Michael Taylor, Class of '69
Michael Taylor ’69 is a judge on the Appellate Courts of Colville Confederated Tribes in Washington State and the Tulalip Tribes and San Manuel Band of Serrano Indians in California. Previously, he has served as a judge on the Appellate Courts of Quinault Nation (Washington State); Lower Sioux (Minnesota); and Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw (Oregon).
Judge Taylor began his legal career as a volunteer law clerk at the Yolo County Legal Aid Society and a law clerk at the California Division of Highways. In 1970, his work as an attorney at the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) Reservation Indian Project introduced him to tribal law, shaping the rest of his career. From 1970 to 2018, he represented Native American tribes from Washington State to New Mexico, winning cases that expanded Native rights.
He received the UC Davis School of Law Distinguished Alumni Award in 1993 and the Northwest Indian Bar Association Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.
Why should a current law student consider going into tribal law?
It's an area that's very rewarding because it protects people who have been tremendously impacted by the colonization of North America in a very destructive way. Some would call it a genocide. People who have the training should take on these issues and try to resolve them in favor of the people who have been, for so long, a group that has not been able to effectively protect themselves and their resources from the communities that surround them. That's my take on it after fifty some years of being in what’s called “Indian country.” That’s the term of art. In the federal statutes, these places are called “Indian country.” That's to some degree a pejorative term in the American culture, but for Native people, it's an actual statutory territory.
To my mind, tribal law is the adoption of cultural and and statutory codes by the tribal governments themselves. That's something that I've been part of for quite some time. To the culture outside, tribal law may mean federal and state statutory schemes that have attempted to regulate tribal communities, generally to the detriment of those communities. We're going through a period, for example, of reevaluating the tribal law that forced tribal children into the so-called residential schools where they were divested of their tribal ways of being — of their languages and culture. So in the general way of speaking about Native people, tribal law may mean what the outside government agencies did to try to restrict and mold tribal communities or destroy tribal communities. But to somebody who's worked inside the tribes for many decades, tribal law means something different. It means how the tribes have adopted various cultural and statutory schemes to enhance and protect themselves.
Do you have any interesting stories from your career?
I've had some adventures across the West in various Native communities. I was teaching a two-day course to a class of tribal court clerks for the Falmouth Institute in Las Vegas in 1988. The twenty-five or so students were all young to middle-aged Native women from all over the Western U.S. At a lunch break, one of the young students, accompanied by a couple of her classmates, came up to me and asked whether I had ever worked in New Mexico. I told her that I had spent four years working for Indian Pueblo Legal Services in that state. She asked, "Are you the lawyer who did the Vallo case at Acoma?" I asked her how she knew about the Vallo litigation. "Well," she said looking back at her companions, "all the ladies know the Vallo case because it gives us our place." It took me only a moment to consider what she was saying and guess at what she meant.
Mr. Tommy Vallo was a wealthy man. A middle-aged, enrolled member of the Acoma Pueblo, he was a respected leader of the all-male, tribal council. He was also known outside the Pueblo as a player in New Mexico Democratic Party politics. If one was seeking public office in Cibola County, or a statewide position, it was good to have Mr. Vallo's support.
Tommy filed for divorce in the state district court for Cibola (Seven Cities of Gold) County. As soon as Mrs. Vallo was served with divorce papers, she brought them over to the Indian Pueblo Legal Services (IPLS) office. After reviewing the state court divorce petition, we advised her that it appeared to us that, under federal law, the Cibola County Court lacked jurisdiction over a marriage between two Acoma Pueblo members who resided within the boundaries of the Pueblo. We advised her that she should immediately file a contesting action for separation under tribal law in the Acoma Tribal Court. Mrs. Vallo agreed to proceed under Acoma law and asked me to file her own legal action. There was, however, an immediate problem. I could not practice law in the Acoma Court. The Acoma code allowed practice only by representatives fluent in Keresan. IPLS contacted a Laguna private tribal court advocate, Ruth Paisano, who agreed to represent Mrs. Vallo. Thus, for the duration of the Vallo litigation, Mrs. Paisano was my Keres speaking co-counsel.
