Native American Tribal Disenrollment Reaching Epidemic LevelsPosted in Articles, Economics, Law, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2017-03-06 03:04Z by Steven |
Native American Tribal Disenrollment Reaching Epidemic Levels
VOA News
2017-03-03
 FILE – Protesters hold hands in prayer in Temecula, Calif., at a rally protesting the disenrollment of tribal members, Saturday, May 21, 2005. More than a hundred ousted members of tribes from California and five other states gathered to denounce being disenrolled. |
All across Indian Country, Native Americans are being evicted from their tribes, with little warning and little legal recourse.
Take, for example, the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians, a federally-recognized tribe of Luiseno Indians living on a reservation in Temecula, California, part of the territory where their ancestors lived for 10,000 years.
If you want to be a member, you must prove direct lineage to one or more of the original ancestors forced onto the reservation in the early 1880s.
Pechanga Indian Rick Cuevas traces his ancestry to a woman named Paulina Hunter, who was granted a lot of land on the Pechanga reservation in the late 1800s. He and his family have lived on the reservation as full tribal members for decades.
But in the early 2000s, the tribal council decided to posthumously disenroll Hunter and, by extension, about 180 of her descendants…
…An alien concept
Disenrollment is not native to indigenous cultures, who Galanda said traditionally understood “belonging” in terms of kinship and personal choice, not “blood quantum,” a measurement introduced by the U.S. government.
“The U.S. introduced its concept of who’s an Indian by declaring, under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, that an Indian must be in residence in a reservation likely established by the treaties of the 1800s and be of one-quarter Indian blood,” he said. “The challenge today is that many tribes, if not most tribes, use the Federal government’s criteria for who’s an Indian.”…
Read the entire article here.