Charles Wilkinson, Beloved Longtime CU Law Professor, Marked 50 Years as Leading “Law of the West” Practitioner, Scholar, and Teacher in 2021
Part 1: Beginnings
“The coming of the white people and the treaties with them are not distant, hazy memories but sharp occurrences, just yesterday.”
Those words, which University of Colorado Moses Lasky Professor of Law Emeritus Charles Wilkinson wrote in a 2005 book, reflect the perspective and understanding that Wilkinson gained during almost 50 years since he first came to Boulder and joined the Native American Rights Fund in October 1971.
During that near half-century, Wilkinson built a legacy as one of the nation’s foremost scholars of the peoples, public lands, and waters of the West. In addition to writing 14 books and nearly five dozen scholarly articles, he has been a faculty member at the University of Colorado School of Law since 1987 and, before that, taught for 12 years at the University of Oregon Law School.
“Charles has been a pathbreaking paragon of modern engaged scholarship on Indian, water, and public land law, as well as a great storyteller, illuminating key events and trends across those fields, including where they intersect,” said John Leshy, the Emeritus Harry D. Sunderland and Distinguished Professor of Real Property Law at the University of California-Hastings College of Law and a former Solicitor of the U.S. Department of the Interior. “Everyone who practices in these fields owes him a debt of gratitude, whether they know it or not.”
Wilkinson’s fascination with the West and its native societies seems like an unlikely outcome for a boy born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and raised in Bronxville, N.Y. His path began by reading the newspaper. A devoted fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, he made a habit of spreading the daily gazette across the living room of his family’s home. “It drove my mother crazy,” Wilkinson said.
That ritual led to a revelation. “In May 1954 I saw the headline ‘Supreme Court outlaws school discrimination,’” Wilkinson said. “I was so excited. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to be a lawyer.’”
After graduating from high school, Wilkinson headed to Ohio’s Denison University and, after earning his undergraduate degree, to Stanford Law School. “I’d never heard of California,” he said. “No one even knew where that was. I said, ‘I’m going to go to law school where the Dodgers are.’”
He didn’t like the law.
“It was really just a large study of business,” Wilkinson said. That changed not long after graduation. After a spell at Lewis Roca, then a firm with a single outpost in Phoenix, and at Bronson, Bronson & McKinnon in San Francisco, the future CU Distinguished Professor made a life-altering decision. He met with David Getches, who would become his CU faculty colleague, best friend, and then a staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, and John Echohawk, NARF’s founder. He decided to represent the nation’s indigenous civilizations. “I’d never met an Indian,” Wilkinson said. “I just said, ‘I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy’ – and a lot of people said I was – ‘but I think I‘m going to do this.’”
He began his work at NARF on Oct. 4, 1971, and, soon after, found himself helping Wisconsin’s Menominee Tribe obtain renewed recognition as an Indian tribe under federal law. “This was in the middle of the termination era when Congress was going to sell the reservations off and be done with the ‘Indian problem,’” Wilkinson said. “They were in danger of having big companies come into this good timber and take it out of Indian hands.”
The process of obtaining Congressional repeal of the termination legislation affecting the tribe that was enacted during the 1950s was already “going full bore” when Wilkinson joined NARF and he soon found himself working with Ada Deer, a Menominee who led the fight against the liquidation of the tribe’s lands, to secure the repeal bill that would reverse the tribe’s termination. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Within two months at NARF, I was drafting a bill in Congress. I’d never even conceived of drafting a bill. It was really public law.”
Since then, Wilkinson’s impact on Indian law has been colossal. After the repeal of the Menominee Tribe’s termination as a federally recognized tribe in 1973, Wilkinson began working on behalf of other tribes, this time in the Pacific Northwest. He represented the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, and the Klamath Tribes. Wilkinson helped the Siletz regain recognition, just as had for the Menominee. “This time I was their lead lawyer, by far, making hundreds of trips back to DC and so forth,” he said.
Wilkinson also took on a fight against unequal treatment of Navajo youth in the tribe’s sprawling homeland. “There was discrimination all over the place,” he said. “We brought a big case on that and won.”
