Event Summary: Last year, the Supreme Court heard three cases about the sovereign rights of Native American tribes in the United States – one of which resulted in a major victory for the tribes. But honoring tribal choices has at times produced conflicting claims of individual rights. Join us in February for a conversation with Audrey Martinez, a plaintiff in one of the historic Supreme Court cases that confronted one such conflict: whether tribal membership rules can discriminate on the basis of gender.

Speaker Biographies: 

Julian Zelizer New York Times best-selling author Julian E. Zelizer has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN Political Analyst and a regular guest on NPR’s “Here and Now.” He is the award-winning author and editor of 25 books including, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society, the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress and Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, co-authored and Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party. The New York Times named the book as an Editor’s Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books in 2020. His most recent books are Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement and The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment, which he edited, and Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past which he co-edited with Kevin Kruse.

Josh Prager, a former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal, has written about historical secrets—revealing all from the hidden scheme that led to baseball’s most famous moment (Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World”) to the only-ever anonymous recipient of a Pulitzer Prize (a photographer he tracked down in Iran). His work, described by George Will as “exemplary journalistic sleuthing,” has shed new light on our cultural touchstones. So does his most recent book, The Family Roe(Link is external)(Link is external), illuminating unknown stories and people behind Roe v. Wade, and enabling the public, for the first time, to see the abortion debate in America in its full social and personal context. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Audrey Martinez is the named plaintiff in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez with her late mother, Julia. She grew up on a reservation in the Santa Clara Pueblo with her parents and eleven siblings. For 33 years, she worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she managed facilities containing plutonium, uranium and other nuclear materials. 

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui is the Princeton University Eric and Wendy Schmidt Professor of Indigenous Studies in Anthropology and the Effron Center for the Study of America. Among other things, her work centers on Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. She is the author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (2008) and co-edits a book series called “Critical Indigeneities.” 

Gloria Valencia-Weber Gloria Valencia-Weber is Professor Emerita at the University of New Mexico School of Law. Her research focuses on the evolution of U.S. Federal Indian Law, and she has written extensively about the case of Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez. A bilingual child of Mexican Indian heritage, she enrolled in Harvard Law School after a career that included working for the American Civil Liberties Union. Under Professor Valencia-Weber’s leadership, the Indian Law Certificate Program at the University of New Mexico has become one of the top Indian Law programs in the county.

Case Summary: 

In 1971, Julia Martinez, a full-blooded member of the Native American Santa Clara Pueblo tribe in New Mexico, sued the tribe in U.S. federal court. Martinez and her daughter, Audrey, sought to overturn a tribal ordinance that denied membership to the children of female members who married outside the tribe, while extending membership to the children of male members who married outside the tribe. The Martinezes argued that this ordinance violated the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 (ICRA) and the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, including its guarantee of equal protection.  The Supreme Court ruled 7-1 for the tribe. Writing for the majority, Justice Thurgood Marshall reasoned that, notwithstanding the Constitution’s guarantee of gender equality, membership rules are basic to tribes’ “social… self-definition.” Citing the history of the ICRA, he concluded that Congress wanted to preserve tribes as “distinct, independent political communities.