alternative sentencing

Tulalip Alternative Sentencing Program

Year

Born out of a need to create a judicial system that Tulalip citizens can trust and that also helps offenders to recover rather than just "throwing them away," the Tulalip Tribal Court Alternative Sentencing Program supports efforts to establish a crime free community. Focusing on the mental, physical, and spiritual health of offenders, while incorporating cultural values, the program melds indigenous and therapeutic jurisprudence, Honoree Program Descriptions going beyond placing offenders in jail. Tulalip citizens now better reflect the sentiments of a traditional saying, "To pull that canoe, you have to pull together."

 

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

"Alternative Sentencing Program." Honoring Nations: 2006 Honoree. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2007. Report.

Permissions

This Honoring Nations report is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development.

Theresa M. Pouley: Reclaiming and Reforming Justice at Tulalip

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

Tulalip Tribal Court Chief Judge Theresa M. Pouley shares the long-term, positive effects of the Tulalip Alternative Sentencing Program on the Tulalip tribal community.

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Pouley, Theresa M. "Reclaiming and Reforming Justice at Tulalip." Emerging Leaders Seminar. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. March 26, 2008. Presentation.

"I am Theresa Pouley. I'm a judge. I've been a judge for a long time, only in tribal courts. That's the only place I ever wanted to be a judge. And I've been a tribal court judge for ten years; six of those years were as the chief judge of the Lummi Nation. So that almost is a credential all in itself. I'm honored to be here today. I rarely get to speak in front of so many council people. It's not a good spot for a tribal court judge, usually. I'm honored to be associated with Tulalip's tribal court. I was really honored and humbled to be awarded High Honors at the Honoring Nations program for a tribal court program. I'm here to share that experience with you today about Tulalip's alternative sentencing program and hopefully we can learn some lessons from it.

Every day I think about Tulalip and its justice system. Most judges in tribal courts think about those issues all the time. At Tulalip, whenever I think about it and whenever I give a presentation like this, I always stop for a second and see if I can come up with a pearl of wisdom from our ancestors. So today I thought about it and there's an old Shenandoah proverb that I think fits Tulalip's alternative sentencing program. It says, 'It's no longer enough to cry peace. We have to act peace, live peace and live in peace.' So when I think and talk about the alternative sentencing program I always do it in those three ways. How do we act peace? Let's talk about the history of Tulalip. Where did they get to where they are today? Let's live peace. What's Tulalip doing now that's different and useful in resolving some of the issues that are facing our communities? And the last one is how do we live in peace? What are the lessons that we learn from that so we can move into the future?

So let's start with the history. And I like to go way back when I talk about Tulalip. I read a bunch of stuff about Tulalip -- I'm actually a Colville tribal member, which is a cousin on the other side of the mountains in Washington State. So I went about the business of learning about Tulalip. Tulalip is historically a fishing community. That's why that picture is up there and it always reminds me of who I speak. They were a very peaceful people. All of their disputes were resolved by families or resolved by the elders in their communities and almost every Indian agent, non-Indian person who came to Tulalip said the exact same thing. They're a peaceful people. Now just like all the rest of the Indian nations -- and that includes everyone that you're at -- that was pretty badly interrupted in the late 1800s. And Tulalip's system of problem solving went from that dispute resolution that was family and community based to being a system based on punishment and prison. Doesn't make any difference what tribal jurisdiction you're from because the United States Supreme Court decided in Ex Parte Crow Dog, which sort of took all of Indian nations and put us on the same page, that the way that we did justice wasn't right; that we needed to do it in a system where there was a trial, where there was consequences and where there was punishment. Now the results are exactly the same. In 1999, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, for the very first time, came out with crime statistics in Indian Country. And for all of you as leaders you know them; you live them every day. We have two times the rate of violent victimization of Indian women in Indian Country than in any other population. We have two times the rate of tribal members in jail for drug and alcohol-related offenses. We have two times the rate of alcoholism that causes, and as a matter of fact as high as, seven out of 10 violent crimes are caused while our relatives are under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Those are alarming statistics. And it doesn't make any difference if you are living in South Dakota or you're living on the Tulalip reservation, it's the same for all of us. That's the consequences of a system of punishment and prison. Tulalip in particular had sort of a double whammy. Washington's a Public Law 280 state so not only did we have the federal government coming in and dictating how we were going to take care of problems in our community but we also had the state government coming in. So not only did we have the feds prosecuting and putting people in jail from a punishment and prison perspective but we also had the State of Washington coming in and taking tribal members and punishing them and putting them in jail. And 57 percent of the Native Americans who were actually put in jail because of a drug- and alcohol-related crime are going to be back in jail within that same year.

