The state of Washington has sworn in their first Native American as a Supreme Court Justice, Raquel Montoya-Lewis, only the second Native American in any state supreme court judgeship. She has been a tenured professor at Western Washington University following teaching at the University of New Mexico Law School; served as chief judge for the Nooksack Indian Tribe, the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe, and the Lummi Nation; and on the Washington Superior Court, in rural Whatcom County, from January 2015 to December 2019. Through this fall, she fills the seat of retiring justice Mary Fairhurst (who attended Montoya-Lewis’s swearing in despite battling cancer), and will then be on the November 2020 ballot. She joins five other women on the state supreme court bench: Barbara Madsen, Susan Owens, Sheryl Gordon McCloud, Mary Yu, and Chief Justice Debra L. Stephens.
Born in Spain in 1968 to a Native American father and an Australian Jewish mother, she grew up instilled with the importance of education by both sides of her family, attended the University of New Mexico for undergrad, then University of Washington to earn her law degree and a master’s in social work. Why both? To elucidate how law affects life.
“The two things, to me, go hand in hand,” she said.
Montoya-Lewis never intended to be a lawyer or a judge — even when she was in law school. “My intention, when I went to law school, was to study how institutions impact people; the law was something that I looked at as being an institution that had incredibly widespread impact,” she says. “My goal was to be a professor,
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After clerking for Pamela Minzner, New Mexico’s first female Chief Justice, and beginning her own practice, Raquel was asked by her own tribe to hear a complex civil litigation case for which they had no judges with her kind of legal training. That request, followed by others, led to tribal cases as a routine element of her work. In Washington state, the rarity of tribal judges entering state and federal court systems gave her little expectation of much higher judgeship — she knew only of Diane Humetewa, a current U.S. District Judge in Arizona, Anne McKeig, who has Native heritage and is on the Minnesota State Supreme Court, and Michael Burrage, a federal judge from 1994 to 2001, who is a member of the Choctaw nation.
“When I applied for appointment to Superior Court —the trial level in Washington State where we do civil trials and criminal felony trials, among other things— there really was no [no national example of a jurist] working for tribes and tribal courts making the leap to the state court side,” she says … “I think it really took some courage and vision on the part of Governor Inslee, who made [my] initial appointment to Superior Court, to imagine not only that I could do it, but that the community I was going to work with would recognize I was capable of doing that work.”
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Montoya-Lewis expects some people will think she got [the appointment to the state’s highest court] because of her heritage.
“People have said that about my successes since I was in high school,” she said Wednesday after Gov. Jay Inslee named her to [the post]. “My record says otherwise.”
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At the time of the state supreme court appointment, she was in her fifth year on the Whatcom County Superior Court, first by appointment by Inslee, then running unopposed for election and later for re-election. She had
presided over felony drug court for the last two years, and taught judges to recognize and deal with the kinds of implicit biases everyone brings to a situation.
“Whether we spoke to the lawyers who practiced before her, or the judges who reviewed her work — we’ve heard one thing over and over: that she’s exceptional,” Inslee said. “Some even used the word ‘superstar’. Everyone kept telling us she is the best trial judge they’ve ever had.”
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A member of the Pueblo of Isleta tribe of New Mexico, she doesn’t shy away from her heritage.
“I come from those who survived,” Montoya-Lewis, with a ceremonial bald eagle feather in her hair, said as she stood in front of the nine current justices and Inslee.
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Montoya-Lewis considers her story at one and the same time both unusual and utterly American. Through her father, she is an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Isleta, one of the larger 19 Pueblos within New Mexico, established in the 1300s. Also of Laguna Pueblo descent, he Joined the Air Force as a means of gaining a college education, discovered a love of military service and made it his career, the family moving with him to Spain, England, Texas, South Carolina, and beyond, but always returning to the reservation for important times in their lives, and settling there when he retired — Montoya-Lewis was in highschool by then.
“It was an opportunity for me to really connect with my Native community,” she says. “Growing up, I had a lot of connection with my culturally Jewish heritage from my mother’s side of the family.”
Montoya-Lewis sees an overlap of her Jewish and Native identities — namely, persistence and resilience, which is something she hopes to transmit to her own children, ages 14 and 17. “On both sides of my family, governments, other entities, really sought to wipe us out,” she says. “My father really instilled in me the importance of recognizing that I came from people who persisted, people who were lucky enough to survive, and that my existence is dependent upon those people’s persistence and resilience. That’s something I hope I pass on to my own children. I hope they pass it on to their [children], because that’s a very important concept for both the Jewish side of my family and the Native side of my family.”
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<big> She finds powerfully meaningful how strongly her heritages are intertwined — the defiant yet welcoming light of the Chanuka menorah in the window, the more so following so many recent lethal attacks upon Jews in the U.S.; and the essence to her of what it means to be Native — pueblo feast days, with many homes open to anyone, not only tribal members, to come sit at long tables and eat together “with people you don’t know,” often “where you don’t know the people who are feeding you — Our homes are open, our hearts are open” and we nourish one another.</big>
As it happens, there are very, very few Native American Jewish people. “I have met maybe three others,” Montoya-Lewis says. “So, I certainly can’t call that number a community. But, we do exist and I think that those communities have a lot in common with respect to those awful histories, and those powerful histories of survival.”
Montoya-Lewis said of Washington’s Supreme Court building: “The first thought I had was that these hallways, and those steps, were not built with [the diversity of] people like me in my mind.”
At the [swearing-in] ceremony, there was an invocation from the president of the Quinault Indian Nation, a welcome (and closing) song from Port Gamble S’Klallam Singers, and a benediction by Rabbi Seth Goldstein, a rabbi based in Olympia, Washington.
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At a press conference announcing her appointment, a reporter asked Montoya-Lewis, “What do you see as the biggest problem with implicit bias in the courts right now?”
“The biggest hurdle is getting people to understand that we all bring biases to our decision-making, that it’s across the board — I do it, you do it, we all do,” she replied. “That’s often, in my trainings, the first place we have to start: to recognize that it’s not something to be embarrassed about, but something to recognize.”
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“I was raised to remember that I come from those who survived. My ancestors on both sides of my family survived genocide, survived institutional boarding school, survived attempts to eradicate their cultures, and yet as my father reminded me often ‘we survived… I am here because of their resilience, their courage, their intelligence, and their deep commitment to what is just.”
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