: Michael P. Gross
: A School of Their Own A tenacious lawyer and his Navajo clients' fight for Indian self-determination, from remote New Mexico to the Supreme Court
: Green Fire Press
: 9781971030036
: A School of Their Own
: 1
: CHF 10.50
:
: Biographien, Autobiographien
: English
: 275
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
As an Ivy League student in the 1960s, Michael Gross's optimistic perception of America was shattered. When appalling social inequality became immediate for him - first in the Deep South and later in the Navajo Nation - it struck a nerve. In his first case as a cub lawyer at a War-on-Poverty legal services office in Window Rock, Arizona, Gross was assigned to file a lawsuit to reopen a high school in Ramah, New Mexico. He would spend the next fifty years helping tribes achieve self-governance, a dream they chased through centuries of betrayal by the U.S. government. This is the story of the son of Holocaust survivors who forged an unlikely alliance with his Native clients: to educate their children, preserve their culture and language, and adapt to political and economic realities on their own terms.

Michael Paul Gross was raised by hardworking parents and received exceptional educational opportunities. Deemed ineligible to serve in the military, he felt he owed a debt to his country. He never planned, however, on representing his first clients in a distant Navajo community throughout most of his fifty-year career. From advancing a model for Native-led schools, to providing pro bono legal counsel to the Navajo Code Talkers Association, to winning two major cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, Gross propelled enduring and long overdue change in federal Indian policy for all Native Americans.

INTRODUCTION


BY KEVIN WASHBURN

Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law and a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, Kevin Washburn served as Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of Interior in President Barack Obama’s Administration, from 2012 to 2016.

In 2011, the Supreme Court granted certiorari inSalazar v. Ramah Navajo Chapter. It was Michael Gross’s case, and he had been Ramah Navajo School Board’s attorney for more than 40 years. It was a very productive career in which he reached the U.S. Supreme Court not once, but twice for the same small client.

The case was about an important, but arcane area of the law governed by the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act of 1975, usually shortened to “Indian Self-Determination Act,” or “ISDA.” This law allows tribes to take over the functions provided by federal agencies, initially the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the Indian Health Service (IHS), but it has since been expanded to several other agencies, too.

In ISDA, Congress authorized tribes not only to take over federal functions but to receive the share of federal funding that the BIA or IHS would have spent to provide the same federal services. This meant that tribal employees would displace federal employees. The theory is that tribes can serve themselves better, and thus more successfully meet the treaty and trust responsibilities of the federal government to tribes, than federal agencies and employees can.

ISDA was slow to be implemented. One can imagine how federal employees felt about being displaced in this way. Many of them were lifelong public servants earnestly trying to help Native people. Even some of them who liked the idea in principle likely were not excited about being forced to give up their federal employment or move their families. Others viewed the law as a vote of no confidence in their work. Moreover, from a more cynical perspective, power is a zero-sum game, and this law very explicitly was designed to take power from federal officials and place that very same power in the hands of tribal officials.

Soon after the law began to be implemented, it became clear that funding for the direct services performed by the BIA and IHS was not sufficient. Tribes have needed to not only provide the direct services but manage the contracts, prepare budgets, hire and fire employees and provide benefits. The BIA and the IHS had offices and staffing to provide these services, but ISDA only required the federal government to contract with tribes for the direct costs of running the programs. To be successful, tribal governments also needed additional funding to cover all of the administrative costs that accompany this work. The costs are akin to the funding that research hospitals and universities receive when implementing federal grants, sometimes referred to as finance and administrative (“F&A”) or “indirect” costs. For some universities, these indirect costs are more than 50 percent of the amount of the direct costs, and they are key to ensuring that a university can realistically provide the services which they are contracted to provide.

Congress eventually amended ISDA to allow tribes to recover such costs, called “contract support costs” in the ISDA context, but such costs, though real, were not politically popular. It was easy for a federal policy-maker or legislator to understand the importance of providing funding for a tribal doctor or nurse or police officer, but not so much for appropriating millions of dollars for “administrative” costs. Contract support costs were, however, required by federal law.

Or were they? Though contract support costs were required explicitly by law, Congress also imposed an explicit limit each year on appropriations to cover the c