So Tulalip, who was really spurred by its economic development -- I don't if any of you, have any of you been to Tulalip? They have the most beautiful facilities. They have a beautiful casino, an outlet mall; they have a Walmart. That's pretty exciting in Indian Country. So they took this economic development and rather than paying it out to tribal members in per capita said, "˜We can do this better. Enough is enough. We're tired of tribal members going to jail. We're tired of a concept of prison and punishment so we're going to take it over.' In 2001, so this is just seven years ago, Tulalip retroceded all of its criminal jurisdiction from the state of Washington. And that's a big deal. Tribal court went from [a] one-day-a-month court system to 1,100 cases almost overnight. In 2001, when those cases started coming in, my boss was the chief judge at Tulalip and he did what we're trained to do as lawyers in developing tribal court systems. He implemented a system that gives everybody due process, notice and an opportunity for a hearing and guess what was happening? You can't take the state system of punishment and prison and put it in a tribal community and expect different results. And fortunately for me, my boss knew that. So he started changing the system just a little bit at a time. He would sentence people, suspend that sentence and then of course require they get drug and alcohol treatment, education, GED and then of course send them on their way. A year later they'd come back for a criminal review and guess what, they didn't do any of that stuff, right?

So that's the second one. How do you live that peace? So what did Tulalip differently? Judge [Gary] Bass just started hauling everybody in every 30 days. There's a joke at Tulalip that if you come to tribal court, get a divorce, we're going to give you a UA [urinalysis]. Want to write a will? We're going to give you a UA. You're in trouble?We're going to give you a UA. Why would you do that? Because it's absolutely critical to address the underlying cause of the crime, and the underlying cause is unresolved drug and alcohol abuse in over 80 percent of the cases at Tulalip. So you've got to identify it early so if you do a UA, you can suddenly see if somebody has a substance-abuse issue because Tulalip is right on the I-5 corridor, there's lots of drugs that are available on the Tulalip reservation. Meth is one that just scares absolutely everybody in the community.

So you've got to figure it out. If you come in and you actually are arraigned because you're accused of a crime, you will have to take a UA. Now we won't use it against you -- as the judges -- but we want to know, are you using drugs? Do we need to get you treatment? And we'll have a CD [chemical dependency] evaluation done before you even get to trial. If you go into custody in the jail, because you're a danger to the community or to yourself, you're going to get a CD evaluation while you're in jail [because] we want to know what the underlying cause of the problem is. You're going to come to court every 30 days and you're going to answer to the judge. And you're not just going to answer in a bad way. So when you say, Judge Pouley, "˜I did the best I could to get to my CD evaluation but I missed it.' Judge Pouley's not going to say, "˜Okay, go to jail for the next six months,' [because] that doesn't work. I'm going to say, "˜Okay, go get your CD appointment, bring me back the card and come back to court today,' because we have to engage people in that process. Tulalip's alternative sentencing program and alternative sentencing idea is to hold individual offenders accountable for getting better. 'Do you have a job?' 'No.' 'Okay, well, before you come to court two weeks from now you bring me some proof that you stopped at the TERO office or that you stopped to get your GED or that you're doing job training and if you do, I'm going to tell you good job from the bench,' because you want to encourage the positive and have immediate consequences for the negative behavior.

Now that expanded at Tulalip, because we still had a variety of people who were sort of our revolving door of justice people. You know who they are. The ones who come in three or four or five or six times in a year because despite our best efforts, they just can't kick a disease. It's recognition that it's a disease, that a judge can play a crucial role in diagnosis and treatment of a disease. In 2005, the chief of police at Tulalip looked around and said, "˜Wow, this is working.' So he didn't ask the chief judge. He went to the tribal council and he told the tribal council that they should plan a drug court, that they should require all of the departments at Tulalip to come together to plan a court system that was responsive to the needs of their community. And in 2005 the tribal council, the board of directors at Tulalip, passed that resolution. Chief judge didn't say, "˜Oh, no. We're not going to hear that resolution from the tribal council.' Chief of police didn't say, "˜Oh, no. We're not going to send anybody.' We all have the same problems and we all need the same solutions. So Chief Judge [Bass] and I went about the business of coordinating those meetings. And out of that a wellness court was born.