Part 2: Teaching and Writing
The impact of Charles Wilkinson’s work as an advocate for tribes has been far-reaching, said Rebecca Tsosie, Regents Professor of Law and co-chair of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law. “Many citizens think of Indian tribes and Indian people as these distinctive ethnic and cultural groups who have some relationship to the land, but they don’t necessarily think of them as sovereigns,” Tsosie said. “The tribal sovereignty idea blossomed in the latter part of the 60s and 70s. Charles was at the front of that, on the legal side.”
Even now, Wilkinson said, he considers the notion of tribal sovereignty to be central to his life’s work and among his proudest professional achievements. “It’s one of the greatest notions that’s ever touched my mind,” Wilkinson said. “I wanted so much for people to understand the Indian way and how deep it is. It’s not better, but it’s a different way of knowing. There’s a bunch of different values in there, usually dealing with the land and family and so forth that they want to protect. The way to do it is through tribal sovereignty.”
Today, the concept of tribes as governments has driven a “comeback,” Wilkinson said. “It’s a very exciting place, Indian country,” he said. “They make laws and enforce them. They’ve made sovereignty real.” Tsosie explained that Wilkinson’s work also went beyond the mere concept of tribal sovereignty. “He’s always made it a point to show why tribal sovereignty is relevant to a lot of the West, or even all of the United States,” she said. “He’s framed it in a way [that] people understand where the duties [owed by the U.S. government to tribes] came from and how they ought to be discharged by the various [federal] agencies.”
By 1975 Wilkinson entered teaching, in part because he grew tired of extensive travel as a NARF lawyer. Joining the law faculty at the University of Oregon School of Law in Eugene, Ore., he convinced the dean to let him teach public lands law instead of natural resources law and also took on instruction in federal Indian law and water law.
“It wasn’t being taught in any school,” Wilkinson said. “It was a changing time in law school, as it was for law in so many fields. It was a really exciting time in that way.” He noticed that students sought out his classes. “Oregon students craved public lands and Indian law and I loved teaching out there.”
While still a faculty member at Oregon, Wilkinson co-wrote two seminal casebooks, Federal Indian Law: Cases and Materials and Federal Public Land and Resources Law. He edited the then-most important work on Indian law – Felix S. Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law, first written during the 1930s — and co-wrote the seminal guide to the nation’s bedrock law for the management of the national forests — Land and Resource Planning in the National Forests — and wrote American Indians, Time, and the Law: Native Societies in a Modern Constitutional Democracy.
The latter book is still the ideal introduction to the subject for many law professors.
“I know I am not alone when I say that I am planning to teach federal Indian law and public lands this fall and as I prepare to do that, nearly every year, I begin with American Indians, Time and the Law,” said Monte Mills, a professor at the University of Montana’s Alexander Blewett III School of Law, and co-director of the school’s Margery Hunter Brown Indian Law Clinic, and a former Wilkinson student. “To me, it is the single best resource for anybody [to] understand federal Indian law. Not because it’s a legal textbook but because it presents and explains the concepts in the field in such a way that anyone can pick up that book, read it and at least have a functional understanding of the complexities of federal Indian law.”
Wilkinson also introduced a lasting innovation to law teaching — the field learning expedition — while a member of the law faculty at Oregon. “I realized that law was seeming so narrow to me,” Wilkinson said. “I’d been teaching appellate cases, which really are the law, but it’s not real, like it is when you’re out on the ground.” So he took students to the other side of the Cascades for a week so they could study the problems of the Columbia River Basin and the perspectives of those who live and work there. “We met people and talked about controversies,” Wilkinson said. “That was the subject of the course, that watershed.”
In 1987, Wilkinson and his family decided it was time to return to Boulder. After arriving at the University of Colorado Law School, he began to turn toward the writing that eventually grew his acclaim as a scholar of the unique body of law so important to the West and that he had been teaching for more than a decade. Inspired by Wallace Stegner — “the greatest writer about the West,” he said — Wilkinson realized that the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner provided essential insights into the region.
“Reading him, I realized ‘that’s what’s real,’” he said. Diving into the wide-ranging reading of literature, history, science — “you name it, I read it” — Wilkinson soon saw how the policy conundrums of the region could be understood and explained through another window. “They made me realize that law was so formal and so impersonal,” he said. “I wanted to find ways to deal with that.”