We drafted a contesting complaint against Tommy for the Acoma Court, petitioning for a separation of the marriage and an order setting out the terms of the separation. That petition would be written in English or Spanish, the Court would accept either, as Keresan has no written form. Our requested order contained provisions directing Tommy to remove himself from the home and to formally act to turn over to our client, Mrs. Vallo, every item of the Vallo property: from bank accounts to vehicles and farm equipment to cattle and sheep to Pueblo land assignments to clock radios, furniture, dinnerware, linens, etc.
This was my first direct experience with the effect of a matrilineal culture on Pueblo family law. As my co-counsel Mrs. Paisano informed me, at Acoma when a marriage was dissolved, all the property of the marriage was divested from the husband and formally placed into the ownership of the wife.
My next responsibility was to serve an attack on Tommy's petition for divorce that had been filed in Cibola County Court. Even as a matter of New Mexico state law, let alone federal Indian law, I wrote, the county courts of the state had no jurisdiction over such a relationship. Jurisdiction, I argued, was exclusively in the courts of the Tribe and under the laws of the Pueblo.
The judge quickly rendered his decision. Matters of family relations on the reservation were left to the Pueblo and its leaders. He dismissed the state court petition for divorce. Soon, in the Acoma Court, Mrs. Paisano successfully argued Mrs. Vallo's petition for separation from her husband and the retitling of the Vallo property.
So now I thought we were done. But I was wrong. Tommy was acquainted with the U.S. Attorney from their joint participation in state Democratic Party activities. Together they put together a federal court claim that the family law regarding the property of a marriage at Acoma violated provisions of the federal Indian Civil Rights Act (ICRA). I filed a motion in the federal court to dismiss the Vallo complaint, arguing that the ICRA did not provide a basis for attacking Acoma family law. At the preliminary hearing on this federal claim, an attorney for the Pueblo also appeared with me to defend Acoma jurisdiction. I represented Mrs. Vallo.
The preliminary hearing on the Vallo matter in the federal court was really over before it started. Judge Juan Guerrero Burciaga opened the proceedings by announcing that he had just attended a training session put on by the Federal Courts Training Center in D.C. for federal judges who had significant numbers of Indian lands within their Districts. He said he had reviewed the complaint, that he could not find a basis for ICRA jurisdiction in it, and he would recommend that the U.S. Attorney withdraw it. He would listen to arguments by counsel, but he wanted everyone to know that the burden was on the U.S. Attorney to convince him that he was wrong. Discretion, as they say, being the better part of valor, the U.S. Attorney asked for a day or two to consider his options. The federal claim was withdrawn.
Mr. and Mrs. Vallo had now been to state, tribal, and federal court on their dissolution of marriage dispute. What was left was for the Acoma Court to execute on its order to place all the Vallo family possessions into the sole ownership of Mrs. Vallo. Then Tommy, in a final attempt to avoid this result, filed a notice of appeal of the Acoma Court decision. So, we had one further round to go in this contest. Appeal in the Acoma system was worrisome because the appellate court was the Acoma Tribal Council. The Council is a twelve member, all male, body of which Tommy had long been a member.
On the day the appeal hearing was scheduled, I arrived at the low, weathered stone, Pueblo council building an hour or more after the hearing was scheduled to begin. I knew I would not be allowed into the chamber during the hearing and that Mrs. Paisano and Mrs. Vallo would attend and defend the Acoma trial court decision. I sat on a bench outside the chamber doors, alone except for secretaries and Pueblo employees passing by in the corridor. After an hour or so into the afternoon, a number of vehicles began to arrive and park in front of the building. Through the front doors I could see that each sedan or pickup truck was driven by a woman and held one or two or even three passengers — all women. These Pueblo ladies of various ages and forms of dress, from traditional to everyday, entered the building and congregated where I was sitting.
Soon that congregation consisted of two or three dozen women standing and sitting on the benches around the chamber door — all speaking in normal tones to each other in Keres. They ignored me. These newcomers did not appear agitated but seemed to have a group presence and purpose. No one went into, or tried to go into, the tribal council chamber. A secretary (female) came into the corridor and spoke to the group for a few minutes, then turned and went back into the council clerk's office.
