Researching Tom Rodgers

Rodgers played an important role in the investigation that led to the conviction of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Since then, Rodgers has waged a Native American Voting Rights effort to help provide Native Americans on remote, poverty-stricken reservations with equal access to voting. Rodgers has dubbed the effort to suppress the Native American vote "the Jim Crow of the West." He played a lead role in an historic Native American voter registration and turnout effort in the 2016 elections. The effort drew the support of Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union and National Congress of American Indians, prevailing in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Attorney General Eric Holder in June 2014 stated that the Montana native voting rights "conditions are unacceptable and they are outrageous......As a nation, we cannot -- and we will not -- simply stand by as the voices of Native Americans are shut out of the democratic process."

In May 2015, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, a stalwart proponent of expanding voter access for Native Americans, transmitted to Vice President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House John Boehner a request in statutory form that the outcome sought in the Wandering Medicine litigation should be enacted into federal law. This was soon followed by introduction of legislation by Senators Jon Tester, Heidi Heitkamp, Tom Udall, and Al Franken. The federal action elevated the significance of the Wandering Medicine litigation in the Native Americans empowerment and enfranchisement movement dating back to the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. In the spring of 2018, Tester broadened the Native American voter access fight, demanding Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Director Tracy Toulou of the Office of Tribal Justice establish satellite voting locations on tribal lands.

Building off the voter project, in the fall of 2016 Rodgers joined a national advocacy effort on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux, working to educate lawmakers and officials in Washington, D.C. and nationwide to the need to protect the water supply for the tribe and all downstream residents in the upper Missouri River region from the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Rodgers is currently engaged in an effort to repatriate to his native land the remains and spirit of Jim Thorpe, one of the greatest athletes in history known in his Sac and Fox Nation as Wa-tho-huck (the "light after the lightning”). In what Rodgers describes as a "sacred covenant" with Bill Thorpe, the son of Wa-tho-huck, Rodgers is working to have Wa-tho-huck's remains moved from a tomb in Pennsylvania to Oklahoma, so his spirit can rest in peace in his ancestral home.

Rodgers is also leading an ongoing effort to educate people about the impact the opioid crisis has had on Native American tribes and nations. Rodgers is organizing Native Americans as part of a federal class action lawsuit against opioid manufacturers and distributors. Legal action taken by his own Blackfeet Nation was named in July 2018 as one of two Native American bellwether cases in the opioid class action lawsuit.