This award winning essay was written by Joseph Austin for the 18th Annual Richard Grand Legal Writing Competition. Dedicated to those young Native warriors who carry the torch of a forgotten people, the light in the darkness, the hope of generations past, and the vision of a better future. It has been passed to us. Now, where do we take it? Where do we go from here? Don't be afraid of these questions because the answers lie within ourselves, our identity and way of life. ____

In English, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but for indigenous people, it seems to be the opposite—a word in our language is worth a thousand pictures. As a kid, and even today, I ask my father to help me interpret a Navajo word into English, and we both struggle to do it. Indeed, interpreting any language into another is challenging especially if those languages have different roots. Translating between Germanic languages is definitely easier than translating b

My first day of law school began with contracts law. In the days leading up to the first day of class, we were assigned readings, mostly consisting of cases. I’m pretty sure most of us going into that first day of contracts law read the cases but understood less than 25% of what we read, or at least that’s how I felt. The case captions, citations, facts, procedural history, statement of law, analysis, and conclusion were pretty much a foreign language to me. Even after my fat