It remains to be seen whether the onetime high school dropout's oral arguments last December persuaded the nations highest court that "Indian country exists in Alaska, as it does in the lower 48 states, where Native Americans live on autonomous reservations, mostly independent of state authority. Such a ruling, say lawyers for Alaska, would be devastating to the state and raise the specter of 226 separate tribal governments with authority to tax, police and regulate hunting and fishing on 44 million acres—leaving the state with full jurisdiction over less than 3 percent of privately held land.
But to Kendall-Miller, 42, whose mother was a member of the Athabaskan tribe and whose father was a white railroad engineer, something even greater is at stake. A court victory would—among other things—allow the villages to maintain their sovereignty, regulate their lands and protect their culture from the excesses of modern society. "It is one of the last chapters of how this nation deals with its aboriginal people," she says. "This is the last Indian war."
The conflict began about 11 years ago in Venetie, an icy town 150 miles north of Fairbanks, where 275 Neets'aii Gwich'in eke out a subsistence, blighted by alcoholism, a high suicide rate and scarce medical care. To cover water and road-wear costs, village leaders decided to impose a 5 percent tax on a contractor building a school. When the contractor tried to pass along the cost to the state, Alaskan officials balked, insisting that the village wasn't empowered to levy taxes.
In her federal court of appeals debut in Seattle in October 1996, Kendall-Miller proved otherwise—at least to the satisfaction of a three-judge panel that ruled on the case. With only three years' experience as a lawyer, she had previously handled minor matters in local courtrooms for Legal Services. As an attorney for the nonprofit Native American Rights Fund in Anchorage, she drew the Venetie case by chance. Her electrifying victory panicked the state, which authorized spending $1 million to battle the $65,567-a-year lawyer in a Supreme Court appeal.
With so little experience, and infant daughter Ruth waking her at 5 a.m., Kendall-Miller was uneasy about taking on what many consider the most important case in the history of Alaska Native law, which deals with Alaska's aboriginal people. But when she suggested that she be taken off it, her bosses disagreed. "She is doing an outstanding job for us," says Walter John Jr., local chief of Venetie. With the help of her husband, Lloyd Miller, 44, a Native-rights lawyer she married in 1996, Kendall-Miller began preparing relentlessly, seven days a week. As Miller watched his wife conquer her own exhaustion and the case's complexity, his confidence in her grew. "Heather has a calling for this case," he says.
In fact, Kendall-Miller had been determined since childhood to do something meaningful with her life. Her mother, Ruth, died of spinal meningitis when Heather was 2½, and though her father, Jack Ferguson, later remarried, she became a self-reliant tomboy, protecting feisty younger sister Nancy when she got into scraps in their middle-class Fairbanks neighborhood.
Like her two sisters (now also lawyers) and her younger brother, Heather dropped out of Lathrop High School at 16. A year later she married laborer Dennis Kendall, and they set off to homestead in the Ray Mountains, 140 miles north of Fairbanks. "Wolves howled on the bluff, graylings swam in the river, and grizzlies roamed the front yard," she says. In 1976 she gave birth to a daughter, Asha, now 22. Says Kendall-Miller: "It was paradise."
But Heather and Dennis grew apart and divorced, leaving her a single parent at 23. She took an $11-an-hour job as one of five women cooking and making beds for 500 men on the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline at Prudhoe Bay, above the Arctic Circle. But she couldn't abide being cooped up inside—or cleaning up after men. "That was not me," says Kendall-Miller. She spent the next 7½ years as a laborer, earning up to $20 an hour, rigging pipes, shoveling ditches and laying gravel in temperatures as low as-50°F. She did everything the other laborers did—almost. "I'm afraid of heights, so I didn't like walking pipe over water," she admits.
Life on the pipeline, working seven days a week, 10 hours a day, and watching people waste their hard-earned pay on alcohol and drugs, stiffened her resolve to get out and get educated. "Every time I went to work, I had to make it count" toward that goal, she says. In 1979 she went with Asha to live at a New Age meditation center in Berkeley, Calif., and earned her GED. In 1983 she enrolled at University of Alaska Fairbanks. It was not until age 32, in her junior year, that she discovered Native Alaska law. "I took to it like a fish to water," she says, "and the professor just reeled me in."
In 1988, serious about a legal career, she applied for and received a full scholarship to Harvard Law School. In 1991 she became the first Alaskan Native to graduate from that institution. Returning to Alaska, Kendall-Miller, an opera fan, clerked for the state's chief justice, then worked two years for a private law firm on a public interest advocacy fellowship.
By the time she went before the Supreme Court, Kendall-Miller was sure of her case. Even her legal foes gave her performance high marks. "She is a very articulate advocate," says Alaska attorney general Bruce Botelho, one of the principal attorneys opposing her. "She did a very credible job." As the justices hurled challenging questions at her, Kendall-Miller fielded them gracefully, feeling all the while, she says, a great sense of calm. "I wasn't nervous," she recalls. "I slept like a baby the night before. I felt the spirit of the people coming over me."
BRUCE FRANKEL
TINA KELLEY in Venetie
- Contributors:
- Tina Kelley.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
