2026 – LAW

Arlinda Locklear is one of the nation’s foremost attorneys in federal Indian law. She began her career as a staff attorney at the Boulder, Colorado, office of the Native American Rights Fund (NARF). In 1982, she became the directing attorney of NARF’s Washington office.

In 1983, she became one of the first Native American women to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court. In Solem v. Bartlett, she successfully defended the right of the Sioux people to try their own residents for crimes committed on reservation territory. Two years later, Locklear successfully argued the case of Oneida Indian Nations v. County of Oneida, leading the Supreme Court to decide that the state of New York had wrongfully taken possession of lands belonging to the Oneida tribe. Among her legal victories, Locklear led the successful legal battle where the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation in Arizona won its water rights.

In the late 1980s, Locklear took up the Lumbee Tribe’s long battle for federal recognition, representing her own people in that effort for more than two decades. Her work has been widely honored: she was named Outstanding Woman of Color by the National Institute for Women of Color in 1987, and in 2012 she received the American Bar Association’s Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, which recognized her expertise in Native American law and tribal federal recognition and called her “an inspiration” to other Native American women lawyers.