Academia is my second career, and my path to that career was unusual. Oklahoma schools had little to offer, and I had given up on education in the ninth grade because it had long since given up on me. The Vietnam War bought me a position in the Air Force that improved my self-image, and the gi Bill bought me an education. I came out of the University of Texas at Austin, having graduated magna cum laude, convinced that my educational failures were the fault of a system that expected nothing of Indian children. I was trained to be a high school teacher, and that was my plan. It had not occurred to me that no school system would hire somebody who was so plainly convinced that the public schools were squandering the talent of minority kids. Having no teaching offers, I proceeded to law school, where my heroes were Thurgood Marshall and William O. Douglas. By that time I had changed my name to Steve Russell, a surname I chose to match the grandparents who raised me. I knew no Indian lawyers in spite of the fact that my original namesake, Stephen Teehee, served as a judge and in other capacities in Cherokee government and that I had grown up with stories of Houston B. Teehee, another famous Cherokee lawyer. If I could not be a teacher, I would be a civil rights lawyer, even though I knew of no Indian civil rights lawyers and the top ten law school I attended offered no course in Indian law. While in law school I did an internship with the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO, and discovered that south Texas was full of Indians who did not identify themselves as Indian. The typical career path of a civil rights lawyer, I learned, started on a volunteer basis, and my GI Bill funds had run dry. I decided the second-best job in the legal profession [End Page 400] was judge. After losing my first election before the ink on my law license had dried, I practiced law for a couple of years and won some cases that brought more notoriety than money. What followed was seventeen years wearing a black robe, three appointments, and three elections engineered by a coalition of Chicanos, African Americans, feminists, and liberals. There were no visible Indians on the political landscape. While serving as a judge I had picked up an advanced law degree but I had never given up on some day becoming a teacher. I knew high school was a lost cause, but I still thought I could do some good with undergraduates. I had no interest in teaching law school unless there was a law school that existed to equip the powerless to take on the powerful. When asked about teaching law, my standard reply was that it would be "too much like giving hand grenades to babies." The time finally arrived when my kids were out of school and I no longer needed money. Getting paid to teach and write was a lifelong dream for which I was willing to take the two-thirds pay cut. Because I intended to write on Indian issues it seemed honest to put my Cherokee nation registry number right there on my academic vita. It would notify white people of my tribal identity and, when combined with my birthplace, tell Indian people (should there be any) that I was not an "instant Indian" seeking special favors. The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) was a school with a mission, and it was a mission I shared: to bring affordable, quality, public higher education to south Texas. In my "work talk" I drew on my experience working for the United Farm Workers of America. Mexican Americans are Indian by blood, and my political ties to that community run deep. Of the three possibilities that opened up for me, there was no question that this university was the place...