made a deal that I could leave Judge West’s chambers if I finished a really hard, hard case. [When I] finished that, then I could go. Now, I was going to move to Judge Holloway’s chambers, and Judge West, who’s always been one of my super supporters, he came down yesterday for the talk [(given by Valencia-Weber on October 22, 2010 at the 35th anniversary of the OSU Psychology Diversified Students Program)] and went to all the events, and he had a great time. He said that he would never have given me up except for his good friend William Holloway and that it was for my good. And then he laughingly said, “If he doesn’t treat you right, you’re welcome to come back,” which is really a joke because Judge Holloway is the softest, sweetest man ever. I mean, Judge West is nice, but he can be, especially in a trial court, you have to be much firmer, much harder, to keep those cases moving and all.

So, the agreement was made, and the hard case was really a hard case. It was Indian in that it involved an Indian defendant. It was the awful case of Rita Silk-Nauni, an Indian individual from South Dakota who was mentally ill, and she had spent time in mental hospitals. At the time of the crime, she had been living in California, and her mental condition and her fears are such that she gets on a plane from California to the Oklahoma City airport with her son because she’s convinced that harm is going to come and especially for her son. The son’s father—and they’re divorced—lives in Lawton. She’s trying to get the son to the father, so she claims. All during the flight, there are strange behaviors of all kinds. The stewards have to address outbreaks of different kinds she has. Then the plane lands in Oklahoma City, and then they can’t get her to get off the plane. She will not leave because some harm is waiting out

there for her and her son. So, then they call the airport police who manage to persuade her to leave, and she has a whole series of bizarre acting-out adventures in the Oklahoma City airport, and whatever way she had planned to get to Lawton, it wasn’t working. So, she begins to walk along that grass area that is still there at the Oklahoma City airport, because you know there’s a long area there before you hit roadways. It’s still true; we came in on that airport set of roads. She’s carrying suitcases and bringing her son with her, and they’re walking. The suitcases begin to get a bit heavy, so they’re beginning to abandon some of the things in the suitcases. Somebody reports this to the city police, the airport police, that there’s people walking on this grass with this bizarre behavior.

At some point, the city police arrive. It’s a male officer and a female officer. Rita Silk-Nauni’s fears about her and her son, particularly her son, are so powerful that there’s no rational conversation between the two officers and Rita Silk-Nauni. At some point, the male officer gets a hold of Rita Silk-Nauni, and she observes that the female officer is holding her son who is about nine or ten, putting a hand on him. At that point, Rita Silk-Nauni grabs the gun from the male officer, shoots him and kills him. She then wants to get her son who’s being held by the female officer, and points the gun at her. Eventually, other officers come, and the female officer is wounded but lives.

The question about this case is—she is convicted, and the then DA of Oklahoma County is determined again that no cop killer will get off. I mean, killing a policeman in any jurisdiction in the United States is a hard case to defend, and they’re determined they’re going to make this case. So, they’re going to argue that she was sane, even though she’d only been released from the institute in South Dakota about two and a half weeks prior and has a whole history of mental disorder. In the process of the trial, the determined DA and his people, they have access to lots of witnesses because remember the roadway this is happening on, there’s lots of witnesses. People who are delivering services and goods to the airport, there’s a lot of witnesses. The night of the shooting, at the hospital, the wounded female officer gives a statement. So, what’s critical is the account of how this struggle occurred, and the DA is maintaining that Rita Silk-Nauni is sane, and that willfully knowingly killed the male officer and attempted to kill the female officer by saying that when she turned to the female officer—and this is the record— having shot the male officer, she turns and says, “And now I’m going to kill you, you bitch.” That’s to show intent.

The way it happened on that grass is at issue because the account told that night by the wounded officer does not fit the account I just gave you, which is what the DA is going to argue at trial. Additionally, there

were passing vendors and other people who were found by the attorney for Rita Silk-Nauni whose account of the events as this whole struggle unfolds is different. It matches what the defendant is saying happened. That is, how the officers got out of the car, who touched who first, what the struggle was, and all this. So, there’s a difference between even what happened on the grass. But at trial, the female officer now testifies different than her signed statement the night of the shooting, different from the statement of the witnesses at various times to the account. It is almost like a film because you have different people seeing different parts of it. So, the case is appealed because she’s sentenced to basically die in prison. She’s given two lifetime sentences, and her attorneys successfully raise a habeas petition, habeas being based that the individual is being wrongfully detained, denied their liberty, that the authority holding them in this case, the state of Oklahoma, has wrongfully obtained that custody because the trial was flawed. The female officer was obviously coached to lie. The attorneys find these other witnesses who saw the whole transaction, and they testify and give documents now that they were interviewed by the DA’s people, and they were told, “You don’t have to be there for the trial.” They were, in fact, invited to leave town. A completely flawed trial lacking due process and all the core rights every individual, whether it’s a traffic ticket or a murder, is entitled to.

