Convocation: Steve Russell

Steve Russell, a Cherokee Indian born and raised in Oklahoma, served for 17 years as an elected trial judge in Texas before becoming an associate professor of criminal justice at Indiana University. Russell views his career path as unusual. Oklahoma schools had little to offer, and he had given up on education in the ninth grade because, he said, “it had long since given up on me.” It was the Vietnam era, and Russell joined the Air Force, which he said improved his self-image and resulted in an education through the G.I. Bill. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Texas at Austin, convinced that his previous educational failures were the fault of a system that expected nothing of Indian children. He was trained to be a high school teacher, and that was his plan, but it had not occurred to him that no school system would hire someone who was so plainly convinced that the public schools were squandering the talent of minority children. Having no teaching offers, he proceeded to law school and set out to be a civil rights lawyer, even though he knew of no Indian civil rights lawyers and the law school he attended offered no course in Indian law. Russell’s experience and education has led to a number of articles about the judicial process. His research focuses on the necessity to redefine national sovereignty to settle disputes arising from globalization and the need for American Indians to redefine tribal sovereignty and Indian identity in response to national and international change. Russell examined the recent challenge over the status of the Cherokee freedmen in his presentation titled "Race and Citizenship Inside and Outside the Cherokee Nation."