Updated on April 16 at 11:53 a.m.

In what appears to be a historic first, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has hired Tobi Young, a Native American lawyer, to be one of his law clerks starting this summer.

An Oklahoma-born citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and currently general counsel to the George W. Bush Presidential Center, Young is believed to be the first Native American to serve as a law clerk for a justice. The Chickasaw Nation announced her appointment on Friday.

“It is difficult to overstate the significance of having a well-qualified, experienced Chickasaw such as Ms. Young serving as a Supreme Court clerk,” Chickasaw Nation Governor Bill Anoatubby said in a statement.

In the ongoing controversy over the dearth of minority Supreme Court law clerks, it has often been noted, without contradiction, that no known Native American has ever clerked for the court, which routinely handles one or more Indian law cases every term.

“This is fantastic news,” Lawrence Baca said Friday, when told about Young's appointment. A member of the Pawnee tribe, Baca in 1976 was the first Native American lawyer hired by the Justice Department, and is now retired. “My view has always been that the discourse around the big table changes when somebody different joins it—someone who can say 'we,' not 'they.'”

Young has known Gorsuch for more than a decade, and was interviewed by The National Law Journal last Monday about his first term on the high court. At the time, Young said on Friday, the clerkship appointment had not been finalized.

Tobi Young

In the interview, Young said of Gorsuch, “I do think he's independent and not ideological. There's not a lot of evidence to look through and statistics to look through quite yet, but you can look at his past, and I can tell you someone like Justice Gorsuch isn't going to change overnight. I think you're going to see a lot of times that the court will end up 9-0, or continue to have interesting splits as it always has, and so the man I know, I don't question his independence and his integrity whatsoever.”

When Gorsuch was nominated to the Supreme Court last year, Native American groups were cautiously favorable. “Judge Gorsuch has significantly more experience with Indian law cases than any other recent Supreme Court nominee,” according to a report by the Native American Rights Fund. “His 10 written opinions generally recognize tribes as sovereign governments.”

Chickasaw governor Anoatubby said in the press release, “Justice Gorsuch is well respected by tribal leaders for his understanding of tribal sovereignty and Indian law. His decision to select a Native American to serve as clerk underscores his appreciation of the importance of the Native perspective on Indian law.”

In the 2014 case Yellowbear v. Lampert, Gorsuch ruled in favor of a Native American prisoner who claimed he had a right to use the prison's sweat lodge. “No one questions … that access to a sweat lodge is a form of religious exercise for Mr. Yellowbear,” he wrote.

In NLJ's report on law clerk diversity last December, Gorsuch ranked relatively high, having hired seven law clerks during his brief tenure so far, including three minorities—two Asian-American males and one Hispanic male.

In a statement on Friday, Young said, “Justice Gorsuch has already brought a diverse group of clerks to the court and I am honored to deepen that diversity. Our backgrounds may be different, but what we have in common is our commitment to the law and to serving Justice Gorsuch.”

In the Chickasaw press release, Young recalled that her father Lonnie Edwards urged her to learn about her Chickasaw heritage as she grew up. “I am very pale, and nobody is going to look at me on the street and say, 'Oh, she's Indian.' But it was very important to my father that I understand where I came from and he instilled in me the pride of being a Chickasaw.”

Young was an associate White House counsel during the Bush administration and served in the civil rights division of the Justice Department. There, Young said she worked to make sure that “Choctaws in Mississippi were receiving voting instructions in the Choctaw language.”

Gorsuch recommended her for a clerkship with Judge Jerome Holmes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, where Gorsuch was also a judge. She received her law degree from the University of Mississippi School of Law. The law school tweeted that she would be the first female graduate to be a Supreme Court clerk.

Her husband Evan Young, a former law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia, is a partner in the Austin office of Baker Botts who has argued before the high court and filed briefs with the court.

Update: After this story was posted, we were alerted that Notre Dame Law School professor Richard Garnett, who clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1996 and 1997, is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

In an interview Sunday, Garnett confirmed his status, but said that when he was a clerk for Rehnquist, he was not aware of his roots and was not a Choctaw member. After the clerkship he learned more about his ancestors, applied and became an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma several years later.

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