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Betty N. Morgan, Ph.
D.
Associate Professor,
Political Science and
Public Administration
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Lawrence D. Vellani,
M.P.A.
Adjunct Professor, Political Science
and Public Administration,
and Director,
Foundation Relations, Office of Institutional
Advancement
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Project Pericles Course
Enhancement
Judicial Administration - PA/POL 374 - E
Cross-listed with Criminal Justice (CJ), Non-Violent
Studies (NVS), Public Administration (PA) and Political
Science (POL)
Purpose and Design
We hoped to use project resources to allow students in
their study of the administration of judicial policy in
the United States to observe, record and reflect upon the
challenges confronting a subnational jurisdiction in the
process of developing a justice system. The students'
travel and research would expand their understanding of
the concepts of jurisdiction, sovereignty and separation
of powers, and provide unique insight into the
relationship of cultural identity and cultural survival
to the construction of social and political institutions.
Students and faculty would observe, interview, record and
assess primary source data gathered from the civic and
judicial officials of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee
who are leading a quiet, but historic revolution in
Eastern Cherokee jurisprudence.
 Intercultural experiences are
integral to a liberal arts education. In providing
academic and experiential opportunities beyond the
classroom and the campus, faculty help engender the
conditions that foster the development of humane,
competent and engaged citizens of the nation and the
world. In taking students beyond their usual zone of
intellectual, cultural and linguistic comfort, course
authors must set goals in the areas of academic content,
personal growth and cultural awareness. We designed the
activities of this project to reinforce specific course
content as well as the students' writing, speaking,
critical thinking and reflection skills; to stimulate the
students' intellectual curiosity, and appreciation
and tolerance of individual and cultural differences; and
to challenge the students to understand the significance
of culture and to gain deeper insight into their own
social and political culture through comparison and
contrast. The course enhancement would enable us to bring
our students for two days and one night from the
"other world" into the "real world,"
as the Eastern Cherokee often distinguish between life in
non-Indian society and life in Cherokee
communities.
 Eastern
Cherokee Justice in the 21st Century
The Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation maintains a
self-governing jurisdiction of approximately ninety
square miles in western North Carolina, lying primarily
on the eastern slopes of the Great Smokey Mountains
between the North Carolina counties of Jackson and Swain.
Since the early 1840's this jurisdiction has been
known as the Qualla Indian Boundary (QIB).
East of the Mississippi River, the Eastern Band of the
Cherokee Nation is the political successor to the
Cherokee Nation that governed in this area by virtue of
treaties with the United States government dating back to
1791 and under the terms of its first national
constitution promulgated in 1821. Federal and state
ethnic cleansing policies of the early nineteenth century
resulted in the forced removal of approximately 95% of
the citizens of the Cherokee Nation from their national
homeland then situated between the U.S. sub-national
jurisdictions of Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and
Alabama. Until the military's removal of these people
in the fall and early winter of 1838 and 1839, the four
U.S. state jurisdictions bordering on the Cherokee Nation
did not and could not fully claim their current political
boundaries.
 For generations after the
removal of the greater part of their body politic, the
Cherokee had no court system on the Qualla Boundary.
Unlike with the legislative and executive functions that
the tribe had maintained since the establishment of the
Qualla Indian Boundary, tribal members had to go off
Boundary to avail themselves of formal institutions of
civil and criminal justice. Circumstances began to change
in 1975 through provisions of the Indian
Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. This
important act of Congress returned to Indian tribes the
right to establish independent institutions like schools,
hospitals and courts. In 1980 the Bureau of Indian
Affairs of the U.S. Department of the Interior
established a Court of Indian Offenses on the Boundary,
commonly referred to as the Code of Federal Regulation or
CFR Court. The federal government hired and fired the
judicial officers, set the standards for employment and
advancement, and oversaw the federal administrative
regulations that informed the substantive and procedural
law in the court.
In official actions taken in December 1999 and in March
of 2000, QIB officials took final and full advantage of
the federal legislation to reestablish a truly
independent third branch of government on the Boundary.
For the Cherokee of Qualla, this fundamental reformation
of its civil and criminal justice system at the turn of
the 21st century clearly amounts as much to a taking back
or reclaiming of earlier judicial sovereignty, as it is
also the initiation of an important new social
project.
Activities
Preparatory
In addition to the usual readings for Judicial
Administration 374-E, I selected additional course
assignments: Trail of Tears, by John Ehle, and selections
from Cherokee Americans: the Eastern Band of the Cherokee
in the Twentieth Century, by John R. Finger, and American
Indian Law, by William C. Canby, Jr. I also made each
student responsible for individual, independent, World
Wide Web searches on aspects of the Cherokee People's
history, culture and language.
With these readings as partial support, each student
prepared a three columned reflection table, in which they
filled in items of their choosing for the decades 1770
thru 1980 and for each year from 1990 thru 2003 from the
history of the Cherokee People, the history of the United
States Republic, and the history of their own personal
family, respectively.
 Historian and Elon faculty
member, R. Clyde Ellis, presented a guest lecture on the
experience of Indian peoples in the United States in
general and the Cherokee of the QIB in particular. During
his lecture and in a later class meeting, the students
viewed portions of a public television documentary on
Cheoah, N.C., also known as the Snow Bird Community, a
satellite area of tribal lands within Graham County,
N.C., which is a part of, but not contiguous to the QIB.
Prior to traveling to Qualla, each of the students
prepared questions for use in interviews with officials
in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of
QIB government.