No one moved and things got quiet. Then, without ceremony, the chamber doors swung open and Tommy stepped out into the corridor. Moving quickly through the female assembly without acknowledging anyone, he strode down the steps, climbed into a pickup that was waiting for him, and drove away. Next Mrs. Vallo and Ruth Paisano came out through the doors. Mrs. Vallo appeared teary and upset. She was quickly surrounded by the women in the corridor. My co-counsel joined me. "Let's go," she said. "They told Tommy that he knew the law."
My guess as to what my Las Vegas court clerk student was talking about when she asked me her question was that this little struggle, with all the powerful Anglo institutions that were pressed into service to overcome tribal culture and tradition, had reverberated around Pueblo country. Even though the events had taken place sometime in the past and at a distinctly different community than her own, the Vallo litigation had preserved something very important to Pueblo people.
Ruth Paisano told me that the decision of the Council to deny Tommy's petition to make an exception for him had been unanimous. I asked her about the assembly of Acoma women that showed up at the Council building near the end of the appeal hearing. She didn't tell me anything, but she laughed and said something like, "Aren't you lawyers always bragging about trial tactics?"
Another of my adventures involved Joe Biden. In the early 1930s, a controversial decision was made to dam the Columbia River at the Grand Coulee to provide flood control, agricultural irrigation and electric power to the interior Pacific Northwest. When the coffer dams went up and the wild running river was eventually turned into Lake Roosevelt by the final closure of the great concrete and steel structure, a way of life for the Native people living along the water was shattered. The life-giving tribal fishery at Kettle Falls (est. 1,000,000+, yearly catch) was destroyed. Villages, homes, cemeteries, schools, farms, ranches, churches, ceremonial sites, hunting grounds, and timber allotments, were all permanently flooded and destroyed. Ten percent of the Colville Reservation, including the homes of the twelve distinct bands of peoples who had been pushed onto these lands by the United States, was lost to the dam and its reservoir. The homes of much of the Chief Joseph Band of the Nez Perce, who had been imprisoned on the Colville because they refused to convert to the Christian religion, were taken.
When the massive flood gates were closed, the famous Roosevelt era Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes traveled to the Grand Coulee on the Reservation and personally met with the leaders of the twelve bands of the Colville Tribes. On the record, he promised that the bands would be completely compensated for their huge losses. Like all of the promises made by the United States to the indigenous owners of the American lands, nothing was ever done to carry out that promise.
In the 1950s, Congress established the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) whose purpose was to use the judicial process to compensate Native people for damages and loss of property that had taken place because of actions of the United States, by paying the various tribes money (based on what the property was worth at the time of its loss — which meant that compensation numbers were kept very low). The Colville people were contacted by two D.C. claims lawyers and convinced to file a claim. It was numbered 181D by the Claims Commission and research, legal and factual, began.
Progress of the prosecution of 181D was very slow, and by the time the claim was thought to be ready for presentation in trial, the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) had been dissolved. The very few remaining unresolved Indian claims cases were removed to the U.S. Court of Claims. The Court of Claims is a special federal forum where plaintiffs who assert that the United States has damaged them and owes them money must bring their complaints. This court has the reputation of being the most tight-fisted of any federal court. The lawyer who argued for the Tribe had virtually no trial experience. The judge immediately agreed with the defense presented by lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department and completely dismissed 181D.
This was the scene when, in 1982, my wife Doris and I moved from Santa Fe to Omak, Washington, to begin work on the Colville Reservation. The first day I came to work at Nespelem on January 2, 1982, I learned about this defeat. It was a huge blow to the Colville people and leadership. It was not really the money that might have been available from the Court of Claims — which was thought to be modest — it was the ugly failure of the deeply felt promise made so many decades before.
Time for appeal of the loss in the Claims Court was running out, and I had to do something. After getting admitted to the Court of Claims, I had to get the case away from the original lawyers and over to me or someone who was a competent appellate lawyer.