So, the case is appealed on a habeas basis and lands in Judge West’s, and it’s a pile of boxes this high. I mean, the pile is as tall as me, boxes of the materials, and on appeal, you just review the trial record, all the evidence, everything in the record. You are not hearing anything; you are not hearing witnesses or anything. That was done at the trial level. So I spent several months on that and came back and told Judge West that it was a successful appeal, that there had been clearly evidence of an unlawful, unconstitutional trial charge, and the conviction could not stand.

So then the question was, “What was the remedy?” and whether or not one of the magistrates at court who was part of this group, considering now that we had found an unconstitutional trial that what would we do? I advocated for totally overruling the trial and saying it was fatally flawed. One of the magistrates argued, “Well, why not just lessen the sentence?” That means we had our own little mini trial in the chambers, but Judge West agreed with me, and so we completely invalidated and overruled it. And what that meant is the state of Oklahoma was free to retry her if they wanted to. In any case, that trial wouldn’t stand, so the conviction wouldn’t stand.

What an interesting case. Paustenbaugh I thought you would be interested in it because the Indianness of Rita

Valencia-Weber Silk-Nauni unleashed other forces. I mean you have the usual “Don’t kill a cop,” but because she was Indian, and there was obviously this DA machine against her.

So, you have this case of a cop killer, so-called cop killer, wrongfully convicted by a flawed trial that had denied all of the core constitutional rights of due process, so the state now could retry her if it wanted to. But before the trial and during the trial, the American Indian community had been very aroused by this whole situation of a clearly mentally ill woman who was being tried and then people making horrible statements about Indian people. The Nauni case was adopted by many, many groups outside of Oklahoma as a case that was wrong, and so there were, for instance, fundraising concerts given in Oklahoma by Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne to raise money for a defense fund for her to pay for the lawyers’ cost. Not that they were earning a huge fee for their services, but it’s a lot of work to get just simply what you need as records and other things to do this trial. So, it was a big cause for many people.

The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City, which is a big constitutional rights center that does cases of all kinds all over the United States, tried to provide an attorney for her but the Oklahoma judge would not allow the out-of-state attorney to come in and be part of the case because it was going to be the controversial attorney William Kunstler. The local attorneys were just magnificent. I mean, so, they got a lot of help from these outside groups, the law groups as well as the groups to try to cover the costs of just doing the case. And then at trial, there were lots of Indian people in attendance in that courtroom, and that itself led to some particular kinds of interactions, just during the trial and how it would be conducted.

The trial judge who had not allowed the out-of-state constitutional attorney to participate was concerned about this large number of Indians. They would be outside on the sidewalk with their signs, but they didn’t bring signs into the courthouse. They were very respectful. They sat there very quietly, and they had brought with them some spiritual leaders. Some people call them medicine men, but I would call them spiritual leaders, sacred leaders. And they would come in, and every day they would quietly do some prayers in the back of the room, and some of that involved the people gathering in a prayer circle briefly. The judge called the attorneys to the bench and said that some of the jurors were being upset by the ceremonial prayers, that he didn’t want them to do that anymore; it was unsettling. And he was very determined that if those people didn’t stop doing that, he would forbid their being in the courtroom. And he made this grandiose statement that, “This is a court of law and we don’t allow religion in here,” at which point one of the somewhat smarter-mouthed attorneys lost it for a minute, and he said,

“Judge, what’s that? That’s the Bible, on which people take the oath. That’s witnesses.”

So, they stopped doing the prayers in the courtroom. They would do them in the hallway. Well, that became a slight point of contention, but they eventually reached a resolution on that. I mean, the attorneys tried to explain that these people and these spiritual leaders were in fact not attempting anything with ill will toward the jurors, toward anybody in the courtroom. In fact, it was not only trying to invoke the most beneficent spirits for everyone in the courtroom, certainly for the defendant, an Indian woman who was not at a good place, had had a rough life, domestic violence and all sorts of things, but for the whole courtroom. Everyone in it was what these prayers were for.

That’s amazing in a place like Oklahoma that people would’ve had a Paustenbaugh problem with that.

