The lawyers representing the Miccosukee Tribe used strong language in criticizing The Miami's Herald's coverage of a car crash involving tribal members in which a Kendall woman died.

The stories were ''unfairly slanted,'' ''biased'' and ''assumed from the outset that a Miccosukee Indian was at fault,'' attorneys Mike and Lewis Tein and Guy Lewis of Coral Gables wrote in a letter to the editor.

''Prejudging Indian people today is as objectionable as it was 300 years ago,'' they said. They added that the articles were responsible for attracting ''ugly and racist comments'' that were posted on the Web.

The offending comments are no longer on the Miami Herald website, so I cannot say anything about them. But I have reviewed all the stories and wonder if the attorneys aren't grandstanding for their clients and readers. With some minor exceptions, I found the stories fair and responsible. What was missing was information that tribal police and the tribe itself refused to make available.

Writing about the Miccosukee and other Indian tribes is often complicated and sensitive. Some of that is because of laws and treaties, which grew out of the nation's conquest, that accord them certain special rights. Some of it is because of a parallel history of exploitation and racism against Native Americans. A resulting distrust by many Indians is behind some, but only some, of the problems surrounding the car crash.

The Miccosukee themselves weren't officially recognized by the federal government as a tribe until 1962. Their small federal reserve of 680 acres on the edge of the Everglades wasn't established until 1998. But from the police and justice systems that quickly emerged there, it seems clear that the Miccosukee still have a distinct culture and way of doing things.

Tatiana Furry, a 31-year-old yacht mate, had left the Miccosukee casino and was driving at 4 a.m. in January along the Tamiami Trail when her Nissan pickup truck ran head-on into a Ford Explorer SUV with a group of Native Americans inside. Furry was killed. The Indian driver, Kent Billie, grandson of tribe Chairman Billy Cypress, was apparently the worst injured of the Miccosukee and was airlifted to a hospital.

Complicating matters was that the accident took place several miles off the reservation, but in an isolated area in which Miami-Dade County had given ''concurrent jurisdiction'' to the Miccosukee's small police force. When a Florida Highway Patrol trooper arrived on the scene, he was waved off by the Miccosukee police -- and left.

Beginning that night and until this writing, the Miccosukee police have shared little information with anybody. They have not given copies of the accident reports, witness statements or scene photos to Miami-Dade prosecutors, who routinely investigate all traffic fatalities in the county. Seeking advice, they showed some reports to the FHP, but only several weeks after the accident, and even then they didn't let the FHP keep copies. The tribal police never even made public the names of those in the Ford Explorer, or whether they were tested for alcohol after the accident. Both Miami-Dade and the Furry family are considering suing for information.

A Miami Herald team led by reporter David Ovalle had to operate under those restrictive conditions. Ovalle made no excuses to me for writing that the Miccosukee police were being ''secretive,'' or for reporting that the Furry family was suspicious of a ''cover-up.'' Those are among examples that the tribal lawyers cite as biased coverage. I think that every reasonable person would agree with Ovalle, and would have the same suspicions as the family, for that matter.

As it was, Ovalle was able on his own two months after the accident to get copies of the police reports and photos. After sharing them with an accident-reconstruction expert, he wrote a front-page story saying the expert concluded Furry may have crossed the median and was responsible for the accident. That is hardly anti-Miccosukee reporting. Herald stories up until then, moreover, were careful not to imply who was responsible.

The lawyers complained that there were no sympathetic stories about Billie, as there had been about the Furry family, but Ovalle correctly notes that The Miami Herald didn't even know Billie's name until Ovalle uncovered his own official reports.

The lawyers cite as bias another line in which Ovalle writes that ''justice for Indians is vastly different'' from what the rest of us know. As a long feature written by him shows, however, it is. Interviewing Miccosukee leaders and eight ex-tribal police officers, Ovalle opens up a different legal world in which elders are as important as lawyers, truth by Indians is almost a given, and jail is considered too harsh a punishment for many serious crimes. That difference is a source of friction with state prosecutors. Justice needs to follow the standard American model, but to report the differences is legitimate.

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