Attorney and activist Robert Coulter spoke last Wednesday as a part of the University of Arizona’s Vine Deloria, Jr. Distinguished Scholar Series, sponsored by the American Indian Studies Department. Coulter has spent the past 35 years advocating for Native American rights and played a key role in the writing and passage of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
In an impassioned speech, Coulter spoke of some of the challenges that Indian nations continue to face. “We are still suffering under a legal framework that is discriminatory, unconstitutional, irrational, and inconsistent,” he said.
Coulter added that the laws that govern Indian nations today are “analogous to Jim Crow laws and the Separate but Equal doctrine” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
