Long a go-to litigator in Indian Country, the nonprofit Native American Rights Fund is stepping up to meet the high demand for its legal advocacy, moving to a larger headquarters and adding attorneys in recent years.

The Boulder, Colorado-based organization has been developing a new legal institute focused on water issues and continuing its longtime work, which includes helping to coordinate strategy in high-stakes cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Its efforts touch on a wide range of topics, including the protection of sacred places, child welfare, religious freedom, the environment, voting rights and more.

But the need for legal representation "is still outpacing what our growth has been," said Deputy Director Matthew Campbell, an enrolled member of the Native Village of Gambell in Alaska who joined NARF in 2013 as a staff attorney. The group receives roughly 1,600 requests for assistance per year, he said, but typically takes up only a few dozen annually.

"There's just way too many that we get that we just can't help with, unfortunately," Campbell told Law360. "We know the need is there, and so we're trying to meet that need and do the best we can."

In addition to its Colorado headquarters, NARF has branch offices in Washington, D.C., and Anchorage, Alaska. While the number of lawyers NARF employs has gone up and down over its 55-year history, the attorney headcount is now at 26, growing from 17 in 2018 and doubling since 2010, according to figures provided by the organization.

Staff attorney Lenny Powell, who focuses on voting rights and appellate litigation, joined the D.C. office last year from Jenner & Block LLP's appellate and Supreme Court practice, where he was a special counsel.

Powell was elected to the tribal council of the Hopland Band of Pomo Indians in California when he was just 21. He served on the council from 2010 to 2013 before attending Harvard Law School and becoming a lawyer. He told Law360 he believes it is "important for the attorneys advocating on behalf of tribal rights to have their work grounded in Indian Country."

"I think that is something that NARF brings to every case that it litigates," he said, whether the attorneys are tribal citizens, have worked for tribes or have lived in Indian Country. "There's a big gamut in terms of the various types of perspectives that NARF attorneys bring."

While at Jenner & Block, Powell worked on cases including the landmark Haaland v. Brackeen, in which the Supreme Court in 2023 upheld the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act. Jenner & Block attorneys represented three tribes in that case: the Cherokee Nation, the Morongo Band of Mission Indians, and the Oneida Nation.

The high court's 7-2 ruling was a major victory for Native communities, which said that the case could have threatened tribal sovereignty. The case dated back to 2017, when Texas joined a Fort Worth couple in suing the federal government over ICWA, a 1978 law enacted to stop federal and state practices of removing Native children from their communities.

The ruling was an example of the success of NARF's work through its Tribal Supreme Court Project, said professor Matthew L.M. Fletcher of the University of Michigan Law School. The project, a joint effort with the National Congress of American Indians, began in 2001 and aims to improve strategy and promote greater coordination in high court cases that could affect tribes' rights and interests.

This type of collective legal strategy in Supreme Court cases "was not happening in the 20th century, not in a meaningful way," Fletcher said.

The project launched after two Supreme Court rulings, Atkinson Trading Co. v. Shirley and Nevada v. Hicks, "struck devastating blows to tribal sovereignty and tribal jurisdiction — the most fundamental elements of continued tribal existence and principles of federal Indian law," according to the project's website.

In Haaland v. Brackeen, the Tribal Supreme Court Project coordinated the amicus brief strategy in support of ICWA.

"You need to corral a lot of different types of entities," including academics, attorneys, and various organizations and tribes, to give the court the full picture of the issue through briefs, Fletcher said

NARF traces its roots to 1970, when it began as a pilot project of California Indian Legal Services. The next year, NARF broke off from California Indian Legal Services and moved to Boulder. Co-founder John Echohawk is today the organization's executive director.

One of NARF's first cases resulted in what became known as the "Boldt Decision," a 1974 landmark ruling that recognized the fishing rights of tribes in Washington state.

The organization's services remain crucial due to the constraints many tribes face when it comes to legal representation, said Danelle Smith, a founding partner of the Native-owned Big Fire Law & Policy Group LLP.

"NARF serves a very critical role for Indian Country, because a lot of tribes don't have the resources internally to litigate major issues," said Smith, who is general counsel to the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska.

Two decades ago, Smith worked as a legal intern at NARF's Washington, D.C., office, helping with research in the Cobell v. Salazar class action against the federal government over the alleged mismanagement of tribal trust funds, which resulted in a $3.4 billion settlement.

In recent years, Smith has partnered with NARF on cases including a lawsuit against the U.S. Army seeking the repatriation of the remains of two Winnebago boys who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.

NARF, which had an annual budget in 2024 of $21.7 million, takes up cases that will have the biggest impact, leaders say. Its funding comes from individual and corporate donors, foundations, government agencies, religious groups and tribal organizations.

It has long focused on five priority areas: "preserving tribal existence, protecting tribal natural resources, promoting Native American human rights, holding governments accountable to Native Americans, and developing Indian law and educating the public about Indian rights, laws and issues."

In 2023, NARF announced the creation of the Tribal Water Institute, which aims to bolster tribes' legal capabilities in water issues by training young attorneys, providing legal support and developing policy ideas. The Walton Family Foundation committed $1.4 million over three years to start the institute.

Also that year, NARF moved to a larger headquarters at the foot of Boulder's Flatirons mountains. Previously, it was based in a former fraternity house next to the University of Colorado Boulder campus.

In addition to environmental work, voting rights have also been an area of investment for NARF, Campbell, the deputy director, told Law360.

In a recent win for NARF in the voting rights arena, the Supreme Court in January declined to hear a challenge by two local North Dakota Republican Party officials to the state's legislative redistricting plan.

In the case, Walen et al. v. Burgum et al., NARF intervened on behalf of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation and individual tribal members to defend a subdistrict that encompasses the Fort Berthold Reservation. The district gives Native voters "a long-awaited opportunity to elect state representation," NARF said at the time of the Supreme Court ruling.

Native Americans historically lag other groups in voter turnout, and obstacles to voter registration and participation include "a lack of home mail delivery and residential addresses on homes, geographic isolation, poor road networks, and technological barriers, among many others," according to a report NARF released last year.

Voting barriers "can create a vicious cycle," staff attorney Powell said.

"You are unable to elect representatives that actually represent you, and then when the legislature goes to draw new districts, you don't have people in the legislature looking out for your interests to ensure a fair map is drawn that allows you to elect representatives in the future," he said. "And so breaking that cycle can be very difficult, especially without legal action."

For Powell, it's been deeply meaningful to now focus his practice entirely on Native American legal matters.

"At the end of the day, I find all sorts of law interesting," Powell said, "but the law that means the most to me, personally, is this."

–Additional reporting by Crystal Owens. Graphics by Ben Jay. Editing by Robert Rudinger.

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