A beloved educator and leader in environmental and Native American law, Professor Charles Wilkinson of Colorado University, Boulder had a profound impact throughout the American West and beyond.
The death of the great Charles Wilkinson has come as a terrible blow to the environmental and Native American law community. Wilkinson died in Boulder, Colorado, on June 6, 2023. He was 81. His work on environmental law policy and Native American law is regarded as some of the best work in those fields of the last generation. He was a charismatic law professor, mentor to scores of talented students, and a scholarly environmental activist.
I knew him a little. My former wife, Etta Walker was one of his beloved students. It worked both ways. She took his famous water law class at CU Boulder, during which there was a two-week field study down in Arizona. This was one of Wilkinson’s most coveted courses. Every year he chose a river or bioregion. The students assembled immense dossiers on every aspect of that watershed (geology, geography, economy, Native American traditions, politics, meteorology, literature, etc.). I saw one of these class studies, all in big loose-leaf binders, stretching together across an 8-foot-wide bookshelf. And when the dossiers were complete, the class — armed with all that information — took to the road to go see the watershed for themselves. My wife and Professor Wilkinson bonded for life on that trip. Whenever over the years they found themselves in the same zip code they invariably recounted the barbed conversations they had in pubs and seminar rooms of the American outback. Probably a hundred of his former students tell much the same story of those field trips.
I brought Professor Wilkinson to Portland for a symposiums on the Lewis and Clark Expedition around the year 2006. He gave a beautiful lecture about the world Lewis and Clark encountered and how it has been reshaped and repopulated in the 200 years since they passed through American Serengeti. At one point Charles talked about the salmon in the Columbia in 1805. He said “Think of it. There was a time when there were so many millions of salmon in the Columbia that you could almost walk across their backs from one shore to the other.” As he said this, his voice choked, and he turned his head away for a few seconds before he could finish his lecture. It was a beautiful moment. Everyone was loving what he had to say, and suddenly they got a glimpse of the depths of Wilkinson’s passion for the integrity of western landscapes, his deep sense of loss for what we have erased.
On stage, before an audience of 350, I asked Charles if it is possible to exaggerate Theodore Roosevelt’s contributions to American conservation.
“No,” he said, and went on to talk about the ways in which Roosevelt, a blue blood from New York City, fell in love with the American West beginning in 1883 and went on to set aside 230 million acres of the public domain as National Park, National Monument, National Game Preserve, Nation Forest, and National Wildlife Refuge. Roosevelt invented the National Wildlife Refuge system in 1903 when he used an executive order to create Federal Bird Sanctuaries, beginning with Pelican Island in the Indian River in Florida.
On another occasion, this one at CU Boulder, I gave a lecture on John Wesley Powell. I was about a third of the way through my talk. Charles was sitting behind me on a dais. I recited a passage by Powell in which he says that he and the boys had lunch on the brink of the canyon and dangled their feet over a precipice of at least 2,000 feet. At the end of the passage, Powell says, “And yet I can not look on and see another do the same. I must either tell him to come away or turn my head.” When I said that I heard a little gasp of recognition from Charles. He knew exactly what Powell was saying. He had lived it with close friends and a son. Sitting on the lip of a canyon is an inherently dangerous thing to do, and yet we are drawn to the experience. But to watch your son sitting over the abyss …
He was a prolific writer: 14 books. I particularly admired Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the American West (1993), Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations (2006), and his seminal American Indians, Time, and the Law. His most personal book is Eagle Boy.
It’s true that Wilkinson wrote important and well-regarded books, some essential for any study of “Indian law.” But his true greatness was in his teaching, mentoring, and inspiring law students. He’s had an enormous, almost incalculable impact on environmental law studies. His students went on to important and remarkable careers in public land policy, conservation organizations, and university faculties. There are hundreds of Wilkinsonites in important and often powerful positions in the larger land use and environmental world.
Part of the Wilkinson magic was in his style. He was a handsome man with a great smile, half smirk, a little wan, but genuine and generous. His round glasses always seemed too small, as if his learning, wit, and insights were funneling from his brain through those spectacles. Some of his books recount his actual adventures in the American West, so there is a whiff of Thoreau-Edward Abbey in some of his writings, but the dominant persona is a man who spent most of his time writing and teaching at a distinguished law school. So, it is a scholar who might be seen with his legs dangling over the lip of Grand Canyon or hiking the Utah plateau, rather than an Abbey-like figure who lives the full wilderness life but can also write books.
Wilkinson played an important role in the creation of Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument (September 18, 1996) and Bears Ears National Monument (December 28, 2016).
In an article in the Arizona State law review, “‘AT BEARS EARS WE CAN HEAR THE VOICES OF OUR ANCESTORS IN EVERY CANYON AND ON EVERY MESA TOP’: The Creation of the First Native National Monument,” Wilkinson provided a brilliant explanation of the reasons why the monument was so important, and emphasized not only the importance of that 1.3 million acre landscape to a large number of Native tribes, but he reminded us several times that this was America’s first “Native American Monument,” a much overdue departure from the previous top-down protocols of national monument designation. Native Americans drove the project. They were at the table in every room where decisions were made.
Wilkinson wrote:
“Further, the tone and tenor of the (Monument) Proclamation is central to its meaning. The writing is powerful and often lyrical. Far more than any earlier proclamation, this one, because of the tribes’ deep involvement in its development, is truly an Indian national monument. Although not explicitly stated, the purpose, best understood, of the Bears Ears National Monument is to honor the land; the tribes, past and present; and the tribes’ relationship to the land.”
This is properly modest but a little disingenuous. A goodly portion of that poetic proclamation found its way to paper through Wilkinson’s pen, though he would be the first to say he was mostly just shaping Native thoughts and Native language formulations as an amanuensis.
Wilkinson could have done constitutional law or the law of contracts. He could have made millions of dollars working in a commercial law firm. But he taught at a public university, gave his mighty energies and his first-rate mind to the betterment (and empowerment) of the lives of Native Americans and the protection and celebration of America’s public lands. He had become the grand lama of these fields.
That’s the kind of achievement worthy of the National Medal of Honor. Where’s the lifetime achievement award for someone of such significance?