Trudell named to National Native American Hall of Fame

At 82 years old, Richard “Dick” Trudell, maintains the busy schedule of a man 40 years younger. Driving to a meeting with a Northern California tribe, he conducts a car phone interview, arrives at his destination, and finishes the interview with minutes to spare before his 11:30 a.m. meeting.

During the entire 37-minute interview he is asked only two questions, because he anticipates all the other questions and transitions seamlessly from one phase to the next. A major player in Indian Law and legislation for fifty years, Trudell is no stranger to any process connected to that legacy, including press interviews.

In October he will be officially inducted into the National Native American Hall of Fame for his contributions to Indian Country but when asked about this honor, he gives detailed information about the other five inductees: politician Joe DeLaCruz, actor Will Sampson, writer Leslie Marmon Silko, writer Ladana Means War Jack, and journalist Mark Trahant. He is a man who has worn many hats, accomplished many goals, rubbed elbows with famous and powerful people, but he devotes the minimal number of words detailing any of that. Trudell excels as a communicator, using simple words to convey often complicated and important subjects, and he humbly does not consider himself one of those subjects.

A member of the Santee Sioux Tribe of Nebraska, Trudell entered the university of South Dakota in the fall of 1958.

“I was on the basketball team and baseball team at USD,” he said, “before I dropped out of school because I wasn’t doing well as a student. I left there, went into the service, got my undergraduate degree in accounting from San Jose State. I was recruited by three of the major accounting firms and offered a position, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go into that profession.”

That’s when Trudell was accepted at the Law School program at the University of New Mexico started by Dr. Jim Wilson.

“Jim was a very strong proponent of higher education,” Trudell said. “really pushed the idea of the law scholarship program that enabled myself and a number of other people to see if you had what it took to get through law school.”

That summer program helped Trudell put his education in focus. “When I first went to USD I was like a lost ball in the weeds, no role model, no counseling, just trying to make a go of it because of sports, that’s why I didn’t do very well. At San Jose State I was on the dean’s list because I did what I had to do. It was like a job. Having some of the military discipline and everything, I did exceptionally well. The point about that is undergraduate school is not that hard, when one reflects on it, especially if you end up going to a medical school, or a law school, it’s a whole different ball game.”

After being graduated from San Jose State, Trudell received a law degree from Catholic American University in Washington, DC. He immediately headed up the American Indian lawyer Training Program, seeing a need for Native attorneys.

“There were maybe about ten Indian attorneys in the country,” Trudell said. “Tribes didn’t have any money, most of the tribes were represented by law firms in Washington. DC, general counsel contracts. We created a number of people oriented programs to deal with that to try to get Indian attorneys to go home and work for the tribe at the reservation level. Intern program for Indian law students to expose them to the realities of working for a tribe, and then we did a tribal court advocacy training program where we had hundreds of people go through that program. That was started because of a survey we did of a hundred tribes, looking at their court systems, what were their needs, at the time the BIA was only spending a million dollars on a national basis to help tribes develop their judicial systems. The Indian Law Report we started in 1974, we stopped because everything started to move to the electronic format. We never missed a monthly supplement for 43 years.”

Mario Gonzalez, Oglala attorney was one of those young lawyers, Trudell helped get a start through his training program funded by a grant from the Lilly Foundation.

“We had to apply, it was competitive,” Gonzalez said, and so one of the things that they did is they set up a program in Los Angeles, we went there and got training on how to manage a law office, in the summer of 1975. Based on that, I was able to set up a law office. There was enough money there to buy us a law library, buy us office equipment, and also $20 an hour, that was quite a bit of money then, to represent native people, kinda like a legal aide. We could take outside cases to make money, but this was kind of a sure thing for a while there.”

When Carter was elected president, Trudell began to get into the political end of advocacy: “Hillary Clinton and I were both appointed by President Carter to serve on the legal services corporation board, which oversaw all legal aid programs in the country, including US territories. We met every month for 44 months out of the 48 months we were on the board. When she became the First Lady, I had done a briefing session for the Clinton transition team, because of my relationship with Hillary, I got her to come to our Indian healthcare Summit, and after that they asked me to chair the search committee for the director of IHS.”

The work of which Trudell is most proud and most noted for was with Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.

“In the late 80s I started to work with Senator Inouye,” Trudell said, “The Senator and I wanted to convene a meeting of tribal leaders so he could have a better feel for the needs, issues and priorities of the tribes. I organized a meeting in California for about 40 tribal leaders and then we did about 25 meetings across the country, a few in the US Senate, a couple were on C-SPAN, over a fifteen year period, to get the Senator more informed, take some cues from Indian Country which was a beautiful experience. Senator Inouye did more for Indians than anyone in history, some people disagree, because he didn’t do everything, but he did more than anybody.”

Future generations will probably best remember Trudell for his efforts to bring tribal judicial systems up to a professional standard, whether it was training attorneys, educating lay people, restricting the court system. The best Native attorneys of a generation got their start because of Trudell, and subsequently had a huge impact on policy, legislation, and history.

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

 

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