Now you just have to change everything, right? So you can't have a system of punishment and prison. You have to have a system of praise when you do a good job and accountability, immediate consequences when you don't. You have to have goals for your individual clients. You have to call them clients and not defendants. You have to change the whole way you think about the system and the wellness court really was sort of the final vehicle to do that. The wellness court is a group of people who sits and meets once a week about all of our clients in the wellness court. It includes everybody. It includes CD treatment providers, mental health providers, domestic violent perpetrator, treatment providers, but it also includes GED, job training, Northwest Indian College, casino employment, TGA who grants licenses. All of these people come together once a week to ask this very simple question. How do we help our client get better? It's a pretty amazing tool, but it's only amazing if you take the very last step. And at Tulalip we sort of did it backwards but we gave it a name. It's called [Tulalip language] -- the court giving the means to get stronger. If all of the people involved in the justice system have that perspective, it fundamentally changes the way that business gets done. It's not a western-style court system transplanted on the Tulalip reservation. It's a Tulalip court system to try and help all of our relatives get better. It's a pretty big change in just the way you think about things. And even though I'm a Colville tribal member, I have to tell you this, I've got plenty of relatives on the Tulalip reservation and that's true for most of us. Everyone in our communities is our relatives and you have to be vested in helping them get stronger.

So what's the last thing? How do you live in peace? What's the lessons we learn from it? First thing you guys are probably going to ask me is, 'Does it work? If you just change everything, does it actually work?' Well, interestingly enough, Tulalip's only been hearing cases -- remember I said -- since 2001. So in seven years, 1,100 cases we started. We had less than 400 criminal filings last year. That means it works. The number of repeat offenders at Tulalip is down 25 percent each year for two years running -- changing the way that we do business. This year in 2007 -- and I just did the statistics, I never thought this could happen -- that the number of criminal cases filed went down another 12 percent, because people are figuring out that the court's going to hold you accountable. So don't make any mistakes about that. If you're not doing what I asked you to do, you are going to spend some time in jail. But the goal of it is different. It's not punishment. It is a time for you to be individually accountable on a short-term basis. So you give me a positive UA, you go to jail for a day, not for six months. I don't know anybody who ever learned how to be clean and sober in jail. But you can sure teach that lesson if you use it as a tool.

So 12 percent decrease in crime just between 2006 and 2007, and then we had a really interesting thing happen. Our number of civil cases -- which is cases where people don't go to jail, cases where you come to resolve child custody disputes, get child support, where you want to sue for damages -- guess what happened to those? For the very first time in 2007 they were higher than our criminal cases. Now why does that matter? A lot of people say, "˜Well, geez, that just means you have to go to court and court's a terrible place.' No, because at Tulalip you can choose. You can go to tribal court if you want or you can go to state court. You don't have to come to tribal court. Six hundred and one people, 601 tribal members last year voluntarily came to tribal court instead of going to state court. Well, that's a big deal. Some of those 601 people came to get restraining orders or filed civil suits against each other instead of beating the crap out of each other. That's a good day.

So not only do you have a decrease in crime and an increase in the number of civil cases, but do you know that 80 percent of the criminal case load at Tulalip, so about 400 cases, 80 percent of those have a current drug and alcohol evaluation? Almost all of them are compelled into treatment. And the amazing thing is when people start into treatment you get so much information. Most people don't choose to be drug or alcohol addicted. There are mental health issues that need to be addressed, so almost all of our clients in wellness court also are seeing mental health counselors and they're resolving issues that are maybe centuries old. You also have to make sure that you get people a job.

My favorite sort of success story at Tulalip actually is about a person. So we took in wellness court, [Tulalip language], the hardest of the hard core: people who had had two or more cases filed a year and had been unsuccessful in probation in six years. And in 2006, no, 2007 -- last year -- we had two graduates, people who had been clean and sober for 18 months who are now working when they never worked before. We have one young lady who just moved into the fifth stage who is probably 25 years old. She was in jail probably for six months of that timeframe. You know what? She's been clean and sober for over a year. She got her kids back. She is a great parent and she's taking parenting classes and her significant other, who was also in trouble with the law all the time, they're together raising their own children in a clean and healthy way. So how do you do that? How do you accomplish that objective?

