Alt Legal WebinarTribe and True: Strategies for serving Native American trademark clients
Alt Legal Team | October 02, 2024
This webinar was recorded on November 14, 2024.
When helping Tribal Nations and Native entrepreneurs with their trademarks, it’s crucial to understand tribal law and the unique issues that come with it. Even if you don’t work with Native clients, being aware of tribal law and protections can also help your clients avoid lawsuits for claims under the Indian Arts and Craft Act or even trademark refusal notices for marks that falsely suggest a connection to a Native American tribe.
Join Alt Legal for a webinar where Carrie Frias and Samantha Wauls guide you through the basics of Tribal Law and how it intersects with trademarks. Topics include:
- A brief history of the theft of Native land, resources, culture, and IP
- An introduction to the Tribal Insignia Database
- Tips for working with Tribal nations and Native entrepreneurs
- An overview of the appropriation of Native terms and culture
- Examples of successful partnerships between tribes and corporations
- Suggestions for how tribal law can protect cultural property
View webinar recording here (free registration required.)
Download the presentation materials here.
Speakers
Carrie Frias
, Partner at Patterson Earnhart Real Bird & Wilson
Carrie A. Frias is a Partner at Patterson Earnhart Real Bird & Wilson. She has been working as an attorney for over fourteen (14) years. Her current practice focuses on Indian law, trademarks, copyrights, and issues of tribal jurisdiction. Recently, Carrie served as General Counsel for the Indian Affairs Department for the State of New Mexico. Previously, Carrie was Chief General Counsel for the Pueblo of Pojoaque where she was second chair in the Pueblo’s bad faith litigation against the State of New Mexico in federal court. Carrie also worked as an Associate for Anderson Indian Law. At Anderson Indian Law, Carrie lobbied on behalf of tribes in Washington D.C., and assisted in passing the tribal provisions in the VAWA Reauthorization which returned some criminal jurisdiction to tribes to prosecute domestic violence crimes on their reservations. Before relocating to Washington D.C., Carrie served as a prosecutor at the Hopi Tribe and the Pueblo of Laguna. Carrie also worked as a public defender and prosecutor for the State of New Mexico. She is passionate about defending the rights of Native women and children who are victims of crime.
Samantha Wauls
, Law Fellow at NBCUniversal
Samantha Wauls (Lakota/Lower Brule Sioux Tribe) currently works as a Legal Fellow for the Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians in Southern California and serves on the National Native American Bar Association’s Intellectual and Cultural Property Committee. Samantha recently completed a yearlong Entertainment Law & Policy Fellowship, where she worked at the Motion Picture Association and NBCUniversal. As an Entertainment Law Fellow, she worked on a variety of copyright and trademark issues and performed extensive legal research on anticounterfeiting and anti piracy strategies to address large-scale copyright and trademark infringement. Prior to law school, Samantha was a consultant for the New Mexico Indian Affairs Department to help implement the Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women’s (MMIW) Task Force Act. She also worked as a Project Manager for the National Center for Victims of Crime, where she managed a DOJ-funded project to build a web-based resource tool to connect American Indians and Alaska Native survivors of crime and abuse to culturally responsive services. She was also a teacher for her tribal community for two years.