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 A recent issue of the Lewis & Clark
College Chronicle included
a story about Rob Roy Smith and his efforts
to assist Native Americans in their efforts to protect ancestral
rights.
The article, titled “Ancient Remains Trigger a Modern
Court Battle,” describes Smith’s work on the “Kennewick
Man” federal court case – helping to defend the
right of Native Americans to secure ownership of the remains
of a 9,200-year-old male discovered eight years ago along
the bank of the Columbia River, near Kennewick, Wash.
A 2000 graduate of the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark
in Chicago, Ill., Smith, according, to the article, began
practicing Indian law as one of five attorneys serving the
nine-member executive committee of the Nez Perce – a
3,300 member tribe based in Idaho; in 2002, he joined the
Seattle, Wash., law firm of Morriset, Schloser, Jozwiak & McGaw,
representing the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation
in its efforts to seek joint ownership of the remains.
The case, which was in its fifth year when Smith began
working on it, centers on a dispute between Native Americans
and scientists concerning the remains’ origins. In
September 2003, Smith argued the case before a three-judge
panel of the 9 th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in Portland,
Ore.; in February, however, the court ruled that the evidence
did not support the federal government’s determination
that the Kennewick Man was of Native American descent. In
April, the full court refused the tribes’ request for
a rehearing, giving the tribes a mid-July deadline to decide
whether or not to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Deciding
against an appeal, the tribes would have the option of negotiating
the scope of the anthropological studies and the fate of
the site of the finding before U.S. Magistrate John Jelderks,
who, in August 2002, had had awarded custody of the bones
to the scientists – stating that the federal government
had not proved tribal ancestry of the Kennewick Man.
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