It's sort of what I call the four C's and actually I think there's six of them. At the end of the PowerPoint presentation it gives you all six of them. But I sort of lump them together in about four. You have to have communication and coordination of your services. Your law and justice system must be part of the whole tribal system. You have to be prepared as tribal council people, and tribal council judges have to be prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with their elected officials to say, 'Enough is enough,' to say that it's time to help our relatives heal. [Because] I have to tell you, it's not all roses. We've got great statistics, but if you start holding tribal members accountable, what do you think the tribal membership says? So it's important that you're all on the same page. You have to stand together. Your tribal court system is part of your government every bit as much as any other department. And the fact that we have separation of powers doesn't mean we have a separation of problems. You and I all have the same problems. It doesn't mean that we have separation of solutions. Because I'm a judge, I know a variety of things about promising practices. Because you're tribal council people, you know a variety of things. If we put our heads together, we can get it done [because] it's really for that young lady and her husband and their kids, because we get to break that cycle of drug and alcohol abuse and poverty to give them a real future. So it's worth the effort, but you've got to be prepared and you have to be able to stand together. You have to communicate it to everybody. So it's absolutely critical that everybody in the community knows what's happening [because] if they don't, it looks a little funny. And people don't necessarily like changing the justice system. There's a lot of people who think Western-style justice systems all have to look the same, so you've got to communicate. So you've got to coordinate, communicate. You absolutely have to be corrective. So you have to have somebody who's in the position to say, "˜You did a great job. I am so proud of you. I can't believe you've been clean and sober for a year. Your kids are so proud of you. I know your grandma's so proud of you. Good job.' [Because] too many times nobody bothers to tell people good job when they do a good job. We happily toss them in jail when they don't, but it's got to be corrective. So you have to reward good behavior, but you also have to be prepared to send people to jail for the consequences if they're not doing what you need them to do. And it has to absolutely be comprehensive. That's the last C. You've got to look at it in a holistic way. You can't just do it from one department perspective. You really do have to all stand together 'cause you know what happens when we all stand separate, right? It's happened over and over and over again. About this, the future's now. About this problem of drug and alcoholism and crime on Indian reservations, we need to take control [because] that's what the Shenandoah proverb says, right? "˜It's no longer enough to cry peace. We've got to act peace, live peace and live in peace.' I think we can do it. So call your tribal court judge. We can do it together. We're all part of the solution. Thank you very much." 

Honoring Nations: Theresa M. Pouley: The Tulalip Alternative Sentencing Program

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Judge Theresa M. Pouley of the Tulalip Tribal Court discusses how the Tulalip Tribes reclaimed criminal jurisdiction from the State of Washington and then developed the award-winning Tulalip Alternative Sentencing Program, which she explains is a more effective and culturally appropriate approach to the administration of justice for Tulalip citizens. 

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Pouley, Theresa M. "The Tulalip Alternative Sentencing Program." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 27-28, 2007. Presentation.

Duane Champagne:

"Our first speaker will be -- well, it was supposed to be Gary Bass, who is the head judge at Tulalip and he is one of the founders and sustainers of the Alternative Sentencing Program. But in his place, he's sent us Theresa Pouley, who is associate judge and who actually made the presentation at the Honoring Nations final program. They're 2006 honorees and have a very outstanding program, which I'll let Theresa tell you about."

Theresa M. Pouley:

"Well, I want you to know first that Judge Bass really wanted to be here and he is here in spirit, but he's also here in form. If you look at the 2008 applications [brochure], his picture's right here, standing next to me. And I thought a little bit -- except justices and judges are supposed to be more serious -- that I'd wear it as a little mask today so it was really Gary Bass, but then I changed my mind. I'm Theresa Pouley. I'm the associate judge. As chief judges often do, he delegated this responsibility to me to talk to you about Tulalip's Alternative Sentencing Program. And I was actually delighted. When I talked to Amy [Besaw Medford] and she called me on the phone, she said, 'Oh, this is going to be the feel good section,' and I was like so excited [because] nobody says 'feel good' and 'tribal court' in the same sentence ever. So what I'm going to do is just remind you that when I start out, it's not going to feel very good, but when I get to the end, just like Amy's been for this whole conference -- she's totally right, it is going to work.

