Wilkinson, Charles F. 1941–

PERSONAL: Born July 29, 1941. Education: Denison University, B.A., 1963; Stanford University, LL.B., 1966.

ADDRESSES: Office—University of Colorado School of Law, Office of Admissions, 403 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0403.

CAREER: Attorney. Called to Arizona, California, and Oregon State bars; Lewis & Roca, Phoenix, AZ, associate, 1966–68; Bronson, Bronson & McKinnon, San Francisco, CA, associate, 1968–71; Native American Rights Fund, Boulder, CO, staff attorney, 1971–75; University of Oregon, School of Law, Eugene, OR, assistant professor, 1975–78, associate professor, 1978–81, professor of law, 1981–87; University of Colorado School of Law, Boulder, professor of law, 1987–, Moses Lasky Professor of Law, 1989–, distinguished professor, 1997–. Visiting professor, University of Minnesota, 1981, University of Colorado, 1984–85, and University of Michigan, 1986. Center of the American West, University of Colorado, cofounder, 1987, co-chair, 1987–97, vice[00a0]chair, 1997–. Member of board of directors, Northern Lights Institute, 1986–97, Center for Environmental Law and Policy, and Western Environmental Law Center; member of advisory board, Natural Resources Law Center; trustee for Grand Canyon Trust; chair of Grand Canyon Trust Board. Has also worked for U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Justice, and the Interior, as a special counsel, on committees, and as a negotiations facilitator between U.S. government and native tribes; currently mediating negotiations between the City of Seattle, WA, and the Muckleshoot tribe.

MEMBER: Wilderness Society (member of governing council, 1988–2000).

AWARDS, HONORS: Professor of the Year, Oregon Law School Phi Delta Phi, 1980; Ersted Award for Distinguished Teaching, University of Oregon, 1982; Faculty Excellence Award, University of Oregon, 1986; National Conservation Achievement Award in Education, National Wildlife Association, 1989; Award for Teaching Excellence, University of Colorado Law School, 1997; Colorado Book Award, 2000, for Messages from Frank's Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way.

WRITINGS:

(With David H. Getches and Daniel M. Rosenfelt) Cases and Materials on Federal Indian Law, West Publishing (St. Paul, MN), 1979, fourth edition, with David H. Getches and Robert A. Williams, 1998.

(With George Cameron Coggins) Federal Public Land and Resources Law, Foundation Press (Mineola, NY), 1981, fourth edition, with George Cameron Coggins and John D. Leshy, 2001.

(With H. Michael Anderson) Land and Resource Planning in the National Forests, Island Press (Washington, DC), 1987.

American Indians, Time, and the Law: Native Societies in a Modern Constitutional Democracy, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1987.

The American West: A Narrative Bibliography and a Study in Regionalism, University Press of Colorado (Niwot, CO), 1989.

(With George Cameron Coggins and John D. Leshy) Federal Public Land and Resources Law: Statutory Supplement, Foundation Press (Mineola, NY), 1990, new edition, 1996.

Values and Western Water: A History of the Dominant Issues, University of Colorado Natural Resources Law Center (Boulder, CO), 1990.

Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West, Island Press (Washington, DC), 1992.

The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 1992, revised and updated edition, Johnson Books (Boulder, CO), 1999.

(With David H. Getches, Bates, and MacDonnell) Searching out the Headwaters: Change and Rediscovering in Western Water Policy, Island Press (Washington, DC), 1993.

(With Riebsame, Robb, and Limerick) Atlas of the New West: Portrait of a Changing Region, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 1997.

Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest, Island Press (Washington, DC), 1999.

Messages from Frank's Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way, photo essay by Hank Adams, maps by Diane Sylvain, University of Washington Press (Seattle, WA), 2000.

Away out over Everything: The Olympic Peninsula and the Elwha River, photographs by Mary Peck, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 2004.

Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations, Norton (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to books, including Sweet Reason, Oregon Committee for the Humanities, 1983; Western Public Lands:[00a0]The Management of Natural Resources in a Time of Declining Federalism, Rowman & Allanheid, 1984; Western Water Made Simple, Island Press, 1987; American History, Harlan Davidson, 1988; Defending the National Parks, National Parks and Conservation Association, 1988; "He Shall Not Pass This Way Again": The Legacy of justice William O. Douglas, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990; Beyond the Mythic West, Peregrine Smith Books, 1990; Natural Resources Policy and Law: Trends and Directions, Island Press, 1993; Arrested Rivers, University Press of Colorado, 1994; Heart of the Land: Essays on Last Great Places, Pantheon Books, 1994; To Wallace Stegner, The Geography of Hope:[00a0]A Tribute to Wallace Stegner, Sierra Club Books, 1996; Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness, Milkweed Editions, 1996; Wallace Stegner and the Continental Vision, Island Press, 1997; Jim Stimson, Mono Lake: Explorations and Reflections, Orion Publications, 1998; and The Essential Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries, University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. Also contributor to law reviews, including Washington Law Review, Arizona Law Review, Idaho Law Review, Public Land and Resources Law Review, University of Colorado Law Review, and Brigham Young University Law Review; contributor to other periodicals, including Journal of Forestry, American West, Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, Sierra, Western Wildlands, Northern Lights, Environmental Law, Natural Resources Journal, Pacific Historian, High Country News, Pacific Discovery, and Plateau Journal. Managing editor and member of board of authors and editors for Felix S. Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, Michie Bobbs-Merrill, 1982 edition.

