<\/p>\n
In February 2013, Michelle Roberts, along with around 300 other Nooksack Indians, received a letter informing her that she was being ejected from her own tribe. The missive came from the tribal council of the Nooksack, a 2,000-person federally recognized tribe whose homeland is tucked into Washington state\u2019s lush northwestern corner. Roberts and her kin, wrote the council, couldn\u2019t adequately prove their ancestry, and thus \u201cdid not meet the requirements for membership contained in the Nooksack Tribe\u2019s constitution.\u201d They were being disenrolled.<\/p>\n
To many of the group now known as the \u201cNooksack 306,\u201d the notice came as a shock. Membership in a federally recognized Indian tribe confers material benefits like housing and medical care; perhaps more than that, it is a source of identity. As one tribal court has put it, \u201cTribal membership completes the circle for the member\u2019s physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of human life.\u201d Just as the United States can set the criteria for becoming an American citizen, tribal governments have the right to decide who gets to enroll. The Nooksack Tribal Council, however, wasn\u2019t deliberating over admitting new members. It was booting out existing ones.<\/p>\n
It soon became apparent that the outcasts would have little recourse, at least through the tribe. A follow-up letter in early 2014 instructed outraged disenrollees to dial in to a conference call, during which callers could expect to wait for up to two hours. Each had only 10 minutes to present an appeal, and they were not permitted to ask questions. Tough luck if you dialed in late, or if your call was dropped. To Gabriel Galanda, the attorney who represents the 306 and a Native American himself, the Kafkaesque process proved that the tribe\u2019s bureaucracy had no interest in hearing out its purged members. \u201cCan you imagine a 75-year-old elder trying to dial in to a conference call?\u201d Galanda demands. \u201cShe wouldn\u2019t even know what she was talking to. It\u2019s like lambs to the slaughter.\u201d<\/p>\n
More than three years after the council initiated disenrollment proceedings, however, the Nooksack 306 soldier on \u2014 still members in the tribe\u2019s rolls, if not in the eyes of their foes. \u201cThey\u2019ve already started this process a few times, and we\u2019ve stopped them in their tracks,\u201d Galanda says. According to the Nooksack Constitution, disenrollment ordinances have to be approved by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Galanda has appealed to the agency every step of the way, repeatedly forcing the tribe to postpone ousting the 306. In March, the council retaliated by disbarring the legal gadfly from tribal courts. Judge Susan Alexander, however, ruled that the tribe had denied Galanda due process. \u201cThe court is on neither \u2018side\u2019 here,\u201d Alexander wrote. \u201cBut the tactics being employed by (the tribe) are surely confounding.\u201d<\/p>\n
Behind the byzantine politics lie deeper issues. The Nooksack Tribe is far from the only one to cast out its own members: According to David Wilkins, a Lumbee Indian and professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota, at least 70 tribes have initiated proceedings for disenrollment or banishment, a related process that entails excommunication from tribal lands, over the past two decades. While each tribe presents a unique case, money, power and internecine quarrels are common threads. So, too, are challenging questions about the origins and meaning of tribal belonging.<\/p>\n
The disenrollment movement\u2019s legal roots sprouted in 1978, when a landmark Supreme Court case, Santa Clara Pueblo vs. Martinez, upheld the Pueblo\u2019s decision to deny membership to the children of tribal member Julia Martinez because their father was Navajo. Although Martinez sued the Pueblo under the Indian Civil Rights Act, the court held that tribal nations possess \u201csovereign immunity,\u201d a doctrine that protects them from suit. In the decades since, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other federal agencies have used the decision to justify not intervening in membership disputes. The upshot is that disenrollees typically can\u2019t expect aid from courts, Congress, or the Department of the Interior, where the BIA is housed.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter Santa Clara,\u201d writes Steve Russell, a Cherokee and former Texas trial court judge, in Indian Country Today, \u201cdisenrollment became a robust and unreviewable tool to settle political scores or to give expression to racism or to simply acquire a greater share of limited tribal resources.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, the usual rationale is money \u2014 particularly in California, which Wilkins calls a \u201ccrazy cauldron of disenrollment activity.\u201d More than 30 Golden State tribes, such as the Pechanga Band of Luise\u00f1o Indians and the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians, have taken disenrollment actions. As Andrea Appleton explained in a 2009 High Country News feature, \u201cEach of these tribes runs a multimillion-dollar casino, and the fewer the enrolled members, the bigger the cut for those who remain.\u201d<\/p>\n
While many disenrollment battles have pecuniary roots, the Nooksack\u2019s conflict is more personal, and more complex. The Nooksack 306 trace their lineage back to Annie George, whom they describe as a full-blooded Nooksack whose children married Filipino migrant workers. George\u2019s descendants, many of whom call themselves Indipinos, were enrolled in the tribe in the 1980s. Over time, those descendants \u2014 the Rabang, Rapada and Narte-Gladstone families \u2014 gained political power. Resentment simmered, and some tribal members claimed that the three families were taking over government programs. Several Rabangs were also convicted of smuggling drugs across the Canadian border, engendering further animosity. California is far from the only state with disenrollment woes. In 2015, for instance, Oregon\u2019s Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde upheld a decision to excise 86 members \u2014 even though they were descended from Chief Tumulth, the leader who signed the 1855 treaty that created the tribe\u2019s reservation. Wilkins, who\u2019s writing a book on disenrollment, estimates that somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 Indians have been affected nationwide. \u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing is a scary pattern of tribes violating the civil rights of citizens,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
By December 2012, the Rabangs were out of power, and Annie George\u2019s lineage came under the microscope. Her name did not appear in a 1942 tribal census, nor did she receive one of the Nooksack\u2019s original land allotments; therefore, the tribal council claimed, her descendants lacked sufficient documentation for membership. The tribe\u2019s members later voted to modify the Nooksack Constitution, removing the provision under which George\u2019s relatives had enrolled in the first place. \u201c(I)t would be unfair to our community if we were to allow these people to remain members in the absence of any proof,\u201d Tribal Chairman Bob Kelly wrote.<\/p>\n