It is, but think of this time. I read that through that stack of boxes, I’m Valencia-Weber reading this. I really got an education about…

I bet you did. How long did it take you to resolve this case? Paustenbaugh Well, I started reading, and by the end of two months, I had the draft. Valencia-Weber And then we spent a week or so debating, you might say, and then the judge did his fine tuning of what I had drafted for him, where he agreed. We were absolutely agreed on the result in the analysis (and of course, he’s the judge, I’m not), and about particular ways to say it and what he wanted to emphasize. So, then when the decision was announced, of course it was on the pages of The Oklahoman and all this sort of stuff. I mean, they couldn’t argue with us because we’re not going to argue with the press anyway, but when you have witnesses told to lie and their own documents show the difference between the version the wounded policewoman told the night of the day she was shot and then what she said at trial, and then these other witnesses, you can’t dispute that. So, the then DA Robert Macy laid it on the dead former DA and said, “Well, that wasn’t my shop. That was those people’s fault.”

So, I finished it, and then I began clerking for Judge Holloway, and I stayed there a full two years, and I did a lot of cases of every different kind, and that’s where I had more death row cases, execution cases, and learned about the death penalty. I also did a number of cases involving some of the Indian big money bingo cases where initially the tribes contracted outside companies to come in and establish and maybe fund on a loan the building and the running of the bingo, and then the tribe realizes, “We’re being cheated of money.” Then there’s lawsuits between these totally outside non-Indian contractors and the tribes.

Eventually, that model of economic development died for good reason, because there were too many opportunities for fraud, embezzlement, all sorts of stuff, but those came up there. Added to my education with Judge Holloway, he’s a chief judge at the Tenth Circuit at that time, which makes him the chief administrator for all of the Tenth Circuit courts. So, there’s lots of decisions being made about policy, about the hiring of the federal public defenders, what we’re doing for management of those offices. And remember, the Tenth Circuit included Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, so it’s a sizeable part of the world for Indian law cases. Water law cases, natural resources cases of all kinds arise, and we’re still working our way through the Penn Square fallout of the banks and the S and Ls and all of that. So, it was a full- scale education for me.

You finished your degree at Harvard law in what year? Paustenbaugh Nineteen eighty-six. Valencia-Weber In thinking about the filming of the documentary and when you were in Paustenbaugh law school, a lot of that was going on while you were back in Cambridge. Is that correct?

Yes, but I was here for all the filming, and fortunately most of the key Valencia-Weber filming took place before I entered law school in the fall of 1983. Before I went, I wrote the last NEH matching grant proposal of what they had at that time. While I was in law school that semester, I got word it had been granted. So, by then, that was mostly about editing and the final, sort of, getting old archival footage from other things. Not filming of Angie personally or filming in Oklahoma. It was more of this gathering old photos, going to the archives, getting the Oklahoma Historical Society, various things.

I was just trying to get my timeframe here all lined up. So, I know that Paustenbaugh when you finished your clerkship with Judge Holloway, it was at that point that you started the Indian law certificate program at the University of Tulsa?

That’s correct. Valencia-Weber And how long were you there? Paustenbaugh I left Tulsa in ’92. Valencia-Weber From there you went to… Paustenbaugh University of New Mexico. And I loved the University of Tulsa and the

Valencia-Weber people and the law school and their commitment to diversity. It was a wonderful place to work because the law faculty was almost half women. There were minority women there. There were minority males there. I mean, it was really a more real world, collegial world, for me in terms of the wide range of people I had to work with. And they were very supportive. It was a privately-funded university, but they wanted an Indian law certificate program. They had a long history with Indian law, Indian studies, and of course Rennard Strickland had been there before me, and he had left and they wanted to recover that kind of program. And they also had a natural resources program—that goes together. So, I really cared for that program. At first I was reluctant to leave, so I only took a leave of absence and visited at UNM. They spent a year of full- speed courtship, and they won me over. I missed Oklahoma, from my very good friends here in Stillwater and OSU, that whole network of people and the people at Tulsa, and the people that were part of what I call the Angie core, people like Robert Henry who I then encounter again at the Tenth Circuit when he becomes a Tenth Circuit judge.

The University of New Mexico had been an historical leader in Indian law in two ways. In 1967, under the War Against Poverty Program, the Office of Economic Opportunity that President Lyndon Johnson set up, they had funded a grant written by the University of New Mexico Law School to set up a summer institute for preparing Indian individuals to enter law school and succeed. In 1967 at that time, at most, you could find twenty-five individuals who were American Indian and were members of the legal bars across the United States—Indian attorneys in the United States.