In the years prior to Colville, I had become acquainted with a lawyer in the Office of the Solicitor General in the U.S. Justice Department. The Solicitor General (the "SG" in lawtalk) is a high faluten office of the DOJ that represents the U.S. before the Supreme Court. At the time this 181D business came up, he had just left the SG and gone into private practice. When I got the case, I retained this former SG, by definition an appellate practitioner, to take the appeal for minimal pay, as he was just starting out away from the government. So, we did the appeal of the Court of Claims defeat and, by golly, between him and me, we convinced the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in D.C. to reverse the Court of Claims!
That victory was enough to put us back in court, but the reversal by the Federal Circuit just put us back before that skinflint Court of Claims judge that had thrown out the Colville claim. The future did not look good.
What does this all have to do with Joe Biden — the future President of this here U.S.? I am getting to that. Settlement!! That's what we thought. Was there some way to settle this claim so we did not have to go to trial in the Court of Claims? Many Indian Claims cases, probably most, were settled between the claimant tribes and the U.S. Why not this one? Settlement, however, is often political. Enter Tom Foley (D) Spokane — or more properly — Heather Foley.
At this time Tom Foley, long a political player in Washington State, was the powerful speaker of the U.S. House. We knew that Tom was not only our congressperson — the Tribes and the Coulee Dam were in his district — but that his positions were generally subject to a higher authority, e.g., Heather Foley. By this time in Tom's career, all the major decisions in the Speaker's office were very much controlled by his wife. The Colvilles over the years had been able to maintain a close relationship with Heather.
Thus, the tribal leadership requested a meeting with Speaker Tom. Heather came along and we presented to them our request for a political solution to the Coulee Dam claim. In short order we had an appointment to meet in D.C. with the U.S. Senate Energy Committee. That committee had jurisdiction over many things, but important to us was federal energy operations — most relevant for our purposes, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), which was the federal agency that operated Coulee Dam and Chief Joseph Dam a few miles further downriver on the Reservation.
We prepped like crazy, creating a small team of tribal leaders and, especially, tribal members who had been on the eastside of the Rez when the Columbia/Lake Roosevelt waters came up and experienced the flooding of their homes, villages, and lands. We were experienced D.C. lobbyers, and from that experience we expected our hearing would be with Senate committee staffers only, who would be polite, take notes, and assure us that they would surely convey our concerns to their member or senator — and, in time, we would hear back.
We met in a small, windowless, kind of crowded room in the Senate Office Building. The meeting was not on time, so we were more than a bit nervous by the time the door opened announcing the Senate delegation. A single staffer came in and introduced us to Senator Joe Biden, the Committee Chair, and his colleague, Senator Bill Bradley, former Knicks star and future, unsuccessful, presidential candidate. We shook hands all around and put on our case.
Senators Joe and Bill seemed surprisingly interested in learning about Colville and the dam. They listened to our witnesses, rarely wanted to hear from me (which was good), and asked a lot of questions. Finally, they asked what the Colvilles wanted.
We had to be very careful about answering the question about what the Tribes were after in a settlement. The Indian Claims Commission Act allowed only a single remedy — money payment limited to the value of the acres of land or right lost by the tribe at the value of these acres or rights on the date they were lost. This meant that even successful money judgments obtained under the ICC were depressingly small.
We did explain to our senatorial hosts the remedial limitations of the ICC, but in a troubled and disapproving way. We asked to put off the answer to the question of remedies until we could think about a remedy and make some calculations. We also asked the Senators to determine for us whether a settlement of the claim was possible by legislation outside of the ICC federal statutes under which the claim was originally filed. Eventually, after several meetings in D.C., which the two Senators always attended in person, we began to outline the scope of a legislative settlement.
Grand Coulee Dam has variable but substantial income every year from selling the electric power it produces by spilling water through turbines. Much of that income is used to keep the dam in fully operational condition. But there is always surplus revenue. We and the Senators, who seemed to be always pushing on our side, started to focus on that regular source of income derived from the electric power generated. Soon we were joined by accountants and engineers who worked to hammer out a number that represented a percentage of the electric power produced by the turbines and the value of that percentage. And Bingo! — there it was — staffers drafted a bill, it was sent to Speaker Tom, Heather liked it. The Tribes voluntarily dismissed claim 181D. The Claims judge approved the dismissal.