While some non-Filipino tribal members have allied with the 306, others side with Kelly. Katrice Romero, director of the tribe\u2019s housing department, was born and raised in Nooksack country; growing up, she says, her elders told her that the disputed families weren\u2019t legitimate members. Romero\u2019s own bloodline is a point of pride, proof of her forebears\u2019 suffering and perseverance. \u201cI have a family tree that goes back 10 generations, and I can visit those ancestors in cemeteries,\u201d she says. \u201cThis family, they don\u2019t have anyone in a Nooksack cemetery, they don\u2019t have any Nooksack elders who can vouch for them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although Michelle Roberts and her kin have staved off disenrollment in court, the consequences have nonetheless been severe. Roberts says she was fired from her job at the tribe\u2019s casino and forced from her position on the tribal council. Nieces and nephews lost school supply stipends. Should the disenrollment process succeed, the 306 stand to lose access to housing programs, fishing rights and medical benefits \u2014 a troubling development particularly for the diabetics and kidney dialysis patients among them.<\/p>\n
The psychological trauma may be even more severe. In a 2015 resolution urging tribes to reconsider disenrollment, the Association of American Indian Physicians cited the \u201cgrief, depression, anxiety and more serious mental health problems\u201d that follow the deprivation of cultural identity. Roberts says the tribe has already begun to deny her family\u2019s existence. They\u2019re no longer invited to ceremonies, and allies have been discouraged from showing their support. \u201cYou bump into people, and you don\u2019t know whether to say hello or walk away,\u201d she says. \u201cI know several people who\u2019ve gone on depression medications. It\u2019s been very grueling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although the legal battle drags on, politics may ultimately decide the 306\u2019s fate. The Nooksack Tribal Council had been scheduled to hold elections this winter, and four council positions were up for grabs. Though the council sought to prevent the 306 from voting, a judge ruled that they remain eligible to cast a ballot as long as they are members. In response, the council has simply refused to hold the election.<\/p>\n
But that stance, says Michelle Roberts, is unconstitutional. In absence of an election, Roberts claims, the expired council positions should be vacated. \u201cThat would leave the tribe at a standstill, because they wouldn\u2019t have a quorum to do any sort of business,\u201d she says. A shutdown could compel the tribe to stage the election, giving the 306 and their allies an opportunity to vote their adversaries out of office. The two sides are effectively playing an elaborate waiting game: Galanda and the 306 seek to prolong the appeals process long enough to force an election, while the council seeks to stave off the vote until the federal government issues its ruling. The tribe has also initiated a recall election against councilwoman Carmen Tageant, a non-306er who supports the families\u2019 membership.<\/p>\n
For now, the 306 are prevailing in at least one court: that of public opinion. An anti-disenrollment social media campaign has gathered momentum online, and prominent Native Americans like Sherman Alexie have savaged the trend. In 2015, the Spokane Tribe voted to amend its Constitution to ban disenrollment, and the Native American Bar Association warned that \u201ctribal citizenship is being increasingly divested or restricted without equal protection at law or due process of law. \u2026 This cannot stand.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the debate rages ferociously on Facebook, where some tribal members have criticized the 306\u2019s claims. To Katrice Romero, Galanda\u2019s appeals to the Bureau of Indian Affairs risk impinging on the tribe\u2019s hard-won independence. \u201cPart of being a sovereign nation is determining our own membership, our own citizens,\u201d she says. \u201cWe have an inherent right to govern our own people.\u201d Romero says this disenrollment isn\u2019t about hate or greed; rather, tribal officials are simply trying to protect the integrity of the Nooksack\u2019s membership. \u201cWe don\u2019t have enough resources to take care of our people as it is. Our housing and medical resources are very limited, and our natural resources are scarce. I consider the Nooksack Tribe victims of ethnic fraud, really.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Galanda contends that such insular notions of belonging are part of the problem. In a 2015 article for the Arizona Law Review, the attorney argues that disenrollment and racialized membership concepts like \u201cblood quantum,\u201d the formula for how much Native blood a person must possess to join a tribe, aren\u2019t Indian norms. Instead, they\u2019re the legacy of American laws, like the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, aimed at subjugating, assimilating and even eradicating Native Americans. \u201cTraditionally, before the federal government shackled resources to race, most tribes regarded ethnic boundaries as fluid,\u201d Appleton wrote in High Country News in 2009. \u201cSocial kinship, not biology, was the tie that bound.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two hundred years of cultural and literal genocide, however, have supplanted traditional notions of community. \u201cIf you talk to any Indian in any tribe, there is no word for disenrollment,\u201d Galanda says. He is careful to point out that the federal government, and the race-based criteria it foisted upon Indians, is ultimately to blame for turning membership into a commodity. Still, he remains fiercely critical of unaccountable tribal governments that marginalize members with impunity. It\u2019s one thing to assert sovereignty by controlling who gets in; it\u2019s another to pull the rug out from under vulnerable people.<\/p>\n
For his part, David Wilkins prefers to call the process \u201cdismemberment\u201d \u2014 an evocative double-entendre that conjures not only a sovereign body exiling members, but a physical body chopping off its own limbs. After all, says Wilkins, blood isn\u2019t the only thing that makes an Indian; culture, beliefs, and connection to place also shape identity. Practicing the politics of exclusion, Wilkins adds, leads only to extinction. \u201cThis gets at the heart and soul of what it means to belong to an indigenous community today.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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