I always start, when I do presentations like this, by thinking about words from our ancestors, from different tribes. And in this particular case, I thought about this saying from a Shenandoah proverb that says, 'It's no longer enough to cry peace. We have to act peace, live peace and live in peace.' And Tulalip's Alternative Sentencing Program is really geared towards doing those things. How do you act peace?

You look a little bit at the history of the Tulalip tribes  -- and this is not the feel good part of my presentation -- crime on the Tulalip Indian Reservation, which is located in western Washington, traditional fishing tribe, about 3,500 tribal members now -- the reservation by the time the 1980s and 90s came around was characterized by everybody who knew it as lawless. That's a pretty serious, and makes you take a serious sigh, about how the criminal justice system is operating at Tulalip. Now why is that? It's exactly the same as it is all over Indian Country -- the federal government took over traditional Native problem-solving and replaced it with a system of punishment and prison, and not a surprise, it didn't work at Tulalip. The main road that goes through the Tulalip Reservation was designated by the Washington State Patrol and virtually every other agency as 'blood alley' because of the number of drug- and alcohol-related deaths on its highways. In 2001, the Tulalip Board of Directors said, 'Enough is enough. We're tired of having state law enforcement on the reservation, we're tired of sending tribal members to state court, we're tired of having this reputation of lawlessness on the reservation, and we're going to take our community back. We are going to solve the criminal problems that happen within the boundaries of the Tulalip Reservation.' And they did.

They got a State [of Washington] piece of legislation, which retroceded all of their criminal jurisdiction under Public Law 280, and they took over and went about the business of adjudicating its own tribal members as guilty of crimes and holding them accountable for those crimes. Now, 2001, you had a huge influx of cases. So Tulalip Tribes never has heard a criminal case, never had a criminal defendant come before the bench before, and in a two-year period of time, they had 1,100 criminal cases filed in tribal court. Zero to 1,100. Imagine, if you will.

By 2003, Chief Judge Bass came to one conclusion that should have been easy for any judge to see all along, which is, his clients were all the same clients. And why were they committing crimes? Were they committing crimes because they had criminal behavior? No. They were committing crimes because 95 percent of the time, they had substance abuse issues. Over 60 percent of the time, they had mental health issues. Many of them suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder because they were removed from their family's homes, because they were sent to boarding school. The issues that were bringing those clients to court simply were not being resolved, not on any day. So Judge Bass decided, in a Nike© kind of way, 'Just do it.' We can do it better than that.

So he created a special criminal calendar where he had clients come into court on a weekly basis and he asked them the question. 'I asked you to get a drug and alcohol evaluation. Did you get one?' And if they didn't, then he'd say, 'You're going to get one by next week and if you don't, I'll throw you in jail.' Throw you in jail for a long time like they would in the state court system? Warehouse you off 365 days? No. One day, to make the point. That's how important it was that you should get a drug and alcohol evaluation. Combined with that -- you know, modern technology is a wonderful thing. He used a system of urinalysis testing. It's a big joke at Tulalip, by the way. If you come in to get a will at Tulalip, you better be prepared to take a UA. You want a divorce, we're going to hand you the cup. Because, here's the key, early identification of drug and alcohol related issues and constant monitoring of sobriety is critical to your ability to comply with court orders. If the judge tells you that you have to get community service, that you need to get a job, you need to get a GED, what is the chance of you being able to accomplish that objective if you're addicted to drugs or alcohol? All of the state statistics will tell you exactly what the chances are: seven in 10 Native Americans in jail today are there because they did not comply with their probation. Why not? Because they're addicted to substances.

So a concerted effort was made by Judge Bass to change the way business got done. It was so successful on individual clients that the police were seeing, that the Chief of Police of the Tulalip Tribes went to the Board of Directors and said, 'I think you should pass a resolution. That resolution should require that we all investigate alternative sentencing and that we have a drug court.' And they passed a resolution implementing those things. So that's the history of how we get there. So now we know how we act peace. So how do we live peace?