By 1992, Wilkinson published his first book for a general audience — Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West. “I had this idea about the ‘Lords of Yesterday’ and how present-day activities in the West were governed by laws fashioned in the mid-1800s overgrazing, mining, and so forth,” he said. “They still were the laws. People didn’t realize it, I thought.”
After finishing a book of essays the same year — The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West — he committed himself to make general audience writing a staple of his work. “I decided that reaching general audiences and presenting legal issues to them was a very effective way of maybe influencing laws that you care about.”
In 1999 Wilkinson introduced readers to the Colorado Plateau in Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest. During the next year, Wilkinson examined the story of native American fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest in Messages from Frank’s Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties and the Indian Way, and, in 2005, wrote Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations, which surveyed the modern indigenous Americans’ sovereignty movement.
The books, which may soon include a look at the 1970s Boldt decision that recognized and enforced the treaty rights of Native Americans in Washington state to harvest wild salmon, are highly regarded by Wilkinson’s colleagues.
“I think those books will have an enduring legacy,” said William Boyd, a UCLA law professor who worked with Wilkinson as a CU Law School faculty member between 2008-2016. “You get a sense for his deep love and respect for the land and its people.”
Wilkinson didn’t limit his effort to grow an understanding of the laws that govern the West’s peoples and places to the written word. He introduced another innovation to the legal academy in the form of the seminar teaching method. Bringing guests, including former Secretary of the Interior and Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt and Stewart Udall, who led the Department of Interior during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, to talk with his students about the practicalities of Indian, public lands, and water law, he helped students to grow in their grow their appreciation of the region’s original inhabitants and the diverse and beautiful terrain of the West.
Before joining the school’s faculty in 1987, Wilkinson also helped build CU’s Natural Resources Law Center as a board member. Working with CU Law School colleague David Getches, who was lead counsel in the landmark United States v. Washington case that recognized a native American treaty right to harvest wild salmon, after coming to Boulder, Wilkinson helped to develop what he calls the “preeminent center for natural resources in the West.” By 2013, the center would be renamed for the tandem and is now known as the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment.
“Colorado is far better off for his leadership, which is why the University of Colorado Law School renamed its Natural Resources Law Center after him and his longtime friend and collaborator, David Getches,” said the state’s Attorney General, Phil Weiser.
Wilkinson continued to innovate in his methods of teaching, including with the seminar. “It’s been wildly successful, just a wonderful program,” he said. “It just changes everything to go out and instead of hearing about the Wind River Range and the wolves, you’re up there and talking with the people that are making the decisions and hiking. It brings law to life.”
Wilkinson said that conversations with Native Americans are always part of the adventure.
Beyond the pen and the classroom, inside or outside, Wilkinson is a regular feature at the Department of Interior and the Department of Agriculture teaching, where he instructs employees. “The Interior Department needed upgrading on Indian law,” he said. “I had a lot of training sessions with them and I think it really helped.”
He works with USDA Forest Service employees on understanding the National Forest Management Act, the agency’s organic act about which Wilkinson has extensively written. During the last years of the Clinton administration, he served on the USDA Forest Service Committee of Scientists, which helped the agency to rewrite the National Forest Management Act forest planning regulations.
A board member at Grand Canyon Trust, the Northern Lights Institute, the Western Environmental Law Center, and The Wilderness Society at various times in his career, Wilkinson has also been a key player in the effort to protect two Utah preserves: the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments.
Babbitt, then serving in President Bill Clinton’s cabinet as Secretary of the Interior, asked Wilkinson to help him come up with a plan to set aside the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
The former Arizona governor, Wilkinson said, was the driving force behind the designation. “He had this card,” Wilkinson said. “On one side, it had listed all the national monuments that Teddy Roosevelt did. On the other side was a big zero, which was how many [Clinton] had done. Clinton thought he could get some votes with this and he turned Babbitt loose.”
Nearly 20 years later, another opportunity to help craft a national monument in the Beehive State’s anthropologically significant landscape became apparent. “I worked with the five tribes that put Bears Ears [National Monument] together,” Wilkinson said. “Everybody says it anyway – I was a driving force behind that.” He drafted the proposal and, working closely with affected tribes, produced a document that articulated their aspirations for the preserve.
