AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jim Barnes was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1944. His family visited his father’s Cherokee mother, Nellie Maude Mayes, her siblings Maggie and Hazel and other relatives in Tahlequah and Muskogee several times a year until he was 12. Maude was a teacher, painter and musician who imbued Jim with a passion for Cherokee history. His Uncle James Thompson, after whom he was named, was Treasurer of Cherokee County following dissolution of the Cherokee Nation.

In 2014 Jim began researching the lives of Annie Spirit and her extended family, and the larger story of Cherokee sovereignty, which resulted in “Annie Spirit’s Cherokee History” featuring his great-great grandmother Annie Spirit. It will be published in November 2023 by the University of North Georgia Press. Jim’s Cherokee cousins helped track down important family information, photos, paintings and artifacts such as Annie Spirit’s smoking pipe. His greatgrandfather William Penn Mayes, who died in 1944, the year Jim was born, was Chief Interpreter for the Cherokee Senate in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Two of Jim’s great-great uncles, Joel Bryan Mayes and Samuel Houston Mayes, were elected Principal Chiefs of the Cherokee Nation in 1887 and 1896. Jim has been a registered citizen of the Cherokee Nation for more than forty years.

Jim attended public school in Tulsa until the family moved to Louisville in 1955. After graduating from Eastern High School in Middletown, Kentucky in 1962, he attended Northwestern University in Chicago, receiving a BA in 1966. He received a Juris Doctor degree cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1970. After clerking for U.S. District Judge John Pratt in Washington, D.C. Jim joined the litigation team opposing the Alaska Pipeline project at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP). After serving as a public defender for two years in Washington and one year in the New Hebrides Islands, he rejoined CLASP in 1977, serving as co-director in 1981-82. While there, he founded the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC) in 1978, bringing together environmental organizations around the world to advocate for protection of Antarctica. Jim led successful campaigns to create the world’s first ‘ecosystem-as-a-whole’ fishing regime in 1980; to block a proposed treaty that would have opened Antarctica to drilling and mining in 1988; and agreement on the Environmental Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty in 1991, which bans minerals activities indefinitely and created a modern governance structure for the region. He retired as ASOC Executive Director in 2015 and today serve as Board Chair.

Barnes lives in Villamblard France with his wife, Anne, and continues to advise international environmental organizations.