We have Tulalip's Alternative Sentencing Program, which incorporates all the best values of the Native culture into a modern and traditional court system. First of all, you have regular and frequent reviews with the judge. And the judge is there not to punish you, the judge is there to encourage you to make better choices. If you do a good job, the judge is going to come off the bench and give you a hug. If you get your GED and graduate, your case is going to be closed. If you get a job when you haven't been employed for the last 20 years of your life, a round of applause is going to break out in the courtroom. That's how alternative sentencing works. We still had a group of clients that we couldn't reach, our repeat offenders who had been in court now five, or six, or seven, or eight times. And that particular system wasn't working. So the question became, what do we do with those clients? And the answer is, change. Change everything. And you start with changing the name. [Salish language]. The court 'giving the means to get stronger' is Tulalip Tribes' wellness court. Wellness court coordinates all of the services of the tribe. They all meet together once a week and those clients come forward and visit not just with the judge, but with all of the institutions of the tribe. Drug and alcohol counselor is there, mental health counselor is there, GED provider is there, Northwest Indian College is there -- everybody who has a vested interest in this person's life and in the requirements for that person sits at the table once a week. But remember, you have to change everything.

So imagine the courtroom. Now the courtroom is an entirely different place. They all sit in a circle. They start the proceedings and they open with a prayer. And everybody sitting around the circle, client, public defender, prosecutor, police officer, treatment provider, we all take our turn giving a prayer. And then all of the clients take turns doing closing prayers. Now Tulalip isn't a homogenous society. We have a variety of religions that are there, but we all get to learn and respect one another. These proceedings which happen in a circle, you don't sit on the bench–which is a problem for me when I do [Salish language], because I'm a little short, so sitting around in the circle sometimes is problematic, so I like to get up and wander around. You all sit in a circle, you open with a prayer, you close with a prayer, and they all watch out for each other.

When we first were awarded Honoring Nations in 2006, we'd just started [Salish language]. Now, we've had our first two graduates. The most rewarding thing, and this is what Amy's right about, is that I have a grandma who is a grandma to her grandchildren again, and a mother to her children again. The most rewarding thing is that I have a young mother who's 25 years old, who has four children who have all been removed from her care. And not only has she been clean and sober for eight months [because] she's got to come visit with the whole team every week, but now she's starting to get her children back. The Tulalip Tribes is planning on moving for an in-home dependency within the next couple of months. And not only that, as if that wasn't enough, her husband has always been a problem child. Since 2001, he was one of our very first criminal cases. And in 2006, he's still racking up charges. And in 2007, he's out of jail and on probation again. And guess what? He also is doing fabulously. The family's in family counseling, there's in-home services. We just gave them a congratulations card because, for the very first time in their life, they have a home with their children in it. You can just change everything and you do it just one at a time.

Now that's sort of the anecdotal information, but I'm always reminded, especially when I come to these gatherings, that it's not really my job. Nor do I get the luxury of seeing the results on a daily basis, but every once in awhile I get that reminder. We don't do this work for the mom, necessarily. We do this work to break the cycle of violence and drug addiction in our community that deprives her children and her grandchildren from being able to be tribal chairwoman. Actually, her children are all girls. So if they wanted to be tribal chairman that would be okay, too.

So if you act peace, live peace, how do you live in peace? You have to figure out how to incorporate the custom and tradition and values of the tribe into the justice system. Courts are not popular places. Nobody wants to come to court. I bet all of you when you thought you were going to talk to a judge you're like, 'Oh, man.' And I bet each and every one of you has a relative who's been to court and didn't have anything nice to say about going to court. Remember that separation of powers does not mean separation of solutions, and it certainly doesn't mean separation of problems. The Tulalip Board of Directors passed a resolution that said that we should plan a wellness court, that we should plan alternative sentencing, and the chief judge could have said, 'Absolutely not! You can't say anything about that. Separation of powers.' But he didn't because we have the same problems and we needed the same solutions. The same thing's true for the chief of police. He didn't ask those questions and he wasn't interfering with the province of the court. We need to learn how to work together. We have to quit thinking of our relatives who are in court as sort of the black sheep of our family. We have to love all of our clients and I really hope for every one of my clients everyday -- even when I send them off to jail once or twice -- that they get the message this time. [Because] I never know when I'm going to be looking at the chairman of my tribe, or when I'm looking at the mother of the chairman of the tribe. [Salish language]. That's the judge's role. The court's role is to give people the tools to help them be stronger. But that means everybody here -- this is all of your obligation -- you've got to talk to your local tribal court judge, bring them into the loop. Don't be afraid of passing a resolution. It is absolutely critical to our tribal members that we take the time to figure out how those disadvantaged people in our communities can be made whole, because if we don't, that's just perpetuated into another couple of generations. It's absolutely critical that you use justice systems to change behavior in a positive way. And when you do that, you go back to the more traditional problem solving.