That’s amazing there were so few. Paustenbaugh So few. So, that began what we call the Pre-Law Summer Institute Valencia-Weber [PLSI], and it has been at UNM since 1967. As a result of that, the American Indian Law Center was established there as a research and service institute, and it runs the PLSI. At some point, because of funding and governance issues, the American Indian Law Center wanted to become independent as an institution from UNM, no longer a UNM institution, which they did but they remain housed in our building and are a collaborator with us on any number of projects, the biggest one being the continuous operation of the Pre-Law Summer Institute. It was held every year but one year when federal funding from the federal government was just denied. The funding has come variously from Department of Education, sometimes Department of Interior, but one year there was just no funding. There have otherwise been continuous cohorts, anywhere from twenty-four to, I think the record number we had one year was about thirty-eight, students that come for two months. We call it boot camp. They are trained in how you’re going to study as a

law student, and they take short courses in critical areas, especially legal reasoning and legal writing. They take a course in Indian law because Indian law is still not taught across many law schools, and this is a national program. The students are going to enter law schools all over the United States, and it’s not remedial. We assume that when you come to PLSI, you’ve already been admitted to a law school to begin with. There’s a few that come conditionally admitted. That is, a law school accepted and admitted them, subject to their performing well in the graded courses at PLSI. You’re entering a law school somewhere in the United States, tribes from all over the United States, and so they do an Indian law course as well. They maybe do a property, maybe they do contracts, but what they’re going to encounter in their first year in any law school. It’s a real hard work—stressful--but amazing experience, joyful experience, for most of them, and they finish with an oral argument. They do a case and present it before real judges. So, they enter law school having gone through boot camp, having been toughened up about the way you read the law, the way you study the law, the way you write about the law.

So, in 1992, I go to UNM as a visitor, and in 1993, I accept. After looking at our curriculum, looking at what the tribes in our area are doing as governments, what do they need as governments, we set up the Indian law certificate there. It is basically twenty-one hours within the three years of the JD [Juris Doctor] program, and the students get advanced training in a whole variety of topics. The basic Indian law, if they’re interested in family or other stuff, we have courses on the Indian Child Welfare Act. Maybe it’s tax. For a while, we were the only law school that taught a course in Indian tax. The few there are in other law schools are modeled like ours, and in that Indian tax course, which is separate from our state tax and federal tax course, the students learn about how to set up tax regimes for tribes to collect their own taxes from whatever it is, whether it’s the people who buy things in the stores or the people that put business on reservations. A whole variety. We teach a gaming course. They do advanced research. They do placements in with tribes, with offices that do Indian law. That’s some private practitioners. It’s also some prosecutor offices in Indian tribes as well as offices that defend people who are in tribal court.

We also have an Indian law clinic. UNM is unique among law schools. It’s among that small core rather, that are unique that require clinic before you can graduate. We have a full-time clinic, a regular law office- type clinic, and every student must go a semester in the clinic doing real cases supervised by faculty before they can graduate. One of our clinics is an Indian law clinic, so our students in that clinic do cases involving people in tribal courts, state courts, some federal forums. We, of course, teach international law, the law of indigenous people, that’s part of what

happens at the UN and other places. So, that’s where I have staked my professional working life, and out of that comes other experiences that I’ve trained many of the people who then go on to work for their tribes, to work for other tribes, to work for Department of Interior, to work for Department of Justice in D.C.. We have many alums there. The head of the Indian Program Desk at the Department of Justice is one of my early graduates. A number of our attorneys are there. One of my recent graduates is the assistant solicitor for the Department of Interior. The solicitor general for the Department of Interior is also a native woman who was one of our law teachers. She’s not our graduate, but Hilary Tompkins is first class. We have people all over the world where people are making decisions about the lives of Indian people. And I encourage my students to think if they’re interested in finances and bonds and stocks, you be in there. You be in Wall Street. Because people make decisions there, and right now one of the big things is for tribes to try to develop the ability to issue bonds, just like any other government as supporting engines for their economic growth, just like the state issues bonds.

How many people go through the certificate program? Paustenbaugh Every year we have about twenty-some enrollees. The students sign on Valencia-Weber to the certificate program in their second year, and we’re graduating anywhere from eight to twelve a year. It’s a real commitment, but most of our students—it’s on your diploma, and we have people who call me regularly from the federal government from tribes saying, “We need to hire somebody foreign. Do you have somebody?” Because that level of training is incredible. Many of the tribal court judges are our graduates. Many times they are the attorney generals. They are making differences in real lives, and some of our people go to the state attorney generals’ offices of some states that have Indians within their borders and who have regularly to deal with Indian law.

