"As an academic, Robert Anderson advocated giving sharper "teeth" to policies requiring outreach to Native Americans and called "intriguing" a move to enhance the clout of the Interior Department's top American Indian affairs official.
Now, as the Biden administration's newly named nominee to serve as Interior solicitor, the law school professor could be much closer to putting his tribe-empowering ideas into practice.
"It is apparent that Indian tribes in the United States need more than rights to consultation when federal projects or federal-permitted projects take place in off-reservation areas that may nonetheless affect indigenous rights to land and water," Anderson wrote in 2018.
At the least, Anderson added, "any consultation power must have teeth."
The article in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review was one of a number that Anderson, an enrolled member of the Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, penned as the Oneida Indian Nation visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School."
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