At Tulalip it was like this all the time. From my own family it's absolutely like that. Court becomes a place where there's teaching to be given, not only to the person who's appearing in front of you, but to everyone else in the courtroom and everyone else in the community. Teachings are given. That's how we hand down particular pieces of information for the next generation. So, it's the old Shenandoah proverb right? Tulalip decided 'it's not enough to cry peace' anymore. 'We [absolutely] have to act peace, live peace and live in peace.' Crime rate at Tulalip, a year after this program, has decreased 25 percent -- 25 percent. That's an amazing day. And we get our mothers and our grandmothers back. We get our fathers and our grandfathers back. We do it for the future of our children in the ways of our ancestors. Thank you."

First-time offenders learn accountability through diversion program run by tribal elders

Year

The 2012 Annual Tulalip Tribal Court Report states 415 criminal cases were heard in court. Included in that 415, are 24 newly filed criminal alcohol charges and 69 disposed, meaning judicial proceeding have ended or a case that has been resolved. Also counted in that 415, are 76 newly filed criminal drug cases and 126 disposed. Helping to tackle these numbers is a group of volunteer Tulalip elders, who are teaching offenders accountability in a traditional way, and saving the court thousands of dollars...

Native Nations
Resource Type
Citation

Montreuil, Brandi N. "First-time offenders learn accountability through diversion program run by tribal elders." Tulalip News. March 19, 2014. Article. (http://www.tulalipnews.com/wp/2014/03/19/first-time-offenders-learn-acco..., accessed May 5, 2023)

Health, Innovation and the Promise of VAWA 2013 in Indian Country

Year

Yesterday morning, we made our way north from Seattle, past gorgeous waterways, and lush greenery to visit with the Tulalip Tribes of western Washington, where we were greeted by Tribal Chairman Mel Sheldon, Vice Chairwoman Deb Parker, and Chief Judge Theresa Pouley. We saw first-hand, a tribal court system which serves to both honor the traditions of its people and to foster a renewed era of tribal self-determination...

Native Nations
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Jarrett, Valerie and Tony West. "Health, Innovation and the Promise of VAWA 2013 in Indian Country." President Obama and the Native American Community Blog. Washington, D.C. September 06, 2013. Article. (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/09/06/health-innovation..., accessed May 31, 2023)

Negotiating Jurisprudence in Tribal Court and the Emergence of a Tribal State: The Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe

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The interaction between American Indian activism and changes in federal Indian policy since the 1960s has transformed American Indian tribes from largely powerless and impoverished kinship‐based communities into neocolonial statelike entities (Wilkinson 2005).1 Representing themselves as distinct nations, they are also part of and thoroughly articulated with the American multicultural state. The ambiguous and contradictory status that indigenous peoples have always had in U.S. law and policy has made the transformation possible, and “the contemporary regime of neo‐liberalism” that encourages devolution and the subcontracting of governance (Biolsi 2004, 244–45) has accelerated it. With the widespread development of tribal courts, they are productively thought of as tribal states.

Indian tribes appear in the commerce clause of the Constitution (article 1, section 8) as distinct from both states and foreign nations. Though the United States employed treaties—an international mechanism—to deal with tribes for nearly a century, in its 1831 decision in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia the Supreme Court characterized their relationship to the United States as resembling that of “a ward to his guardian.” Although the tribes are both preconstitutional and extraconstitutional (Wilkins and Lomawaima 2001), Congress has asserted plenary power over them without explicit constitutional authority. Federal Indian policy has swung between facilitating a measured separate corporate life for Indian groups (thus treating them as unique) and encouraging their assimilation into the mainstream (Biolsi 2001, 14)...

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Nesper, Larry. "Negotiating Jurisprudence in Tribal Court and the Emergence of a Tribal State: The Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe." Current Anthropology. Vol. 48, No. 5. October 2007. Paper. (http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/520132, accessed February 10, 2014)