A while ago, you said that you went to law school because you saw the Paustenbaugh law as one potent avenue for making real change. Did you go there with the intent of being an educator, or was this part of you realized by educating others that you could make an even greater difference?

Well, I enjoyed teaching while I was at OSU, and it was an amazing set Valencia-Weber of students there, as well, very gifted undergraduate students and some graduate students when I was teaching. In fact, one of my prize undergraduate majors in psychology was Anita Hill. I was her counselor. When Anita, who was a brilliant student, top-level academic student, was trying to decide between a PhD program and law school, we talked and talked about it. Eventually she decided law. I wrote a letter of recommendation to get her into Yale Law School and for a Thurgood

Marshall Fellowship. We have remained friends. We started out as teacher-student. We are teaching colleagues and friends, and we stay in contact. Every time I’m in the Cambridge area we visit and catch up. I expect to send her a message soon, given the recent things in the press about her. I enjoyed the teaching and maybe thought I’d someday get to it if things worked out. Teaching in American law schools is a hard job to get. There’s only about 7,000-plus full-time law teachers. It’s a highly competitive area, and to my delight it happened to me without my really having fought and pushing hard for it.

While I was clerking for Judge Holloway, the University of Oklahoma Law School has these visiting scholar programs where they bring a scholar in for a week and he or she does a variety of classroom presentations and also general public lectures. One year they brought one of my mentors from Harvard Law School, Professor Derrick Bell, a true pioneer in civil rights work, having done the cases in the south at the hard period but then gone on to teach and to write books in the area of constitutional and civil rights, and he’d been a critical mentor for me at Harvard Law School. They invited him, and one of the things that Professor Bell does in the public lecture is he does a debate, but he debates himself. He wants to show how a truly skilled and knowledgeable attorney will know the other side’s argument. So, he did both sides. And he asked the law school to bring in a panel, setting it up like an appellate argument where it’s not witnesses but appellate, and we got an appellate case structure, and he asked them to put me on the panel because I was in the area and clerking for Judge Holloway. And so I was on the panel, and they had a University of Oklahoma law professor and I think a law practitioner from the area. I forgot who the third person was, but anyway, one was a law professor.

I was deeply honored and terrified, so I prepared for weeks, and I practiced with my law clerk friends the questions and why I would ask the questions. At that public event were people from the University of Tulsa law school, and afterwards they came up and they asked me, “Are you interested in teaching? Would you please apply to us?” So I applied. They offered me the job, and I had thought if when I tried to enter law teaching, I’d go through the national system. We have a national system through the Association of American Law Schools, and you put in your resume and materials, and then they’re sent to all the law schools, and then there’s an interviewing conference where the law schools select ahead of time who they want to interview in person and all. But I never had to do that. I was hired by the University of Tulsa, again an enriching and a very supportive institution. And then I was lured away by UNM. Their history and their commitment to Indian law, their pioneering work, persuaded me. I understand recently that you’ve been appointed by President Obama to

Paustenbaugh the Legal Services Corporation Board of Directors?

Yes. Valencia-Weber What an honor. Paustenbaugh I feel really honored that President Obama selected me as one of his six Valencia-Weber appointees and one of five attorneys, among all of the attorneys in the United States, to be on the board of directors for the Legal Services Corporation. I have to say, it’s my Indian law work that put me in the running. Where I’m at in New Mexico is very serious about Indian law. It’s the first state to put Indian law on the state bar exam. It’s a competency issue for any attorney. Moreover, I’ve headed a committee for the Federal Bar Association to see what we can do about putting the bar exam on other state bars where it should be because you can’t work in Indian country without bumping into an Indian law issue, whether it’s child custody or making deals or getting water rights. We now have two other states that have joined: South Dakota and Washington State. The training I did of Indian law attorneys who then went to Legal Services stood me in a different position.

After President Obama was elected, the National Association of Indian Legal Services had a meeting, and most of those are Legal Services grantees. That is, they get money from the money that Congress included from the first year in 1974 that Legal Services Corporation was created, money specifically to provide services to Native Americans and to people in Indian country. It’s a very specific formula that has continued. The NAILS, National Association of Indian Legal Services, providers, a number of people who are trained in various states, said, “We have never had a person on the board who knows Indian law and knows how we do law in Indian country. We’re not in an urban area where the clients can get the subway to get there. We’re hours from our clients. Some of us have to make overnight trips to be able to interview the clients because of the distances in Indian country.”

