Fletcher previously taught at the Michigan State University College of Law (2006 to 2022) and the University of North Dakota School of Law (2004 to 2006). He has been a visiting professor at Arizona, Harvard, Michigan, Montana, UC Law San Francisco, and Stanford law schools. He is a frequent instructor at the Pre-Law Summer Institute for American Indian students. He is a member of the Grand Traverse Band.
He was lead reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law of American Indians, completed in 2022. He has published articles in the California Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and many others. He also authored a hornbook, Federal Indian Law (West Academic Publishing, 2016), and a concise hornbook, Principles of Federal Indian Law (West Academic Publishing, 2017). Fletcher co-authored the sixth, seventh, and eighth editions of Cases and Materials on Federal Indian Law (West Publishing 2011, 2017, and forthcoming 2025) and three editions of American Indian Tribal Law (Aspen 2011, 2020, and 2024), the only casebook for law students on tribal law. He also authored Stick Houses: Stories (Michigan State University Press, 2025), Ghost Road: Anishinaabe Responses to Indian-Hating (Fulcrum Publishing, 2020), The Return of the Eagle: The Legal History of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians (Michigan State University Press, 2012), and American Indian Education: Counternarratives in Racism, Struggle, and the Law (Routledge 2008). He co-edited The Indian Civil Rights Act at Forty with Kristen A. Carpenter and Angela R. Riley (UCLA American Indian Studies Press, 2012) and Facing the Future: The Indian Child Welfare Act at 30 with Wenona T. Singel and Kathryn E. Fort (Michigan State University Press, 2009).
Fletcher’s scholarship and advocacy has been cited by several times by the United States Supreme Court. Finally, he is the primary editor and author of the leading law blog on American Indian law and policy, Turtle Talk.
He worked as a staff attorney for four Indian Tribes—the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, the Hoopa Valley Tribe, the Suquamish Tribe, and the Grand Traverse Band. He has sat on the judiciaries of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi Indians, the Santee Sioux Tribe of Nebraska, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, and the Shoshone & Arapaho Courts of the Wind River Indian Reservation, and he served as a consultant to the Seneca Nation of Indians Court of Appeals.