“He really brought in that idea that the public lands are inclusive of the native communities, which is why they came up with that new structure of [the] Bears Ears [National Monument designation],” Tsosie said. “That would be a strong affirmation of indigenous self-determination.”
“I believe I’m a person who could have conceptual understandings of things and how to change them,” Wilkinson said, explaining how his work on Bears Ears helped to convince former President Barack Obama to establish it. “When I talked with [former] Secretary [of the Interior Sally] Jewell and other federal officials I think I had an understanding of what was going on with the monument and some of the unique things.”
The boundaries of both Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument were dramatically cut back by former President Donald Trump shortly after Trump took office in 2017, but Wilkinson is optimistic that President Joe Biden will restore them. “Biden really is committed to doing that,” he said. “He knows the issues.”
[Editor’s note: President Biden restored the Obama-era boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument in October 2021.]
Part 3: Legacy, Family, and Reflections
The Bears Ears National Monument project was Charles Wilkinson’s “last, big all-out effort,” but he is working on another book. His latest will examine conflicts over wild salmon fishing in Washington state that endured for decades, which led to the groundbreaking Boldt decision. Wilkinson regards that ruling, named for the federal judge who issued it, as “one of the greatest decisions by an American court, period.”
“When [Judge George Boldt] signed that decision, the tribes were taking 2% to 5% of the salmon, and the commercial fishermen were taking a little over 90%, and then forage fishing were taking the rest,” Wilkinson explained. “The salmon was a big part of the economy and 50% got shipped.”
“That means that [he was] rearranging an economy,” Wilkinson continued. “A judge might order somebody to pay a whole lot of damages, but judges don’t go into court and rearrange economies. Well, he did.”
Through it all, Wilkinson maintains the passion that began on that fall day at NARF nearly 50 years ago.
“I just have to say that I love Indian people and their land and their history,” Wilkinson said. “And I love tribal sovereignty because it has shown the staying power of native peoples and being able to have self-government and their land with their own values. I love that legal and historical and social notion of tribal sovereignty.“
Those who work with Wilkinson and who have learned from him are not shy about their belief that he is an inspiration. “Along with being a giant in the field of natural resources law, Charles has an incredibly generous spirit,” said Reed Benson, a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law. “He has helped so many people in their careers, including me.”
One reason for that, according to William Boyd, the Michael J. Klein Chair in Law and co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law, is Wilkinson’s towering impact on the law.
“You can really say that he really defined the field of Indian law and public lands and natural resources law, which for obvious reasons is heavily focused on the American West,” Boyd said. “In many ways, he was the one who was pioneering the development of these rich fields in the legal academy.”
But Wilkinson also brings “authenticity” to his work, according to Boyd, and that can’t help but catch students’ interest.
“First and foremost Charles is real about his passion for and connection to the West as a landscape and its people, its distinctiveness,” said Monte Mills, a professor and the co-director of the Margery Hunter Brown Indian Law Clinic at the Alexander Blewett III School of Law at the University of Montana. “You get that. You understand from the first minute that he is authentic and genuine in his love for all of those things.”
Rebecca Tsosie, a Regents Professor and the co-chair of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law, said Wilkinson went out of his way to welcome Sarah Krakoff, a University of Colorado Law School faculty member now serving as a deputy solicitor at the Department of Interior, to CU Law, even encouraging her to take on some of the classes that he taught for so long.
“He was so willing,” Tsosie said. “There was a kind of an ethic in the profession when I went into academia, where most of the senior people were male and most of them were not happy to have you teach their class. He would sit with you and laugh. He was just amazing to us. There’s no way to not like him. I have profound gratitude and respect for him.”
Now in semi-retirement as an emeritus professor, Wilkinson continues to marvel at his life’s greatest joy: his family. Married to his wife Ann, also a lawyer who practiced in Oregon and in Boulder before stepping away to raise the couple’s four sons, for 43 years as of Aug. 20, Wilkinson can hardly contain his joy when speaking of those he holds close. “It’s been the most rewarding thing in my life,” he said.
