'We were born for this': Native women overcome obstacles in the legal field

Friday, May 3, 2019  

But Native women are finding success, with some striking out on their own.

Alone in her office, Nicole Ducheneaux began questioning herself.

It was February 2017, and in a few days the Cheyenne River Sioux woman would argue in federal court on behalf of her tribe for an injunction to stop construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The crude oil pipeline would run under the Missouri River, and Ducheneaux planned to argue its mere presence would impede her people's religious practices by rendering the water impure.

Arrayed against her was the combined might of the U.S. Justice Department and more than a dozen lawyers from Energy Transfer, the pipeline’s owner. No other tribes had joined Cheyenne River on the motion, so Ducheneaux would have to present the case to stop construction on the pipeline by herself.

She began thinking of ways to avoid her court appearance.

“I thought maybe on the way home from work something will happen,” she said. “I’ll break my leg or something. Then I can just be in the hospital and somebody else can do it.”

She looked up from her desk and noticed the portrait of her grandmother, a woman who had fought a federal dam project in the 1940s that led to the flooding of thousands of acres of her tribe’s reservation. Her grandma had spoken before Congress to urge lawmakers to halt the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program.

“I thought, ‘Oh my god, what would she think?’ She would have given anything to have the education and the opportunity to do what I was doing,” Nicole Ducheneaux said. “I get my chance and here I’m so scared I don’t even want to do it.”

A few days later, the young Native attorney stood in a courtroom packed with reporters, tribal leaders and oil executives. And while a federal judge denied her tribe’s motion, the effort reminded Ducheneaux why she became a lawyer.

“Sioux women are born fighters,” she said. “We were born for this, and we’ve been kept down by our own culture in some ways and by the field of Indian law for a long time.”

* * *

From lower pay to fewer opportunities for advancement than their male counterparts, Native women attorneys face many challenges in their chosen profession.

A recent survey by the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession found women make up 38 percent of legal professionals. Of those, just 19 percent of equity partners – those who own a stake in a law firm and typically earn more money than others in the firm – were women. And women equity partners typically earn 27 percent less than their male counterparts.

The experience of minority women attorneys is even bleaker, according to a groundbreaking 2006 study by the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession.

The study found that while 17 percent of partners in law firms were women, just 4 percent were minority men or women. The study also found that 81 percent of minority female legal associates had left their law firms within five years of being hired. The 2006 study also found that 20 percent of minority women but only 1 percent of white men felt they were denied promotion opportunities.

While no major studies have been conducted examining the experiences of Native women attorneys, the experience of four such attorneys interviewed by Indianz.Com seems to suggest opportunities for advancement within the legal profession are often rare for female Native attorneys.

Sheila Corbine, the former attorney general for the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a citizen of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, said one of the challenges facing Native women attorneys comes from the cultural traditions of some tribes, which often relegate women to domestic rather than leadership roles.

While some tribes have become more progressive in their attitudes toward women, others continue to struggle to treat women attorneys with respect, she said.

“I’ve worked in some situations where I felt like my words weren’t listened to as a Native woman so much as that as a Native man or a white man,” she said. “It’s infuriating sometimes, but you just slowly chip away at it.”

Recently, Corbine joined a law firm that is among the first in the country owned by a majority of Native women.

Four of the six partners of the Big Fire Law and Policy Group are women, including Corbine, Nicole Ducheneaux, Leonika Charging and Danelle Smith. The other two partners are Lance Morgan and Burton Warrington. Two other attorneys, Joseph V. Messineo and Michael Novotny, serve as senior associate and associate, respectively.

She said Big Fire, unlike other larger law firms that have Indian law divisions within them, will focus entirely on serving its Native clients. The firm will represent tribes, tribal organizations, Alaska Native corporations and tribal gaming enterprises, among others.

Many of the larger law firms with Indian law divisions are run primarily by non-Indians, Corbine said. Big Fire will be able to bring expertise to Native law issues that non-Native-owned law firms can’t by being better able to understand the challenges facing tribes.

And because Big Fire is a smaller firm, its partners will have greater control over creating the kind of workplace environment they want, she said. She’s hopeful she and the firm’s other partners will be able to craft a work culture that is able to accommodate the needs of a diverse workforce, including single parents and parents of children with special needs.

She said law firms owned mostly by men tend to give more opportunities for advancement to men and to women who don’t have children and are willing to work long hours. They also tend to be less flexible about meeting the needs of working mothers, Corbine said.

“I know that there are work spaces where single parents – lawyers and non-lawyers alike – they might not get the chances that others might get because they are single parents,” she said.

* * *

A Native attorney who is a partner in a San Diego law firm said she has seen more Native women becoming attorneys for tribes, though she sees little improvement in the number of Native women working in private practice.

Kerry Patterson, a partner at Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves and Savitch, said one of the reasons for the lack of Native women in private practice is the challenge of meeting the number of billable hours attorneys in private firms are required to complete.

“Private practice just in itself is really grueling work,” she said. “I’m lucky in the sense that I love the work that I do. I just wish there was more time in the day.”

She said she primarily represents tribes in the areas of economic development, gaming, land use and leasing.

As a Seneca Nation citizen, Patterson said she comes from a matrilineal culture and benefited from having strong female role models, especially her mother and grandmother. However, not all Native women come from cultures in which they are encouraged to take leadership roles, she said.

“Women in some tribes have very traditional roles,” she said. “Trying to balance those roles can be difficult.”

Patterson said private practice remains a male-dominated field without a lot of minority representation. As such, it’s important for minority attorneys to find effective mentors and to be willing to promote themselves, she said.

