Echohawk receives prestigious Thurgood Marshall Award

DENVER—Called a “beacon of light for advancing the cause of civil rights” by the American Bar Association (ABA), John Echohawk (Pawnee), was awarded the 2023 ABA Thurgood Marshall Award for being a “Native American rights trail blazer” and for being the “Executive Director of the Native American Rights Fund (NARF).”

Thurgood Marshall served as an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991. He was renowned for his commitment to the cause of civil liberties. The ABA award in his honor is awarded to “individuals in the legal profession in recognition of similar long term contributions to the advancement of civil rights.”

Echohawk was one of the founding members of NARF and became the Executive Director in 1977. This from the NARF website: “Since 1970, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) has provided legal assistance to Native American tribes, organizations, and individuals nationwide who might otherwise have gone without adequate representation. NARF has successfully asserted and defended the most important rights of Indians and tribes in hundreds of major cases and has achieved significant results in such critical areas as tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, natural resource protection, voting rights, and Indian education.”

Juan Thomas, chair of the ABA Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice wrote: “For over 50 years, John fought, advocated, and litigated for full equity, inclusion and self-determination for our Native American brothers and sisters. You cannot call the roll of the 20^th Century civil rights icons akin to Thurgood Marshall, John Lewis, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sherrilyn I feel without saying the name John Echohawk. Despite the obstacles of systemic racism, efforts to eliminate tribal territories and the marginalization of the Indigenous people of America, our nation owes a significant amount of gratitude to John Echohawk for his work, his sacrifice, and his commitment to never giving up.”

Echohawk was born in 1945. He was graduated from the first class of the University of New Mexico’s Indian Law Training Program in 1967. He earned his law degree from the University of New Mexico in 1970 and was subsequently awarded a Reginald Heber Smith Fellowship from 1970-72. According to the Equal Justice Library, from 1963-1985 “approximately 2,000 graduating law school students received Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer Fellowships. Both the fellowships and those who received them were known as “Reggies.”

Currently Echohawk serves on the boards of the American Indian Resources Institute, the Association on American Indian Affairs, the Indigenous Language Institute, the national Resources Defense Council, and the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development.

During the 1970’s he was a lecturer in the Indian Studies Department at the University of California Berkely and the University of Colorado Department of Ethnic Studies.

Echohawk is the older brother of former Idaho State Attorney General Larry Echohawk, who also served as the Director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the Obama Administration. John Echohawk has been recognized as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the United States by the National Law Journal.

Although called an activist by some, Echohawk was actually a brilliant, legal trained advocate, and he helped sort out the complicated morass of Indian Law and apply it to practical and achievable solutions.

“I was just hoping I’d be able to help the tribes assert their rights and continue to be the people they are,” Echohawk said. “We’ve had laws that are favorable to us, for the most part. We just had to bring it to the courts.”

Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote: “It’s been Echohawk’s mission to help protect aboriginal lands, to defend the waters, hunting, fishing and gathering grounds and timber rights Indigenous peoples depend on for their survival; to promote human rights for Native Americans, by protecting religious freedom, for example, and improving access to quality health care, education, and housing; and to hold state, local and federal governments to account for abiding by, and enforcing, Indian law.”

When Echohawk earned his Juris Doctor in 1970, there were only a handful of Native lawyers across the country, and today there are over 3,000, and Echohawk played a big part in bringing that reality about. His forte was not as an academic or a litigator, but as a galvanizer of skilled people, a staunch advocate with a vision and comprehension of what it would take to substantively alter the legal landscape to address tribal interest.

(Contact James Giago Davies at skindiesel@msn.com)

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