SIDELIGHTS: An environmentalist, historian, professor, and legal scholar, Charles F. Wilkinson has been chronicling the use and abuse of resources in the American West for years. He has also emerged as a leading expert on the legal status of Native American tribes, with their curious mixture of sovereign independence and very real limitations imposed by state and federal officials, corporations eager to exploit resources, and the poverty of the reservations.

In The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West the author brings together a series of essays on the changing nature of the West, where mining and ranching are being supplemented by greater tourism, lighter industry, and more emphasis on recreation. He urges greater land use planning and stricter regulation of both public and private land to encourage sustainable development. A Publishers Weekly reviewer found the collection to be "a thoughtful, stimulating approach to solving the West's environmental problems."

Wilkinson digs deeper into this issue with Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water and the Future of the West, which explores a wide range of issues and problems that seem to share a common source. As Lance Clark explained in American Forests, the author "sees one major theme running through all these issues: Western policies on resource issues have not changed significantly since the 19th century, when rapid westward expansion shaped policy." These poli-cies were also shaped by large and powerful private interests, such as wealthy ranchers and mineral companies that often maximized their profits to the exclusion of environmental considerations and the rights of Native Americans. Wilkinson urges a more balanced policy of conservation that takes the interests of the region's varied inhabitants into consideration. "Part history, part policy analysis, the book is a powerful argument for sustainable use of western resources," concluded Paul H. Carlson in the American Indian Quarterly.

As Wilkinson indicates in Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest, "a powerful narrative with wide appeal," according to Library Journal contributor Patricia Ann Owens, there are a number of hurdles to overcome on the way to sustainable, inclusive development. Drawing on history and his own experience, the author provides a look at the Colorado Plateau, where Native American reservations, national parks, and coal and uranium deposits provide a setting for numerous conflicts; the area has unfortunately become a target for shady lawyers, officious government agents, and greedy businessmen. Messages from Frank's Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way focuses on a particular incident, but one with large implications. It tells the story of the Nisqually tribe's long and ultimately successful effort to get the federal government to acknowledge the tribe's fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest, a struggle that became knows as the "Fish Wars." Although guaranteed by treaty, these rights were highly controversial and often ignored before activist Billy Frank was able to convince a federal judge to reserve fifty percent of the salmon and steelhead catch to tribal members. As Booklist contributor David Pitt noted, Wilkinson and his fellow authors "have written a history not only of a single event but also of the fight for Native American rights in America."

As a former attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, Wilkinson is intimately familiar with the struggle to secure Native American rights in contemporary society. In Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations he provides an overview of that struggle, from the 1950s to 2002, a period that saw a fundamental shift toward greater respect for reservations on the part of both government and Native Americans themselves. "Treaty rights and the court victories upholding them are examined, along with the role of the American Indian Movement and the impact of casinos on modern reservation economies," reported Nathan E. Bender in the Library Journal. Emboldened by the civil-rights movement, Native American activists and tribal lawyers have been much more aggressive, and successful, in gaining autonomy on the reservations from authoritarian Bureau of Indian Affairs officials. In fact, it was the determination of federal officials in the 1950s to get Native Americans off the reservations and into urban centers that created an educated, professional Indian middle class that was able to come back decades later and assert their rights in the courts. "There are still miles to go, but as Wilkinson shows, today's tribes are stronger than they've ever been," commented Booklist reviewer Rebecca Maksil.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Forests, March-April, 1993, Lance Clark, review of Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West, p. 57.

American Indian Quarterly, spring, 1994, Paul H. Carlson, review of Crossing the Next Meridian, p. 262; spring, 1994, Jacqueline Baker-Barnhart, review of The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West, p. 259.

Booklist, January 15, 1994, Joseph Keppler, review of The Eagle Bird, p. 954; December 15, 2000, David Pitt, review of Messages from Frank's Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way, p. 769; February 1, 2005, Rebecca Maksel, review of Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations, p. 924.

Library Journal, June 15, 1999, Patricia Ann Owens, review of Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest, p. 92; January 1, 2005, Nathan E. Bender, review of Blood Struggle, p. 130.

Publishers Weekly, January 13, 1992, review of The Eagle Bird, p. 42; November 9, 1992, review of Crossing the Next Meridian, p. 71; January 3, 2005, review of Blood Struggle, p. 49.

Sierra, November-December, 2001, Christian Martin, review of Messages from Frank's Landing, p. 74.

ONLINE

University of Colorado Boulder Web site, http://www.colorado.edu/ (May 18, 2005), "Charles F. Wilkinson."