Federal Indian Law · Indigenous Heritage
"Tribal sovereignty is only as strong as the systems built to protect it. We build those systems."
If your Tribal Nation is confronting trespass, cultural resource damage, unauthorized encroachment, failures of repatriation compliance, lease violations, energy development questions, fee-to-trust challenges, or broader threats to Tribal jurisdiction, we are prepared to assist. We have worked with Tribes of all sizes, and we understand the value of efficient, sovereignty-centered solutions.
We partner with Tribal governments, Tribal attorneys, THPOs, land departments, and Tribal leadership to develop enforceable Tribal laws, strengthen regulatory authority, and pursue strategic enforcement where necessary. Our work is grounded in respect for inherent sovereignty and focused on ensuring that Tribal Nations exercise clear and effective jurisdiction over their lands and cultural heritage.
How We Work
We do not treat sovereignty as a legal theory. We treat it as an operating system. Every code we draft, every enforcement mechanism we build, and every negotiation we conduct is designed to ensure that Tribal authority is not aspirational but exercised.
Tribal Nations are facing real pressure from the federal government right now. The federal government is cutting budgets, eliminating the staff who handle repatriation, and rolling back long-standing commitments to consult with Tribal Nations. At the same time, Tribal Nations continue to face trespass, unauthorized use of their land, damage to cultural and natural resources, and institutions that resist returning ancestors and cultural items. We help Tribal governments meet these challenges, from governance and land protection through enforcement, and we built this practice to meet them.
We handle discrete matters for Tribal Nations that already have in-house counsel or Tribal attorneys. We also serve as outside general counsel for Nations that need a full-service partner. Whatever the engagement, we bring the same depth of commitment to every matter.
What Sets Us Apart
Multidisciplinary Team
We bring attorneys, archaeologists, historians, and cultural resource specialists to the same table. That combination is not incidental to our work. It is the work.
When trespassers damage cultural resources, when developers threaten sacred sites, when institutions resist repatriation, the legal case is only as strong as the cultural record behind it. We build both.
Our archaeologists and cultural resource specialists help document what was taken, damaged, or disturbed. Our historians reconstruct the record that courts and agencies need to see. Our attorneys translate that evidence into claims, codes, and arguments that hold up. The result is a practice that can take a matter from cultural documentation through courtroom enforcement without losing anything in translation
Enforcement and Recovery
Harm to Tribal land and resources is not abstract. It has a dollar value, a restoration cost, and, under federal law, a multiplier. We draft the codes and build the systems that put Tribal Nations in a position to act on that.
We help Tribal Nations adopt the regulatory frameworks that activate jurisdiction, draft trespass codes that define protected resources and fix enforceable penalties, and build the valuation records that make damages provable in court. When a violation occurs, we move from demand through judgment and, where necessary, pursue enforcement of that judgment against a trespasser’s assets in other jurisdictions. We seek treble damages, restoration of damaged land and resources, and recovery of enforcement costs, and we do not treat paper victories as outcomes.
Federal Indian Law Depth
Our attorneys come to this work from inside the federal system.
Members of the practice have served at the U.S. Department of the Interior, including the Office of the Solicitor and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, at the U.S. Department of Justice, including a United States Attorney’s Office and the Tribal Resources Section, and at the Interior Board of Indian Appeals. We have litigated in federal, state, and tribal courts, including before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit, and the Fourth Circuit. We teach and publish on federal Indian law and tribal self-determination.
That background shapes how we read a statute, how we anticipate a federal agency’s position, and how we advise Tribal Nations on the full range of options available to them. We bring that depth to every engagement, from a discrete code drafting project to long-term representation across a full range of matters.
Integrated approach
Strong enforcement begins with clear authority, and clear authority requires attention to both Tribal law and federal Indian law at the same time.
Our approach integrates both. We help Tribal Nations put the internal framework in place, whether that is a trespass code, a right-of-way ordinance, or a cultural resource protection policy, and we ensure that framework rests on the jurisdictional foundation it needs to hold up when challenged. Tribal courts, federal courts, and state courts all ask the same threshold question: does the Tribal Nation have the authority to act here? We build the answer into the documents we draft and the strategies we develop. By clarifying authority internally and asserting it externally, Tribal Nations strengthen both their immediate enforcement posture and their long-term sovereign control over land, resources, and cultural heritage.