I felt so honored when they called and asked if they could nominate me and submit it to the Obama administration. I have to say, the Oklahoma people were among the pushers. I had served on the Oklahoma Indian Legal Services Board, so I knew the people here and the kind of problems that had been encountered, and also had my graduates in Indian Services in California and Nevada and other states. So they put the nomination in to the transition committee. In turn, I’ve gone through three cycles of reviewing bodies. First the transition committee sent my nomination over to the White House Personnel Review Committee, or a group there that President Obama installed, and that’s where I went through major vetting, all the FBI, IRS, that sort of stuff. But at that

point, the people in Indian country stood up for me. The National Congress of American Indians, which is the national organization of all tribes, the president, Joe Garcia, wrote a letter to the Obama administration and said, “This is the person.”

Former solicitors for Department of Interior, former attorneys for the Department of Justice who did their Indian rights work wrote on my behalf, and I’m very grateful to Tim Bowman who used to be regional solicitor for the Department of Interior here in Tulsa and then became when they opened the regional office in Albuquerque there and I continued to send him students to work during their studies. Then Lawrence Baca, who’s a longtime pioneer in Indian law cases for Department of Justice and just became the first Indian president of the Federal Bar Association, wrote on my behalf. I had letters from lots of other organizations, including the American Indian Law Center, which is an independent law center and which is now headed by one of my graduates with whom I work very collaboratively because we train tribes, their officers and their judges, many who do not have law training. They don’t have law degrees. But we’ve got to train them in law. So, I do a lot of law training, not only of the students in my classroom but of tribal officials and tribal judges so that they conform to the law and their decisions are in good standing.

I made it through all that, and to my surprise, I ended up on the shortest list of the five attorneys to be appointed by President Obama. And it comes in a very sort of wonderful way the news that the appointment’s going to be announced. I had finished all this vetting, and believe me it was intensive to make sure I had paid all my taxes, which I had, and I had never employed illegal immigrants, and all this sort of stuff. They questioned people up and down in my neighborhood, at the Law School. I mean, it was very intensive. Then additionally I had to be vetted by the ABA [American Bar Association]. The way it’s set up, like the judicial nominees, the ABA vets, the people who get nominated to this most critical—it’s an independent corporation really created in 1974 because of the ABA’s advocacy that we can’t claim to be a country of equal justice if the poor don’t have a chance at getting their share, if only rich people can afford to obtain justice. So, the ABA vets you, and I got a fine report from them. With my daughter’s family, my husband and I went to Nicaragua and the Costa Rican coast there to visit the turtle sanctuaries where the endangered turtles, huge turtles, come up and lay eggs. The phone rang while I’m in the Nicaraguan jungle, and it’s the White House telling me that today President Obama’s going to announce my nomination. That was August 6, 2009. I was sent to the Senate for full vote confirmation in October 2009, and I sort of hung around there because it’s a very split divisive Congress, and the Senate is hard bargaining between the majority and minority about confirmations. But

they confirmed me in October 2010 before they broke to go do their campaigning for this next election. So, I was heartened by it.

How long is the term on this? Do you serve at the pleasure of the Paustenbaugh president, so you don’t know?

I am finishing a term of the previous director, and it’s going to expire, Valencia-Weber technically, next year, but under the terms of the statute, you can be reappointed up to nine years. It’s three-year term units.

So, you wouldn’t have to go through the whole process? Paustenbaugh No, I don’t have to go through all that again. No, no, no. Valencia-Weber That sounds arduous. Paustenbaugh Yes, it was very—I have to again thank my husband for allowing his Valencia-Weber privacy to be invaded because it was complete scrutiny of all our finances, our tax records.

Your life. Paustenbaugh Where we’d lived. I had to reconstruct my life to age eighteen. That’s Valencia-Weber pretty hard to do. But fortunately, I had done most of that work earlier because at least in the two states in which I have taken the bar and been admitted, the bar licensing process requires full reconstruction of your life and full exposure of everything including traffic tickets, and I had done that the first time. I said, “I’m not doing this again.” And so I Xeroxed and kept a record of everything. (Laughs) I did have to, this time, go to the New Mexico government to get essentially a transcript that says I have no criminal record. (Laughter) I’ve been so vetted. I’m so clean I’m dull, I tell my husband.

