A recent episode of the Wisconsin Law in Action podcast features Amanda White Eagle, Director of the Great Lakes Indigenous Law Center (GLILC) at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Host Kris Turner of the UW Law Library draws out a wide-ranging conversation about how the Center works with Tribal nations, students, and practitioners to support Indigenous law across Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region. The Law Library’s close partnership with the GLILC is evident throughout, from joint work on Tribal legal collections to collaboration on emerging issues like AI in Tribal courts.
White Eagle brought nearly two decades of experience working with the Ho-Chunk Nation — as attorney general, appellate judge, and in other leadership roles — when she returned to UW Law, her alma mater, to lead the Center. That kind of ground-level experience shapes how she thinks about what the Center should be doing. As she describes it, her first order of business was a serious listening tour: meeting with Tribal leadership, faculty, alumni, and Tribal college partners to hear what they actually needed before deciding on a direction.
Access to Tribal Legal Materials
One focus that emerged from that process was expanding access to Tribal legal materials — codes, constitutions, and court decisions. White Eagle explains why this matters both for Tribal sovereignty and for practitioners considering work in Tribal jurisdictions:
The access to codes, court decisions, constitutions, it directly reinforces Tribal sovereignty and ensures justice and legal fairness, and it promotes respect for the Tribal judiciary across jurisdictions. It affirms governmental authority. … it’s really great to have access to those codes and decisions and constitutions for the benefit of students and those individuals that want to advance Tribal concerns.
The Great Lakes Tribal Law Collection in the UW Law Repository — developed in partnership with the GLILC, the UW Law Library, Open Law Library, the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, and the National Indian Law Library — is one result of that work. Tribal codes are already available there, with more in progress.
Native November Law Symposium
This past fall, the Center launched its inaugural Native November Law Symposium, focused on environmental justice and sovereignty. White Eagle describes the goal:
Our excitement really centered around this idea of amplifying Indigenous voices and making sure that Indigenous voices have an ongoing and critical conversation surrounding particular issues.
The symposium ranged widely — from pipeline resistance and climate litigation to the legacy of federal boarding school policies. White Eagle was struck by how the threads connected:
We just started really taking what is essentially a complex tapestry and almost getting out a magnifying glass and looking at this thread by thread.
Practitioners from Midwest Environmental Advocates, Earthjustice, and Our Children’s Trust participated. White Eagle singled out a panel on youth climate litigation as particularly resonant, noting that she hadn’t known similar cases were active in Wisconsin until that conversation.
Coming Together of Peoples Conference and Mentoring Students
The Center also supports the Coming Together of Peoples Conference, the nation’s longest-running student-led Tribal law conference. Organized by UW Law’s Indigenous Law Students Association (ILSA) since 1986 and co-sponsored by the GLILC, the annual event brings together law students, practitioners, Tribal leaders, and community members to discuss pressing issues in American Indian and Tribal law. Over nearly four decades, its agenda has evolved to cover a broad mix of current and long-term legal topics affecting Tribes in Wisconsin and across the country.
White Eagle sees its staying power as rooted in student ownership:
When you’re a 2L or a 3L, you try to put together a conference panel and bring it to campus. … It requires some skills. You have to be able to call an attorney and be like, “I would like to hear you come and speak about this particular issue because I find it interesting.”
That process pushes students to see themselves as practitioners-in-training rather than just absorbing core subjects. The Center’s role is to support whatever direction students take it — financially, intellectually, and through connections to faculty and practitioners. The conference is free and open to the public, with growing national participation via Zoom.
Mentoring is another area White Eagle takes seriously. She pushes back on an assumption she hears often — that students who aren’t Tribal members shouldn’t pursue work with Tribes:
Tribes need allies. They need individuals who are interested in learning and oftentimes when Tribes are looking for assistance, they’re going to be grateful for the assistance that can be provided.
AI and What’s Ahead
White Eagle also addressed emerging challenges, including artificial intelligence. Tribal courts, she notes, are already grappling with litigants using AI in proceedings, and the Center has been looking at court rules to address this. I had the privilege of co-presenting with White Eagle on this topic at the National American Indian Court Judges Association annual meeting in Phoenix this past October, where we spoke with Tribal clerks and Tribal court administrators about generative AI in the law and in Tribal courts. The interest from that audience made clear just how pressing these questions already are in practice.
You can listen to the full episode at Wisconsin Law in Action. Also available on Soundcloud | Apple Podcast
Disclosure: This post was developed by the author with organizational and drafting assistance from Claude AI. All content was reviewed and refined for accuracy.