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November 3, 2006
Mike Hatch
Attorney General
Minnesota Attorney General's Office
1400 Bremer Tower
445 Minnesota St.
St. Paul, MN 55101
Dear Mr. Hatch,
During a conversation with you at your office in the State Capitol building awhile ago,[i] I mentioned that Barbara Bednarczyk, State Registrar of Vital Statistics, had refused to provide me copies of the legal opinions that, she said, your Attorney General’s office had given her and upon which she claimed she based her decisions about my deceased husband’s death certificate – on the grounds of attorney-client privilege.[ii]
I told you that I thought that was unreasonable. You concurred, and recommended that I send the relevant information to you in a letter identified as “personal.” I did not do so at that time: partly due to ill health – I was subsequently diagnosed with cancer (from which I have hopefully recovered) – and partly because events following my husband’s death were so personally painful that I did not then have the emotional wherewithal to revisit them.
But, you will soon be moving beyond your office as Attorney General, and if I am going to learn what was behind the state’s decisions about that death certificate, it seems I need to ask you now.
Therefore, pursuant to the Minnesota Data Practices Act and the state and federal Constitutions, I am asking and requesting that you provide me copies of all material relating to that death certificate: generated, received, and/or held by the Minnesota Attorney General’s office. I am also asking and requesting that you inform me of the specific legal grounds upon which the State of Minnesota based its decisions concerning my deceased husband Wub-e-ke-niew’s death certificate, which as far as I know is still filed by the State in his son’s name, “Francis George Blake, Jr.”[iii]
Wub-e-ke-niew died at home on October 15, 1997. The death certificate was filed in Beltrami County on October 31, 1997, amended in Minneapolis on December 8, 1997, and re-amended on April 17, 1998.
Senator Linda Berglin, in her February 8, 1998 letter faxed to Commissioner of Health Anne Barry, refers to proposed re-amendment of the death certificate as having “required the cooperation of actors such as your department and the Attorney General,” and Commissioner of Health Anne Barry writes in her February 27, 1998 letter to Sen. Berglin that, “We have gathered preliminary information and have sent this information to the Attorney General’s office for review.”
There are several disputed items on the death certificate, including the decedent’s name, race and marital status, and descriptions of place. Since Wub-e-ke-niew and I were married, resided, and he died and was buried within the external boundaries of the diminished Red Lake reservation – not generally subject to State jurisdiction – the material provided by your office to Sen. Berglin and the Health Department is crucial to understanding the legal basis of the State’s decisions.
The State consistently refused to provide that information, as State Commissioner of Health Anne Barry put it in her June 26, 1998 letter to me, on the grounds that it was “protected by attorney-client privilege.” I have never understood how State officials’ interpretation of the law could be construed as ‘confidential.’
During the course of my efforts to satisfactorily resolve the problems with the death certificate, I provided the State – including State Registrar Barbara Bednarczek and Commissioner Anne Barry – with documentation including a number of affidavits. As a mutual convenience, I am in the process of putting the most significant of these online, indexed at www.maquah.net/MikeHatch/ If you would like additional information, hard copies, and/or would like to inspect original documents, please inform me and I will provide them.
Thank you in advance for your assistance in rectifying this matter,
Sincerely,
Clara NiiSka
[i] The Friday between Thanksgiving and the weekend, as I recollect in 2002. At that time I was managing editor of the Native American Press / Ojibwe News, and was bringing copies of that week’s newspaper to the Capitol.
[ii] Ms. Bednarczyk also refused to cite the specifics of the law supporting her decisions, instead mailing me – as she put it in her attached memo – “the Minnesota Statutes and Rules that pertain to the filing of death certificates” in their entirety. Memo, August 27, 1998, from Barbara Bednarczyk.
[iii] State File Number 1 22 97 27279 [November 10, 1999, Hennepin County].
Subsequent Correspondence
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