Description

Established in 1970, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) is the nation’s oldest and largest nonprofit law firm dedicated to protecting and advancing the rights of Native American people and peoples. NARF provides legal assistance to Indian tribes, organizations, and individuals nationwide, working in the areas of tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, natural resource protection, and Indian education. Conceived in dialogue with a related project to advance the implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the United States (UNDRIP)—to be supported by a grant being recommended to the board by the Initiative on Native American Intellectual Leadership— NARF’s proposed project to advance sacred places protection focuses on the creative, strategic, and collaborative rethinking of fundamental language and practices—including, centrally, complex and contested discourses of “religious freedom.”
The goal of the project is to strengthen protections for Native Peoples’ sacred places in the United States, by putting Indigenous knowledge bearers, Native intellectual leaders, and cultural rights specialists in positions to be publicly heard and legally recognized, and to engage with scholars and professionals from various fields to achieve a common language, understanding, and approach to bolstering Native assertions, exercises, and defenses of sacred lands, waters, and place-based ceremonies.
At the project’s heart are convenings involving Indigenous knowledge bearers and cultural rights specialists around the theme of sacred places, gatherings which will give shape to project work as it engages the rethinking of law and policy. With traditional knowledge in the foreground, the project aims to affirm that sacred place protection must be situated with the consent of specific Native Nations whose places are or could be at risk, since—in the words of NARF’s proposal—”only they can determine what is required to safeguard their places.” This commitment will shape the project’s approach to model policy provisions, close to sacred ground, and will also involve equipping Native Nations with model consent agreements that affirm inherent sovereignty, treaty rights, and the specific religious freedom needs.
In addition to the convening of Native and non-Native thought leaders, project outcomes will include Native-written papers and materials on policy language, best practices, and model consent agreements; professional development activities and programs; new scholarship and public-facing outreach materials; and a website on sacred places protection.