“I don’t know if that’s a woman thing or a Native woman thing, but I feel like we don’t do that enough and we don’t promote each other enough and we should get better at that,” she said.

She said it was important for her to find a law firm that valued her strengths as a minority woman.

“Finding a place where you fit in, where the firm values diversity, where they’re forward thinking and they’re really invested in wanting to see you succeed, that’s the key,” she said.

As a partner, she has been granted some power to promote other Native attorneys, she said. With three other Native attorneys in her firm, she said she is helping train future Native legal partners.

“My goal is to mentor them to success so they can become equity partners one day as well,” she said.

* * *

Little Fawn Boland started her own law firm in 2010. Today, she is the sole partner of Ceiba Legal LLP in Mill Valley, California, though she has four contract attorneys who work with her.

Boland, a citizen of the Piro-Manso-Tiwa Tribe of the San Juan de Guadalupe Pueblo, said she began her career working for a private law firm and was once even offered a partnership within a firm. And while the pay was lucrative – nearly $900 an hour – she never understood why she was expected to bring nearly $1 million worth of business to the firm.

“I believed I had the power in me to make that much, if not more, in my own firm,” she said. “I just had a belief, and it in fact came true.”

And while she charges her Native clients far less than she would’ve at her previous practice, she also has come to value the loyalty of her clients more than the bigger paycheck.

She said the expectation within many private firms for new attorneys to generate huge profits while earning relatively small salaries is often too difficult for those attorneys, especially if they face other challenges such as gender or racial bias in the workplace.

“The bars are set so high that it would be tough for somebody to be able to do that as a Native woman,” Boland said. “It’s just a more uphill battle as a woman to get work and be trusted as an advisor in Indian Country and just generally in the United States.”

But she said she hasn’t personally experienced gender or racial bias within the firms where she has worked. Despite that, she rarely sees women or minority attorneys during legal negotiations, a fact that she says suggests few women or minorities are ascending to positions of power within their firms.

“The older I get, the less women I see at the higher and higher echelons, so there must be difficulty getting to the top,” she said. “I think there are just sacrifices that are expected to be made by people, and I think there’s just a perception that women can’t make them or can’t make them as easily.”

“All I know is there are times when you walk into a meeting, and there’s 25 old white men.”’

She said recruiting young women to law schools is just the first step needed to improve opportunities for women in the legal profession. Female law school graduates must also be given the opportunity to handle challenging cases and negotiations, Boland said.

“I think it has to be that women are given opportunities to get into the courtroom, to work on large financial deals, to establish their resumes in ways equal to men,” she said.

However, she said she also sees a great opportunity for Native attorneys to gain leadership roles within law firms that serve Indian Country as more and more non-Native attorneys retire from the profession.

She said attorneys who represent tribes tend to be middle-aged white men, many of whom have proven themselves to be true Native allies. But the tide is shifting, Boland said, and the Big Fire Law and Policy Group is just one example of Native attorneys who are positioning themselves to take over those responsibilities.

“In the next 10 years, you’re going to see a natural shifting of the old guard to a lot of newer attorneys, young attorneys, Native attorneys, and tribes are going to get more and more comfortable getting advice from people that aren’t gray-haired old men,” she said.

* * *

As a Native woman, Nicole Ducheneaux often finds herself alone in the courtroom and at the negotiation table.

As a trial attorney, she’s one of the few Native women in the country who represents tribes in the courtroom.

She began her career as a public defender in Montana, including on the Flathead Reservation. Later, she joined Fredericks, Peebles and Morgan, where she represented her tribe, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, through its efforts to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline.

She also represented the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Tribe of Potawatomi Indians, also known as the Gun Lake Tribe, in their 2017 victory in the U.S. Supreme Court in Patchak v. Zinke. In that case, the nation's highest court confirmed that Congress can protect tribal homelands from litigation.

But despite her many accomplishments, Ducheneaux has often struggled to gain leadership positions.

“I do suffer the same problems that most women attorneys do in terms of getting into management and making partner and making that work with obligations to family,” she said.

That fact was demonstrated most clearly as she represented her tribe during the Dakota Access Pipeline litigation. With four Sioux tribes being represented during those proceedings, Ducheneaux was the lone Native woman attorney.

“It can be lonely, and it’s also frustrating because there are so, so many smart, motivated Indian attorneys and so many smart, motivated women attorneys,” she said.

She blames an industry that has been designed to funnel white men to become trial attorneys by providing them with continual opportunities for advancement while denying those same opportunities to women and minority attorneys.

She said cultural gender roles that relegate women to supportive positions also have restricted the ability of women to gain advancement in the legal profession. Those same gender roles have conditioned many women to lack the self-confidence needed to take leadership positions, Ducheneaux said.

“When you go into a firm where all of the litigators are white men, you don’t see a lot of models for what a strong woman Native litigator looks like,” she said. “It doesn’t exist by and large today in our Indian firms or in the big firms.”

The lack of diversity among trial attorneys means Native women aren’t being given the opportunity to bring their unique experiences and skills into the courtroom, she said.

But she’s working to change that, and she is hopeful her new firm – Big Fire – can help train future Native litigators.

“What we are trying to do in Big Fire is to create a space where we as women and Indian attorneys have the opportunity to create our own destiny and to represent tribes and tribal entities in Indian Country in a way that we understand it from coming from these communities and understanding our people,” she said.

“We want to not only provide a model, but we want to have the opportunity to mentor and to create a space where other Indians and women have the opportunity to thrive.”

New law and policy firm boasts majority ownership by Native women (April 2, 2019)