But I am greatly honored by the appointment, and when one looks at the quality of the appointees that President Obama selected, he selected six. There’s a minority that the Republicans now and the Senate get to select, and they select five. President Obama’s nominees are incredibly highly talented, highly respected people. As a law teacher, I was highly honored to be one of the two selected. The other one, [Martha Minow,] is the dean of Harvard Law School, so it takes your breath away. One of the others, [Robert J. Grey Jr.,] is the former president of the American Bar Association and is the first African American president of that big national bar. It’s a really high quality of people who have worked in providing legal services to poor people, and I have done that through our clinic at our law school when I did my semesters in the clinic. That is who we serve. That is who we represent. I’ve trained people, but I’ve

also done the cases. These people all have devoted much of their lives to legal services for poor people.

That sounds like an outstanding group of people to be associated with, Paustenbaugh to add to your network of peers.

I work very hard. I’m working very hard, but I’m enjoying it and Valencia-Weber learning new things. I think it’s part of, you know, however have been the history and divisive periods in it, the fact that this country has such a program. We really don’t have a parallel in another country. There is something similar to it in Australia, but nothing on this breadth because we have about 137 grantees. That is, the main organization that applies for the grant gets the LSC money. They in turn have 918 offices throughout the United States in every congressional district. We turn away fifty percent of the people that apply and are eligible for services because we don’t have enough money, and especially with this economic crash that we’ve had, the demand is high for the kinds of cases we do.

We do civil representation, not criminal. There’s a separate program for federal and state representation of criminal defendants, public defenders. We do the things like people who have family law issues, everything from divorce, custody, including parents who deserve to retain custody of their children when they’ve been wrongfully removed from them or whether they’re fighting about it, or grandparents who want to adopt their grandchildren so the children stay in the family. Housing foreclosures and that has accelerated with this housing foreclosure crisis we have right now in the United States.

We have all kinds of contract credit disputes that, again, are contributing to problems as people have a hard time because once a family member loses a job, that often leads to the loss of the home. Once we have a family that’s homeless, we’ve really unmoored that whole family, and keeping the family together and stable becomes very hard. Yes, they have legal problems, but all kinds of other problems occur. So, we’re now in collaborative relationships with medical schools, medical services, mental health facilities, child advocate groups trying to see that the clients we have escalating now in numbers because of the economic downfall we’re experiencing, that they also have access to the health care, the mental health care, the other things they need to keep the family together.

That’s an enormous task. Paustenbaugh It is. And now we’ve got a new charge as well. We’re rolling out this Valencia-Weber new program next month that Congress has given us, as well, for helping

veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who come back and have difficulties assuming a normal productive life. Now, the VA appeals are another matter. They go through another program. This program is devoted, again, to civil issues, where veterans are having trouble with jobs, either getting jobs or obtaining a job. And remember a number of these people we have sent are reservists or National Guard people who were called up, and the terms of that service is that their employer would employ them when they return from overseas combat duty and making those promises real, or the other kinds of employment problems. The foreclosures on some of their housing that they’re facing, the kind of debt and credit cycles that those families experience because of the long time that the man or the woman was overseas. We have a special charge to help those veterans.

That will be a huge job, too. I think it’s wonderful that you’re doing that. Paustenbaugh It’s a big job. It’s a challenge to all of the many talents that are in the Valencia-Weber corporation itself, to our not quite 7,000 Legal Services attorneys across the United States who are trying very hard with very little money to try to make justice real in the lives so people can assume a regular productive life for their families.

What do you see in your future? Paustenbaugh Well, in my immediate future, I’m cutting down on teaching because the Valencia-Weber Legal Services work takes a lot. We go do a lot of visits to grantees to find out what they’re doing, how they’re coping with what is happening. We just finished a visit with the grantees who are coping with what’s happening to poor people in the four states most affected by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the BP spill. So, there’s on-site visits, and out of that, we try to learn how to do our job better as a national board and what we can offer as assistance to those on-the-ground people who are doing the actual work. That takes a lot of time, so I’m cutting down on my teaching. I’m not teaching as many courses, and then the other thing is I’m going to try to develop materials to educate the Legal Services Board in the corporation, and they’ve already talked to me about educating on the larger unique Indian law issues. What arises, because these are governments trying, like twenty-first century government, to provide for their members and anybody in their jurisdiction, safety, security, police forces, clean water, adequate housing. Sometimes these involve non-Indians who are there and should be protected adequately with police and fire services. Others are membership issues. So, I want to properly do my share of that, and I’m uniquely placed for that.

