Conversations with Remarkable Native Americans

14. Robert Tim Coulter, lawyer, founder and director of the Indian Law Resource Center

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Robert Tim Coulter, lawyer, founder and director of the Indian Law Resource Center Robert Tim Coulter (Potawatomi) is an attorney and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. He has been instrumental in the development of international law in the field of Indian rights. He was among the first Native lawyers who came to Geneva, Switzerland in the 1970s, to ask for the recognition of Indian Nations and the human rights of Indigenous peoples by the United Nations. A number of Indigenous delegations were then following in the footsteps of Deskaheh, the first American Indian who, fifty years earlier, in 1923, came to the League of Nations with his Red Man’s Appeal for Justice, in which he asked for the recognition of Iroquois sovereignty on the international scene. Coulter is an idealist-pragmatist. As a lawyer, he has been concerned with standard -setting and seeking remedies in concrete cases of violations of human rights rather than sheer rhetoric. While he expressed an idealist conviction in the goodwill and visibility of international forums in the field of Indian rights, he also founded, in 1978, in his early thirties, the Indian Law Resource Center, a nonprofit law firm specializing in the concrete defense of Indian rights at the national and international levels. As an attorney who practices in the fields of Indian law and international human rights, Coulter belongs to the generation of Indian lawyers who, born just after the war, graduated from the best universities in the 1960s (Williams College, 1966; Columbia Law School, 1969) and chose a career in nonprofit organizations in order to reform existing legal doctrines perceived as unfair, lobby for reform, and break new ground in the assertion of Indian rights. The Indian Law Resource Center has been active for more than thirty years throughout the Americas. It has never accepted government money and it draws its 85 86 CONVERSATIONS WITH REMARKABLE NATIVE AMERICANS financial support mostly from foundations, as well as individuals and Indian nations themselves. It has always contested the fact that the United States can put Indian nations and tribes out of existence at any time by terminating their rights. While it has become a respected and well-established law firm, it has always preserved its cutting edge. As executive director, Robert Tim Coulter has remained faithful to his convictions and to a certain way of life, a personal balance in tune with his personal values. Trained as a musician, he has played the bass professionally in the Oklahoma City Symphony and, since then, music has always remained an important part of his life: he plays cello, banjo, and guitar. His law firm, founded in Washington, D.C. because of the proximity to Capitol Hill and government agencies, now has its main office in Helena, Montana, where Coulter chooses to live in a more natural environment near the vast wilderness areas of the Rocky Mountains.1 Joëlle Rostkowski: Since 1978, under your leadership, the Indian Law Resource Center has provided legal advice to Indigenous nations throughout the Americas, in the field of human rights, land claims, and environmental protection. Do you remember why and when you decided to become a lawyer? Was it at Columbia University? Did you always want to defend Native American rights? Robert Tim Coulter in front of Memorial Sphere, Ariana Park, United Nations, Geneva. (Courtesy of the Indian Law Resource Center) ROBERT TIM COULTER 87 Robert Tim Coulter: I made the decision just before I graduated from Williams College in 1966. At the time, I did not think of doing legal work for Indian nations, but I felt that a law degree would be useful in a life of political and social activism generally. In law school I learned about and participated in the movement for civil rights, especially equal rights, voting rights, and social equality for African Americans and all races. I also became a trained counselor in regard to the military draft and later in military law. This was the time of the Vietnam War, and I opposed it both as a lawyer and as a folksinger in a coffeehouse just outside Fort Dix, New Jersey. By 1972 I had begun to work in the field of prisoners’ rights and prison conditions, but I realized that the skills I had learned were very much needed in the field of Indian law. I soon began to work in that...