Today, every year the Colville Tribes and all tribal members get checks from payments made to the Tribes by BPA. This settlement now includes payments from BPA to the Tribes from revenues derived from electricity produced at Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph Dam, a smaller facility downriver from Grand Coulee but also on the Reservation. Tribal Members call the checks the "Damn Money.” Over a time not too far in the future, these perpetual payments, according to tribal accountants, will amount to billions of dollars.
Why did you choose to attend King Hall?
As a UCD undergraduate I had easy access to Dean Barrett who had come up to Davis from his constitutional law professorship at Boalt Hall to begin the process of starting the new law school. During my application process to several schools, I had the opportunity to meet with Dean Barrett two times. His depth of knowledge and enthusiasum for the new school made me sign up when the offer of admission came in.
What is your favorite King Hall memory?
While still a UCD law student, I was called as a state’s witness in a Yolo County drug dealing prosecution trial. Professor Frank Baldwin was a volunteer defense counsel in that trial. A number of my classmates showed up at the trial to see us face off, and they did it in a noisy way, as one side made a point against the other. To the extent that the judge had to gavel them to silence.
Another favorite memory is my graduation. As a young California Highway Patrol sergeant, my father was in charge of the small detail that protected and drove vehicles for then Governor Earl Warren. When I graduated, my father and my family, of course, came to the graduation. Earl Warren was our graduation speaker in 1969. He had just retired as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. My father was proud to see his old friend and present his son as a member of the graduating class.
How have you stayed involved with King Hall?
In my early days as a lawyer and supervisor of other lawyers, I made several recruiting trips to King Hall to try to convince students who were about to graduate to consider applying to places where I was working. I did have some success. In later decades, at our 25th anniversary, I received a King Hall award for being the most influential of our law school class. I was the first to receive that award.
Of what are you proudest?
I was involved in a lawsuit in the early ’70s about enforcement of a number of Indian treaties dealing with fishing rights in the Northwest. I was trial and appellate council for The Quinault Indian Nation in United States v Washington. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Boldt Decision was a dramatic victory that changed how Indian tribal governments were dealt with under federal law. It had a huge range of impacts across Indian country and reverberated across North America, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. I was only thirty at the time. For a young lawyer to be involved with that kind of a trial and that kind of a decision — and the appellate responses to that case in the Ninth Circuit and in the U.S. Supreme Court — was quite satisfying. That decision has had some pretty substantial impacts across the Northwest — western Washington and Oregon — in terms of various aspects of fishing and water and environment.
The documentary Fish War (fishwarmovie.com), about these cases, has been shown across the Northwest. It was just shown in Eastern Washington at a film festival. This spring, it was shown at the Seattle International Film Festival. It tells part of the story of how this battle between Washington State and the non-Indian fishing interests and the tribal treaty fishers took place. It came early on in my practice of law. But it affected me and my clients and colleagues. It still today is having those kinds of impacts. At the end of the film, for example, it talks about a struggle in the Northwest Pacific region of Washington State over a port that was proposed to be established up here for the transport of very large amounts of coal. The tribes used that case to defeat the establishment of that port. They used the environmental protections that the case provided to tribal waterborne interests. So that's something that I had a good deal to do with in the early days, and it's still going to the heart of many issues arising here in the Northwest.
Do you have any advice for current law students?
I think the truthful answer is no, I don't. UC Davis Law gave me the opportunity to involve myself in major issues involving tribal people and to be successful in those efforts. Taking on major issues for the people of North America is important for people who are trained at UC Davis. I was lucky. I got into working with Native communities right out of law school. And I stuck with it for fifty some years. I think it was satisfying for me and and my family, and I think it was useful to the communities around us. So I think law students today need to look for those kinds of opportunities and to pursue them. I've been able to live a very satisfying legal life. And Davis gave me that opportunity.