Basic Information

I’m Peter d’Errico. I’ve been involved with Indigenous peoples’ legal issues for more than fifty years, beginning in 1968, fresh out of Yale Law School, as a legal services attorney with Dinébe’iiná Náhiiłna be Agha’diit’ahii, the Navajo legal services project.

I taught Legal Studies for more than thirty years at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. During the whole time, I represented and consulted with Native clients in state and federal litigation.

These experiences taught me to view America from outside, to critique historical and current manifestations of its presumption of superiority and claim of a right of domination.

My book, Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples, published September 2022 by Praeger, grew out of this work.

Globally, Native peoples and their lands are at the bleeding edge of extractive violence carried out by a corporate-state system in the name of “progress” and “economic development”, chasing the fantasies of infinite “growth” and “profit” that drive the violence.

John Trudell emphasized that we’re all in this together when he spoke in 2001 at The Women’s Building, San Francisco, “What it Means to Be a Human Being”:

Every one of us is the descendant of a tribe. Every person in this room is a descendant of a tribe at some point in our ancestral evolution. So in our collective, genetic, ancestral memory, we had the experience of encountering the tech-no-logic perceptional reality. Whatever happened to the Indians here, trust me, it happened to the tribes of Europe.

I offer my writings as a tool in what Muscogee Creek medicine teacher Phillip Deere called “a proper education … a rightful education”.