Mr. Echo Hawk is Of Counsel to the Firm. He focuses on issues for and affecting Native American tribes including litigation, lobbying, economic development, self-determination, and tribal government.
Mr. Echo Hawk served as the highest-ranking federal official with exclusive responsibility for Indian Affairs while working as Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs in the United States Department of the Interior. This three-year service in the Obama Administration required that he take a leave of absence as a Professor of Law at Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, whose faculty he joined in 1995. Prior to his teaching career, Mr. Echo Hawk served as the Attorney General for the State of Idaho. On January 7, 1991, he became Idaho’s 30th Attorney General and the first American Indian in U.S. history elected as a state attorney general.
Mr. Echo Hawk was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1948, and was raised in Farmington, New Mexico. He played football for Brigham Young University on scholarship, earning Academic All-Conference honors, and graduated from BYU in 1970. After serving honorably in the U.S. Marine Corp., he earned a Juris Doctor Degree from the University of Utah in 1973 and took graduate studies in business at Stanford University.
Mr. Echo Hawk began his legal career as a legal services attorney working for impoverished Indian people in California, then opened a private law office in Salt Lake City. In 1977 he was hired as tribal attorney for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes at the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho, a position he held for over eight years, and later served as Special Legal Counsel to the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes.
In 1982 Mr. Echo Hawk was elected to the Idaho House of Representatives and was re-elected in 1984 before being named Bannock County Prosecutor in 1986. He won election to that office two years later. He served one term as Idaho’s Attorney General and was the Democratic nominee for Governor in 1994.
During his service as Attorney General for the State of Idaho, Mr. Echo Hawk was named one of 20 “people to watch” in the West by Newsweek magazine, and pictured on the cover of USA Weekend magazine as one of America’s 20 Most Promising People in Politics.”
In 1991, Mr. Echo Hawk was awarded George Washington University’s prestigious Martin Luther King medal for his contributions to human rights, and was honored as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention. As Idaho’s delegation Chair, he became the first American Indian in U.S. history to lead a state delegation to a national political convention.
For his work in the legislature, Mr. Echo Hawk received Phi Delta Kappa’s “Friend of Education” award. He was named a “Distinguished Citizen” by the Idaho Statesman newspaper, one of the “Best of a New Generation “by Esquire magazine, and “Best Freshman Legislator” by news reporters covering the Idaho Legislature.
Mr. Echo Hawk was honored in 1995 with the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s prestigious Silver Anniversary Award, given to a select few prominent athletes who have distinguished themselves in their careers and personal lives. He received Distinguished Alumnus Awards from both Brigham Young University (1992) and the University of Utah (2003).
Mr. Echo Hawk taught courses on Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Criminal Trial Practice, Evidence, and Federal Indian Law for 15 years at the J. Reuben Clark Law School. In addition to his work for the Firm, Mr. Echo Hawk also presently serves as Special Counsel for Indian Affairs for the Governor and Attorney General of the State of Utah.
President Clinton appointed Mr. Echo Hawk to serve on the “Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention” in January 1999, working with the Attorney General of the United States to coordinate the federal government’s efforts to combat juvenile delinquency, and was reappointed in 2000.
On March 31, 2012 Mr. Echo Hawk was called to serve as a General Authority Seventy in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On October 6, 2018 Mr. Echo Hawk was released from full-time church service and is now designated as an Emeritus General Authority Seventy.
Mr. Echo Hawk is a member of the Pawnee Indian Tribe. He and his wife, Terry, have six children, thirty grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.