In 1964, Dan Press was in his first year of law school and was not liking it; he wanted a way out. He applied for a volunteer spot with AmeriCorps VISTA, the domestic version of the Peace Corps, and was intrigued by a position on an Indian reservation.
“I knew nothing about Indians, but it sounded like a good opportunity,” says Press, who was raised in Flushing, in the Queens borough of New York City. “So, I signed up and the next thing I knew I was on a plane to Montana,” he says.
It was a move that changed the course of his life.
Press, an attorney and now 78 years old, has spent his entire working life fighting on behalf of Indian tribes. He helped found the Tribal Employment Rights Officein 1977, which now has 300 offices around the country. His first legal battles involved pushing for enforcement of laws passed a half a century earlier to give Native Americans preference in hiring for employment on Indian lands brought by outside agencies and firms, but until Press challenged practices and won, those laws were largely ignored.
During his long legal career from working for The Navajo-Hopi Legal Services Program for the Navajo Nation in Arizona to his work at Van Ness Feldman, a law firm in Washington, D.C., he’s also counseled Indian tribes in advancing legislation that’s resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in land settlements and the procurement of new health facilities. He helped found the first intertribal bank in the nation. Press has also been a champion of promoting trauma-informed initiatives, which in 2018 earned him a Public Advocacy award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies for “Outstanding and Fundamental Contributions to Advancing the Social Understanding of Trauma.” In addition, he is the author of “A How-To Handbook on Creating Comprehensive, Integrated Trauma-Informed Initiatives in Native American Communities.”
Press is the general and legislative counsel for the Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP), which helps local, county and state initiatives advocate for legislation to expand trauma-informed practices across the country. He also served as general counsel for The Roundtable on Native American Trauma-informed Initiatives. Both organizations are pro bono clients of his law firm. He has taught classes on tribal government at Columbia University, including “The Holocaust and Genocide in America”, in which students looked at common themes that arose in the genocides of Native Americans and of Jews.
On his first foray into Indian land in Montana, Press tutored children and coached basketball on the Crow Indian Reservation in the southern part of the state. While there, he was approached by Joseph Medicine Crow, the last living war chief of the Crow tribe, an oral historian and writer, who chronicled the living stories of the Crow. Medicine Crow asked Press to translate Crow treaties with the federal government into everyday language. (Medicine Crow, who won a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his war time service during WW II and for his work chronicling Crow history, died in 2016). The project was a turning point for Press. “It made me interested in Indian law,” he recalls.
ACEs Too High 
It is astonishingly atrocious that such a large number of human beings, however precious their souls, can be considered thus treated as though disposable, even to otherwise free, democratic and relatively civilized nations. One can observe this with the many Canadian indigenous children having been buried in unmarked graves.
When those people take note of this, tragically, they’re vulnerable to begin subconsciously perceiving themselves as beings without value.
Though perhaps subconsciously, a somewhat similar inhuman(e) devaluation is observable in external attitudes toward the daily civilian lives lost in protractedly devastating war zones and famine-stricken nations; the worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers. Thus, those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news.
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Definitely J&J will root out Native American Trauma.
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Jijohnson@sc.pima.gov
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I tried to post a similar reply earlier today, to an e-mail from the ACLU, concerning the ‘Generational Review’ provision of the Iroquois Constitution noted in 1988 US Congressional Resolution #331-acknowledging the role of the Iroquois constitution in the development of our US constitution. “Gayaneshagowa” was the name of the Iroquois constitution–Which consensus was reached on in 1150 AD (after 55 years of ‘editing’ (reaching Consensus)-which gave Iroquois WOMEN the Rights to: Assert, Debate, Vote, and Declare War; left us the ”democratic tools” like ‘Recall Petitions’ and Ballot Initiatives; and provided for ‘Generational Review’- as they might have used the concept of ‘Generational Review’ to address ‘problems’ we now refer to as “Trans-generational Trauma”. In writings by Iroquois Historian Elizabeth Tooker, published by Duke University, that I scanned [partially, not yet completely], I’ve yet to come across any substantive reference to ‘Generational Review’. I saw no reference to a ‘Supreme Court’. I didn’t see, but I’ve yet to read he ‘Uncensored’ version of: “Felix S. Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law”-found in the University of New Mexico Press 1973 edition of Cohen’s original manuscript The “Fore-word” of that edition explains the U.S. Dep’t. of the Interior’s (and GPO – Gov’t Printing Office) 1950’s collaborative attempt to ‘censor’/replace most of the original 1942 texts…
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