Galonda on the Unintended Consequences of Disenrollment and WHY We Must Continue to Fight

As the #STOPTRIBALGENOCIDE movement continues to grow, attorney Gabe Galonda continues to gain presence in the print media on the disenrollment phenomena that has happened for over a decade.

When tribes regained recognition he says:

Once-terminated tribes that were restored over the last few decades were particularly aggressive about bulking up their membership rosters in order to rebuild everything that the United States destroyed in the 1950s. Because of the once normative nature of American indigenous kinship-based systems of inclusion, the Indian Nation rebuilding efforts were second nature.

 

Then, casinos started coming in and greed got the best of many tribes.  Disenrollments started becoming the norm with tribes such as The REDDING RANCHERIA, terminating the family of their FIRST chairman, now eleven years ago.  But it's not that easy to get rid of Indians...

Offending tribes also fail to appreciate that just because an Indian is disenrolled it does not mean that person can categorically be excluded from tribal territories – as history proves, it is just not that easy to eradicate Indians.

 

MONEY:

So instead of “exercis[ing] a robust form of sovereignty over its territory and all people within its territory,” a tribe that excludes its own people from its jurisdiction vis-à-vis disenrollment becomes a “weak sovereign” under logic espoused through theNew York Timesby Professor Matthew Fletcher. That offending tribe becomes the antithesis of Indian self-determination, having succumbed to archaic federal ways of tribal termination and sovereignty diminishment. These are but some of the profound, unintended consequences of tribal disenrollment.

THIS last paragraph is WHY those of us who have been disenrolled or those who are in moratoriums with land of reservations  MUST fight on.   Sovereignty isn't about being able to get away with exterminating your own people. And we must keep shining the spotlight on the corruption, so that even politicians are disgusted.  We know they love their contributions more than they hate Apartheid, so we must keep pounding the points.

Read more at:  http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/02/02/unintended-consequences-disenrollment