On-Site
With the permission of tribal officials, we observed
each branch of QIB government in operation, beginning
with the judicial, the Cherokee Court. We sat through
Cherokee Court proceedings, both at the trial and
appellate levels, and were granted permission to video
record the court sessions. The Cherokee Supreme Court
conducts oral argument twice yearly, the spring 2003
session coinciding with our March 13 and 14 visit. Among
the cases on the docket during this session of court, the
justices were considering arguments on an issue of first
impression in a law of contracts case, presenting one of
most important issues to come before the new court to
date-- the issue of tribal sovereign immunity. After the
oral arguments, the Court's Chief Justice, Harry C.
Martin, met with the students. The Supreme Court's
need for immediate case deliberation precluded an
extended exchange with the class. However, Chief Justice
Martin made himself available to us later in the evening
to discuss, at length, issues of substantive and
procedural law and judicial administration inherent in
the activities of the first Cherokee Supreme Court to
convene in the Appalachian region in almost 170
years.
Our access to Cherokee trial court officials was more
extensive than that of the Supreme Court. A Cherokee
trial court judge, J. Matthew Martin, the Cherokee Court
prosecutor, James W. Kilbourne, Jr., an attorney
specializing in domestic violence and juvenile law, Donna
Forbis, a paralegal specializing in the preparation of
domestic violence cases, Ronnie Hornbuckle, and the
court's principal bailiff, John Allen, spent
significant time over both days of the visit in
interviews with the students, discussing the evolution of
the court, its law, its procedures, its approach to
rehabilitation and corrections, its relationship to other
aspects of civil society, and its similarities to and
differences from previous judicial system in operation on
the Boundary and federal and neighboring state
jurisdictions.
The students sat in on the proceedings of the Tribal
Council, the QIB legislative branch, which was conducting
hearings on historic and delicate revisions to the
tribe's Enrollment Ordinance, the fundamental law
defining and governing citizenship in the Eastern Band,
including a member's stake in the collective economic
benefits of the tribe's successful development of
gaming and tourism on the Boundary. Out of respect to our
class as non-Indian visitors at the hearings, the Tribal
Council Chairman, Bob Blankenship, invited a
representative of the class to step forward and address
the Council, introducing the class and the university to
the Council and the tribe's attorney general, who was
the principal witness before the Council that
morning.
The Principal Chief of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee,
Leon D. Jones, met with the class in his office for over
thirty minutes. The principal chief is the chief
executive officer of the Eastern Band and the head of the
executive branch of government. Chief Jones discussed
with the students his role as the head of the executive
branch and his perspective on the development of an
independent judiciary for the tribe. The Chief also
discussed the dynamics of the upcoming elections for
principal chief.
The civic officials stressed the importance of the
students having time to study features of the tribe's
cultural patrimony. Tribal cultural officials generously
extended their resources to allow the class to take in
three significant aspects of the tribe's heritage:
the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, the Ocanaluftee
Village and the Kitowah Town site. These experiences
involved direct student interaction and interviews with
Jerry Wolf, an elder museum docent and story teller, Sam
Otter, manager of the Ocanaluftee contact era village
site, and Garfield Long, tribal linguist, who led us off
Boundary to walk the site of the mother town of all
Cherokee People, Kitowah Town.
The Kitowah Town site comprises approximately 300 acres
along the Tukaseegee River recently reclaimed by the
Eastern Band through purchase from non-Indian owners
after being out of Cherokee possession for almost 170
years. Until its utter devastation by a British military
force in 1761 during the French and Indian War, Kitowah
Town was the center of Cherokee religious and political
culture, and considered the founding community of the
Cherokee People and the place where the Cherokee received
and first observed their oral, pre-contact legal
system.
One of the most unique aspects of the discussions and
interactions among the students and Qualla officials and
residents was the participation of Laith Mansour Majali,
a third year Elon Communications student. Mr. Majali,
though not a student in our class, accompanied us to
document with digital video our interviews and research.
Laith is a citizen of Jordan studying at Elon and also
the member of a Bedouin tribe resident in Jordan. He
offered his own insights and comparisons about
cross-jurisdictional and overlapping jurisdictional
issues. For example, during our study at Qualla, we
considered the impact of private behavior and public
policy across federal law, state law and tribal law. In
the Jordanian context, Laith pointed out that his fellow
citizens operate across Jordanian national civil law,
Muslim cannon or shariah law and tribal law.
Assessment
Upon their return to Elon, the students reported, in
class, on each of the Cherokee branches of government and
the cultural sites we studied. The students will have
additional writing assignments in which they will compare
and contrast aspects of sovereignty, jurisdiction and
court structure across federal, state and tribal court
administration. The students will also examine and
reflect on the role of citizen participation and
democratic political processes in the establishment,
exercise and evolution of a justice system.
In continuing the integration of the Qualla research and
documentation experiences into our course work after the
Spring break, each student will develop a substantive
research project based upon the specific data they
gathered during their interviews and observations on the
Boundary.
In this portion of the course, the students will begin
to sort out those features of federal, state and tribal
jurisprudence and administration that are a parallel or
comparable to each other and those features that are
parabolic, leading the citizen and the civil society on a
uniquely different vector of development, based upon
issues of history, culture, language, economics,
geography and degrees of sovereignty specific to the
particular polity.
We believe this "forty-eight hour" study
abroad course enhancement would provide a worthwhile
experience for future groups of students. Future classes
would profit from the professional relationships we have
established this term. Future research and study groups
will also benefit greatly from the documentary evidence
we gathered and logistical experience we developed during
this spring's excursion. Importantly, one of our most
effective products is the creation of an extensive
collection of visual images (supported by video and audio
production) that will add an important qualitative
dimension to the preparation of future classes for a
Boundary study experience.
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