RBG was at the ready to help tribal women in NM

THE DAY that I had lunch with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, we were in New York in 1978 at a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union National Board. She was an ACLU general counsel, one of three, and had already won several landmark sex discrimination cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. I was the New Mexico representative on the ACLU Board.

At lunch, she asked me just two questions. The first was whether I thought the ACLU should enter the Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez case then before the U.S. Supreme Court, on equal protection grounds. A Santa Clara mother and daughter had sued the tribe in federal court, challenging a tribal ordinance denying tribal membership to female members who married outside the tribe, when membership was extended to children of male members who married outside the tribe.

I told her I didn’t know a lot about Indian law, but I knew that tribal sovereignty and the right of a tribe to determine its own membership were of critical importance to Native Americans, and that I thought the ACLU should stay out of the case.

She then asked her second question, “Are those women well-represented?” I said that I was pretty sure that they were. “Good,” she said. “Because if they’re not, I’m coming into the case personally to represent them!”

TASIA YOUNG Albuquerque