Our Expertise
Timber cut without permission. Cattle grazing without a lease. An expired pipeline easement still in use. Smoke, fire, or runoff that crosses onto Tribal land from somewhere else. Damage to a gathering area or sacred site. These are all trespass, and a Tribal Nation does not have to absorb the loss. It can hold those responsible accountable in its own court, on its own terms, and pursue a judgment it can enforce.
Two federal laws stand behind that authority: the National Indian Forest Resources Management Act (NIFRMA, 25 U.S.C. § 3106) and the American Indian Agricultural Resource Management Act (AIARMA, 25 U.S.C. § 3713). Under them, a Tribal Nation decides what counts as a protected resource and what it is worth, including cultural and traditional resources, and may pursue up to three times the value taken, plus restoration and enforcement costs. And because each law entitles that Tribal court judgment to the same recognition in state and federal courts as a judgment of a federal court, the Tribal Nation can seek to enforce that judgment against the trespasser’s assets in other jurisdictions, rather than leave the matter as a paper victory a distant court can decline to honor.
We assist Tribal Nations in:
A pipeline easement expired four years ago, and the operator still moves product across Tribal land every day. A utility energizes a power line under a grant no one at the Tribal Nation remembers approving. A fiber optic cable runs through a stretch of restricted land, and the company that buried it has merged twice since anyone last paid the Tribal Nation a dollar. Each of these is a stranger using Tribal land on terms the Tribal Nation never set, and each one represents leverage a Tribal Nation can reclaim.
Federal law puts the Tribal Nation at the center of these decisions. 25 U.S.C. § 324 bars any right-of-way across tribal land without the consent of the Tribal Nation, and the 2015 right-of-way regulations at 25 C.F.R. Part 169 build on that consent in the Tribal Nation’s favor. The Tribal Nation sets the compensation, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs defers to the amount the Tribal Nation accepts as in its best interest rather than imposing a federal valuation. When a grantee stays on the land after a grant expires or terminates, the regulations let the BIA treat that holdover as trespass and pursue eviction and other remedies. Every renewal becomes an opening to renegotiate from current terms rather than the terms of a generation ago.
When a right-of-way crosses Indian agricultural land, a second tool reinforces that authority. The American Indian Agricultural Resource Management Act treats unauthorized use of Indian agricultural land as trespass (25 U.S.C. § 3713). A Tribal Nation that adopts the governing regulations gains concurrent jurisdiction to enforce that trespass in its own Tribal court, and federal agencies defer to the Tribal Nation’s prosecution at its request. The Tribal Nation may pursue the value of what the trespasser took, a penalty of twice that value, and its costs of enforcement, including survey, appraisal, and attorney fees. And because the Act gives that Tribal court judgment full faith and credit in federal and state courts, an expired easement or a holdover line crossing agricultural land becomes an enforceable claim rather than a standoff.
We assist Tribal Nations in:
When a Tribal Nation controls who crosses its land and on what terms, the right-of-way stops being a federal formality and becomes an exercise of the Tribal Nation’s own jurisdiction.
A solar developer wants a twenty-five year lease on Tribal land. A grocery anchor wants to build on the reservation. A Tribal Nation wants to lease homesites to its own citizens. Under the default federal system, each of those leases waits in line for the Bureau of Indian Affairs to approve it, one at a time, on the federal government’s schedule. A Tribal Nation that adopts its own leasing law under the HEARTH Act removes that bottleneck and approves the leases itself.
The Helping Expedite and Advance Responsible Tribal Home Ownership Act, codified at 25 U.S.C. § 415(h), lets a Tribal Nation lease its own restricted land without separate BIA approval of each lease, once the Secretary of the Interior approves the Tribal Nation’s leasing regulations a single time. Those regulations live alongside the federal leasing rules at 25 C.F.R. Part 162, Subpart I, and they must stay consistent with the federal framework and include an environmental review process. The authority reaches residential, business, agricultural, and renewable energy leases. Wind and solar leasing is a fast growing area of Tribal interest, and the Department applies a heightened review to the wind and solar provisions of a Tribal leasing law before approval. Once approval issues, the BIA steps back, and the Tribal Nation’s own regulatory oversight governs development on the land.
