Upcoming Webinar: Strengthening Tribal Victim Protections: A Guide to Drafting Victim’s Rights Codes

Heather Torres serves as TLPI’s Program Director. She is a graduate of UCLA School of Law’s Critical Race Studies program, where she focused her courses and research on Federal Indian law and the racialization of American Indian identity. During law school, Heather served as the President of the Native American Law Students Association, Executive Editor of the Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture & Resistance, and Senior Editor of the Chican@/Latin@ Law Review. Her legal work experience includes serving as an Udall Foundation intern for the Senate Committee of Indian Affairs, extern with the Children’s Law Center of Los Angeles ICWA Court, Native American Summer Associate at Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves & Savitch LLP, student tribal code drafter in the Tribal Legal Development Clinic, and an UC Public Service Law Fellow with the Tribal Law & Policy Institute 2017-2018. During her fellowship, she provided research and drafting assistance to tribal code development resources, Wellness Court publications, Capacity Building Center for Tribes publications, and the Tribal Court Clearinghouse (www.tlpi.org).

Bonnie Clairmont serves from TLPI’s Minnesota office. Prior to her employment with TLPI, she was the Outreach/Client Services Coordinator for Sexual Offense Services of Ramsey County, a rape crisis center. While employed there, Bonnie provided leadership in the development of Sexual Assault Response Teams and Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner programs and offered guidance with multidisciplinary sexual assault protocol development. She has worked more than twenty-five years advocating for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. She has dedicated much of her work to providing and improving services for victim/survivors of sexual assault, battering, and child sexual abuse, particularly those from American Indian communities. For four years she coordinated the Strengthening the Circle of Trust Conference, a conference focusing on sexual assault and exploitation perpetrated by American Indian spiritual leaders/medicine men. Bonnie co-edited a recently published book “Sharing Our Stories of Survival” an anthology of writing by Native Women who’ve experienced violence. Bonnie provided technical assistance to research conducted by Amnesty International USA that led to the report, “Maze of Injustice: The failure to protect Indigenous Women from sexual violence in the USA.” She and her partner Jim Clairmont have two children and five grandchildren.