He is as devoted to the spouses of his sons Seth, David, Ben, and Philip as he is to them. “Boys don’t grow up thinking ‘I wonder what I’m going to think of the people my sons marry,’ but I’ll tell you, they used to be daughters in law,” Wilkinson said, referring to his son’s spouses, Samantha Funk, a former Dorsey & Whitney and Davis Wright Tremaine associate, and Zahraa Velji Wilkinson, a lawyer at the Seattle City Attorney’s office. “They’re daughters now. I love them.”
A grandfather of two boys and two girls, Wilkinson remains intensely curious.
His son Seth, an environmental crimes prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Seattle, said his dad is as enthusiastic about learning as ever. “He can’t ever satisfy himself with enough questions,” Seth Wilkinson said, describing conversations between his wife and his father about the experiences of women in the law.
Wilkinson said he also stays in close touch with his two younger siblings – brother Bob and sister Martha.
Wilkinson’s love for the outdoors is a powerful memory for his kids. Seth remembers his dad’s delight when he could get to a remote stream and seek trout. “My enduring memories of him are fly-fishing trips,” Seth Wilkinson said. “He just always loved to get out there. It would just be pure glee for him to be out there on some tiny stream up in the Rocky Mountains.”
Nowadays, Wilkinson’s less likely to go fishing. “When you’re dragging 80 years around, you’re not as nimble as you used to be,” he said. His son David Wilkinson said that, notwithstanding his dad’s age, he joined two of his sons on a recent national park fly-fishing trip.
Hiking is an equally consistent feature of Wilkinson’s life. David Wilkinson, a University of Michigan law school graduate who now operates his own business, remembers numerous trips to Utah’s Canyon Country, including in April of this year. David said his dad always enjoyed wandering Boulder’s Sanitas Valley.
The family’s expeditions, including to Maui, almost always featured visits with locals, David Wilkinson said. “We would go somewhere to go backpacking or to have a family trip and often we would end up in a local high school gymnasium in Indian country, meeting with people,” he said. “[My dad] always thought it was extremely important, and still does, to go somewhere and meet with people in person.”
“I have memories [from] all over the West, whether it was in Washington, or Utah, or Colorado or Hawai’i, of meeting with people that he worked with and the warm receptions that we got,” David Wilkinson continued.
The longtime law professor continues to share the obvious care for others that has helped to produce consistent devotion from his students. “One thing about him is he loves kids and he loves dogs,” Seth Wilkinson said. “He’s one of those people that takes joy in younger people and [in] different perspectives.” The Evergreen State lawyer said his dad even “loves having deep conversations and trying to get the views of a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old,” referring to his own children.
“He just has a way of getting on their level,” David Wilkinson said, telling a story about his dad’s experience telling “Mountain Man stories” to his four-year-old daughter during last year’s pandemic lock-down. “He made a huge map of the American West,” David Wilkinson said. “We told him it should go [for] a half-hour.” Instead, Wilkinson entertained his granddaughter for an hour or more on each occasion. “She was so enthralled with it. My daughter was four and she just absolutely loved it.”
As for canines, David Wilkinson said his dad’s devotion is deep. “He said dogs should have the right to vote,” son David Wilkinson said. “That’s how strongly he loves dogs.” One of Wilkinson’s favorite local places to hike is in north Boulder, where dogs can wander leash-free.
Wilkinson still enjoys writing. “I love writing,” Wilkinson continued. “I‘m happy when I’m writing.”
“He has incredible energy and passion,” Boyd said. “His life’s work on the land and people of the American West is always incomplete for him. There’s always more to say and more to do.”
That continued dedication to introducing Americans to the wonders of the West adds to a towering bequest the scholar has left. “Charles Wilkinson is a giant in the legal profession and a public intellectual who has made a tremendous impact,” Phil Weiser, Colorado’s Attorney General and a former CU Law colleague, said.
Editor’s Note:
Hank Lacey, a former practicing attorney, studied under John Leshy, and was his research assistant, while a student at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. He has known and been a personal friend of Reed Benson since 1993. Lacey became acquainted with Charles Wilkinson at a 1992 book signing.
This story first appeared as a three-part series in Law Week Colorado in September 2021. It is republished here, after some editing, with the permission of Circuit Media LLC.
The story was also published at Law of the West on June 1, 2022.