We assist Tribal Nations in:
A Tribal Nation buys back a parcel of its ancestral homeland. The deed is clean and the purchase is complete, yet the land sits under state and county jurisdiction, taxed and regulated like any other private property, until the Tribal Nation does the legal work to change that status. Reacquiring land is the first step. Governing it as Tribal land is the work that makes Land Back hold.
The principal federal route runs through the Indian Reorganization Act. 25 U.S.C. § 5108 authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to take land into trust for a Tribal Nation, and the 2023 regulations at 25 C.F.R. Part 151 set the criteria and streamline the path. One obstacle still shapes this work. In Carcieri v. Salazar, 555 U.S. 379 (2009), the Supreme Court read the Act to reach only Tribal Nations that were under federal jurisdiction in 1934, so a trust application can turn on historical proof of that status. The 2023 regulations address Carcieri directly by grouping the evidence into conclusive, presumptive, and probative categories, and Congress continues to weigh a legislative fix. Once land returns to trust, the Tribal Nation needs codes, jurisdiction assertions, and enforcement authority in place, or the protection it fought for exists only on paper.
We assist Tribal Nations in:
Land Back succeeds when a Tribal Nation governs what it recovers. We build the legal infrastructure that lets a Tribal Nation govern the land it reacquires as its own.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) gives Tribal Nations a federal floor for repatriation. The 2024 regulations at 43 C.F.R. Part 10 raised that floor: they require institutions to obtain free, prior, and informed consent before exhibiting, accessing, or studying ancestral remains and cultural items, and they tighten consultation and the timelines for inventories and return. Where institutions delay, narrow their obligations, or treat consultation as a formality, the question is which government holds the authority to decide. We help Tribal Nations build the governance structures that keep that authority in their own hands.
We also work with museums, universities, and federal agencies committed to going beyond what federal law requires, institutions that want to build genuine, sustained partnerships with the Tribal Nations whose ancestors and cultural items they hold.
For Tribal Nations, we assist in:
For institutions, we assist in:
Our goal is to ensure that compliance with federal law does not define the limits of Tribal authority, and that institutions see repatriation not as a regulatory burden but as an obligation they owe to the Tribal Nations and ancestors whose heritage they hold. Whether we work with a Tribal Nation or an institution, the same principle holds: Tribal law and Tribal governance structures should guide how a Tribal Nation pursues, evaluates, and completes repatriation.
Work With Our Tribal Sovereignty Practice
Cultural Heritage Partners’ Tribal Sovereignty Practice is led by Jessie Barrington, an enrolled citizen of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians. Jessie brings over a decade of high-impact legal experience across Tribal, federal, and private practice.
She served as a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice in the District of Oregon, and subsequently as Senior Counselor to the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior, where she advised on national policy and intergovernmental relations for all federally recognized Tribes. She has litigated in federal and Tribal courts, taught Federal Indian Law and Natural Resources Litigation at Lewis and Clark Law School, and is a published co-author of American Indian Identity: Citizenship, Membership, and Blood.
Jessie Barrington
Partner and leader of Cultural Heritage Partners’ Tribal Sovereignty Practice
Nationwide Practice, Community-Grounded Approach
Cultural Heritage Partners PLLC represents clients across the United States in matters involving federal permitting, consultation, and cultural resource protection.
We understand that heritage preservation disputes involve identity, history, sovereignty, and intergenerational responsibility. Our role is to translate those values into precise legal arguments, carefully developed records, and strategic advocacy grounded in federal and state law.
For matters focused on federal permitting, NHPA and NEPA review, and accountability when development threatens historic, sacred, or culturally significant places, we encourage clients to learn more about our Heritage Preservation Practice.
What We do
Heritage Preservation Practice
Representing Tribal Nations, local governments, nonprofit organizations, descendant communities, and grassroots coalitions to protect historic, sacred, and culturally significant places.
