Indigenous scholar and activist Michelle Schenandoah ’99 condemned Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s ’54 controversial majority opinion denying an Indigenous community’s sovereignty in an International Women’s Day address on Friday.
Schenandoah, a member of the Onʌyota’:aka (Oneida) Nation Wolf Clan of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, centered her address titled “Rematriation and Land: Addressing RBG, Papal Bulls and the Doctrine of Discovery” around the “Doctrine of Discovery,” a papal decree from 1493 that has been used to justify European colonization of the Americas and reject land claims made by Indigenous people.
Ginsburg ’54 cited the doctrine in her 2005 majority opinion in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, where the court denied the Oneida Nation sovereignty to land bought after being removed from their control for centuries. The opinion also cited what Ginsburg called the Oneida Nation’s “embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold.”
Schenandoah condemned Ginsburg’s language in the opinion, rejecting the presumption that Oneida sovereignty had ever expired.
“Did our fires ever grow cold? Did they extinguish and go away? No, we’re still here,” Schenandoah said.
Schenandoah said that Ginsburg’s opinion in the Sherrill case calls into question her legacy of women’s rights advocacy.
“Everybody’s just like ‘Oh yay, women’s rights’ and ‘She’s so amazing,’ and it’s like, really? Because the way I understand the world, … women have a say over the land,” Schenandoah said. “Who was never asked if our land could be taken? Probably not our clan mothers. Probably not the women of our nations.”
Within the Haudenosaunee Nations, clan mothers are women leaders with the ability to check the power of the chiefs, a male position. Clan mothers — who are chosen for their cultural wisdom and dedication — provide guidance and advocacy for clan members and weigh potential chief appointments and chief decisions, according to the Oneida Nation website.
Schenandoah explained that women have traditionally taken on leadership roles in Haudenosaunee society, contrasting the gendered power imbalances in many non-Indigenous communities in the United States.
“A lot of people will say that Haudenosaunee women hold an equal status as men, and that’s actually incorrect, and [women] actually hold an elevated status,” Schenandoah said.
However, Schenandoah said that while Haudenosaunee women did not always experience the same structures of sexism within their immediate community as many non-Indigenous women because of the matriarchal Haudenosaunee society, their positions of power made them vulnerable to external aggression.
During European colonization, Indigenous women faced targeted violence from settlers. The U.S. Department of the Interior has reported that Native American and Alaska Native women make up a significant portion of missing and murdered individuals.
“The issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women is also tied to [sovereignty] because, again, if women have the say over the land, who is in the way of settling this country called the United States?” Schenandoah said. “Who is in the way of expansion? Native women.”
Despite centuries-long harm done to Indigenous women, Schenandoah is committed to finding a way forward through “rematriation,” which she defines as “returning the sacred to the mother and “thinking about our relationship with Mother Earth.”
“She [Mother Earth] is our ultimate life giver, and … women are life givers,” Schenandoah said in a post-event interview with The Sun. “[Rematriation] is centering our way of being to honor that. So it’s something that everyone can participate in — men included, people included, … and it’s also an Indigenous women-led movement.”
According to a 2016 study funded by the National Institute of Justice, 56.1 percent of Indigenous women have experienced sexual violence. Confronted with this alarming statistic, Schenandoah founded Rematriation, a non-profit that uses the principles of women-led healing to combat cycles of intergenerational trauma and violence that have caused victims of sexual assault within the Indigenous community to be “met with silence.”
“We’re passing violence down to our children and teaching them that’s how the world is. … We can’t do anything until we resolve that first,” Schenandoah said.
As a women-led initiative, Rematriation serves as a digital storytelling platform dedicated to “heal[ing] that trauma and find[ing] the way forward.”
Rematriation publishes online and social media content, including the Indigenous Women’s Voices film series that aims to further dialogue about dismantling social injustice through an Indigenous lens.
The organization also highlights Indigenous women leaders, including the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, a member of the Mvskoke Nation who was interviewed on the Rematriation podcast in 2022. Schenandoah believes that Rematriation’s community-building and healing initiatives make it more than just a magazine.
“Yes, we tell stories. Yes, we make films. Yes, we do podcasts,” Schenandoah said. “But at the end of the day, it is about educating. … We’re connecting as Indigenous people. We’re creating safe spaces for our Indigenous women and relatives to come together.”
Dozens of undergraduate students attended Schenandoah’s speech, including Mads Roberston ’27, who came to the event because of their Indigenous heritage and interest in learning more about other Indigenous experiences.
“I’m from South Dakota … so I’m not exactly as familiar with the local history and the local [Upstate New York] tribes,” Robertson said. “Learning more about their interactions with the government and their own tribes’ beliefs was very interesting to me.”
Event attendee Ho’ohila Kawelo ’25 agreed with Schenandoah’s criticism of Ginsburg’s involvement in the Sherrill case.
“I think [Ginsburg’s legacy] should be considered just with like a grain of salt,” Kawelo said. “She should definitely be recognized for the work that she did for women’s rights overall but also recognized for the fact that she didn’t support Indigenous women, Indigenous people and Indigenous sovereignty.”
Skylar Kleinman is a Sun Contributor and can be reached at [email protected].
Correction, March 15, 9:02 p.m.: A previous version of this article incorrectly labeled Rematriation as Rematriation Magazine. Rematriation was originally a magazine named Rematriation Magazine that transitioned into a non-profit named Rematriation. The Sun regrets this error, and the article has been corrected.