Angela Riley, an internationally-renowned indigenous rights scholar who is a professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and director of UCLA’s Native Nations Law and Policy Center, will present a free, public talk as part of the Bucknell Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Gender’s (CSREG) “Indigeneity: Making the Visible Seen” Series on Tuesday, April 16, at 7 p.m. in the Elaine Langone Center Forum. Riley’s talk is entitled “Between Indigenous Law and Federal Law.”
Riley directs the J.D./M.A. joint degree program in Law and American Indian Studies and is the UCLA campus representative on issues related to repatriation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Her research focuses on indigenous peoples’ rights, with a particular emphasis on cultural property and Native governance. Her work has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, California Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal and numerous others.
She began her career clerking for Chief Judge T. Kern of the Northern District of Oklahoma. Riley then worked as a litigator at Quinn Emanuel in Los Angeles, specializing in intellectual property litigation. In 2003 she was selected to serve on her tribe’s Supreme Court, becoming the first woman and youngest Justice of the Supreme Court of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation of Oklahoma. In 2010 and again in 2016, she was elected by her tribe’s General Council to serve as chief justice. She is the co-chair for the United Nations – Indigenous Peoples’ Partnership Policy Board, which is a commitment to the implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. She is also an Evidentiary Hearing Officer for the Morongo Band of Mission Indians.
CSREG facilitates University-wide discussion of issues of race, ethnicity and gender through its sponsored events.