And then I want to do some collaborative work that we’re beginning with these other groups, as I mentioned, that are tied to the needs that are

arising that we have to also address. That includes people with ADA, the people with disabilities, how much access into full job, full work, full housing opportunities they’re having. We’re having to push back from some places who say, “It costs so much to build buildings that are accessible. Can’t you cut down on that?” And yet we have whole populations who have not yet been given their full share of the opportunities we want for everybody in America. Not given an end result, but given the opportunity to get into schools, to gain admission to schools, and show their qualifications, to be given the opportunity for work and to show by their performance how adequately and properly, and sometimes at a super level, they can perform on the job.

Those are very ambitious and worthy goals. Paustenbaugh They are. I learned a lot at OSU. And, again, part of what I learned at Valencia-Weber OSU, because when we were admitting students into the Diversified Students Program, we were also admitting people with sight disabilities, mobility problems, people who were in wheelchairs, but whose minds and credentials clearly warranted that they qualified for admission. And so those communities (and they do often identify as very specific sub- communities) of the people with impaired sight and people with movement—they want to also see professionals that understand their experience by having been part of it themselves. So, it’s not that only people without sight can help the people without the vision, but it makes a difference. So, opening, for instance, the classrooms here so that our students in wheelchairs and mobility issues could get access to them was part of learning, it’s more than just saying, “Now we admit you.”

Right. You have to make it… Paustenbaugh Make it very real. Valencia-Weber Put everything in place that allows that to happen. Paustenbaugh Yes. Valencia-Weber We’ve covered a lot of ground here today, and you have been so Paustenbaugh incredibly generous in sharing your memories. I really appreciate that, and also sharing what you’re currently doing. Is there anything that you wish that I’d asked you about that I haven’t?

Well, I think one thing, since this is for Oklahoma archives, it amazes Valencia-Weber me as a state how Oklahoma’s history has had these various cycles, including the populism and that their constitution when written was seen as such a radical instrument because the many avenues for democracy for people to put propositions on the ballot. It seems strange to think of

that as radical now, but it was, and yet not quite free from some of the bad cultural influences. I saw the state experience the state as one torn between the very rugged individualism, populist type strain, and then also that which came from the confederacy culture, the little Dixie, the bad race feelings that still exist because of anti-black and sometimes anti-Indian, and now anti-foreign or anti-Latino sentiments, and we have gone as a state through cycles like that.

The amendments that were in the Oklahoma Constitution about not mixing the races, it took a struggle to remove them, even though the Supreme Court long ago outlawed them and they weren’t affected. The recurring cycles of meanness which involve the things I think we have to be careful of in this whole country right now, the cycles of fear and hate, the fear of people who look different than us. There may be hatred, very visceral, sometimes violent against people different-looking. It can really disable us as a society. It means we don’t see the benefits, the enrichment, that all kinds of people make, and you have these nasty kinds of actions occurring.

I’m, for instance, sorry that Oklahoma does not see fit to keep a DREAM [Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors] Act. Why would we want to punish children who had no say in being brought to this country by undocumented immigrants, children who were raised here and benefited from our high schools and education system and who have talents and knowledge, and who could qualify for admission and add to our society, and somewhere down the line will probably become legal permanent residents? We have no viable state interest (no state does) in perpetuating a class of ignorant people. There is none that can justify. So, I’m disheartened by that and hope that a state in which I spent so many years and had so many positive enriching experiences gets beyond it. And they’re not alone. It’s happening in other states. If you look at Arizona, Kansas, other places that are moving away from the better of our constitutional principles of equality and due process, of a fair playing field for all who engage in the work, qualify for what the opportunity is, without consideration of their race or their gender or whether they’re doing it in a wheelchair.

I find that very, at this point, disheartening because in times past, Oklahoma for instance had a congressional delegation that was very respectful, very helpful, to the tribes. You’ve had wonderful people like Henry Bellmon who staked their political life on voting for the Civil Rights Act, and perhaps it caught up with him, that his party eventually walks away from that legacy and becomes at least in many of its forms at times just a mean-spirited party. I don’t think any party should be. I don’t overlook that the Democratic Party as well as the Republican Party are capable of mean-spirited cycles. So, I hope Oklahoma, like the rest

of the US, just pauses, thinks about what’s before us and doesn’t repeat the past but does the future in a better way.

Amen. Thank you very much. Paustenbaugh ------End of interview ------