Raymond Cross

Cross began his legal career in 1973 as a staff attorney with California Indian Legal Services in its Mendocino County office located in Ukiah, California.[4]

Cross served from 1975 through 1980 as the Indian Law Support Center Director for the Native American Rights Fund.[4]

During his tenure at the Native American Rights Fund, Cross represented the Klamath Indian Tribe in its successful litigation effort to establish its federally-protected water rights for the preservation of the tribe's aboriginal hunting, fishing, gathering, and trapping practices within the Klamath Marsh region of south central Oregon. He also represented the Pascua Yaqui Tribe in its successful effort to secure federal recognition of its aboriginal status as an American Indian tribe entitled to federal protection and services.[1][4]

Cross returned to the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in 1981 to serve as tribal attorney for his people, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation. He represented his tribe in two U.S. Supreme Court cases, Three Affiliated Tribes v. Wold Engineering 467 U.S. 138[5] and Three Affiliated Tribes v. Wold Engineering 476 U.S. 877,[6] in which he successfully argued that state courts be opened to tribal damage actions against non-Indian defendants and reaffirmed fundamental principles of tribal sovereign immunity established in Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s Trust Doctrine.

He also took on the cause of his father, Martin Cross, in representing his tribal people in their long standing just compensation claim against the United States for its 1949 taking of over 156,000 acres of reservation land as the site for the Garrison Dam, the world's fourth largest rolled earth dam. Cross spent eight years lobbying Congress, and in 1992, Congress awarded the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation over $149 million in just compensation for wrongs imposed on the tribal people by the Garrison Dam.

Due to these legal victories, Cross was named a Bush Foundation fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School where he earned a Master of Public Administration and met his wife, Kathleen Cross (née Johnston).

Cross served on the faculty of the California Polytechnic State University from 1990 through 1993 and at the University of Montana from 1993 to 2015 as an expert on American Indian and environmental law.[4]

Cross has authored numerous works on American Indian law interpretation and environmental law.[7][8]

In addition to his own writing, Cross’ legal career is chronicled in the books “Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes and the Trial That Forged a Nation” and “Savages and Scoundrels” by Paul Vandevelder.[4][9]