Tribal Membership: It's NOT the P.T.A or Kiwanis, Yet Tribal Leaders Revoke Memberships Like it Doesn't Matter

Me and Mrs. OP are on vacation for three weeks, I will try to post new articles, but will bring some older articles forward for our new readers.  PLEASE, visit my blog often, share on social media and ask family and friends to do the same:  


From 2011:

The process of determining who is a legitimate member of an Indian nation is inherently an emotional one, and never more so than when tribes are expelling members, as has been happening quite a bit of late locally.
At those tribes with successful casinos, quite a bit of money can be at stake (in addition to issues of self-identity and family ties) ---- and so it's no surprise that lawyers are getting involved. Or at least wanting to get involved.
Outside of tribal courts, each of which sets its own rules, those being expelled have no legal right to appeal ---- something a group of recently expelled members from Pala want Congress to change.
We believe this would be a mistake.
The Indian tribes are best suited themselves to determine their own eligibility standards and rules. Just as it would be highly inappropriate (not to mention unconstitutional) for the government to pass laws determining how religions admit (or expel) members, so should tribal membership be left alone. 

B.I.A. Director Bryan Rice RESIGNS after Only 6 Months

Bryan Rice has resigned just six months after Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke appointed him to lead the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

 It is our policy not to discuss DOI personnel matters in the press,” BIA spokeswoman Nedra Darling said in an email. She ignored follow-up questions about whether Rice was still employed.

The resignation comes roughly two weeks after the agency’s internal watchdog concluded that poor Interior Department staff record keeping made it impossible to determine if the reassignment of dozens of senior agency staff last year was legal. 

Zinke's Comment doesn't Age well:

When Zinke announced Rice as his choice to lead the bureau in October, he said the veteran Interior official “has a wealth of management expertise and experience that will well serve Indian Country.”

“I have full confidence that Bryan is the right person at this pivotal time as we work to renew the department’s focus on self-determination and self-governance, give power back to the tribes, and provide real meaning to the concept of tribal sovereignty,” Zinke said.


Rice is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and previously led Interior’s Office of Wildland Fire beginning under the Obama administration in 2016.

9th Circuit RULES NLRA APPLIES to TRIBAL CASINOS in Casino Pauma Case

A U.S. appeals court says employees at Native American casinos can receive protection under a federal labor law.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously on Thursday that federal officials reasonably concluded that the National Labor Relations Act applies to tribal employers. The judges said the law does not violate tribes' right to self-government.

The decision came in a fight over efforts to unionize employees at Casino Pauma, a Southern California casino owned by the Pauma Band of Mission Indians. A judge ruled in 2015 that the tribe committed unfair labor practices under the NLRA when it tried to stop the distribution of union leaflets.

The 9th Circuit upheld that ruling.

Trump To Strike a BLOW at Tribal Sovereignty in Medicaid Requirements?

Trump Administration LOGO

After over a decade of disenrollments, abusing over 11,000 Native Americans (Tribes saying, THAT's okay, WE can do it) Now they don't like it when someone else is doing the abusing.




In this Teen Vogue op-ed, Ruth H. Hopkins (Cankudutawin-Red Road Woman), a Dakota/Lakota Sioux writer, biologist, attorney, and former tribal judge, explains how the Trump administration is trying to remove the classification that designates Native tribes as unique nations

Under the guise of Medicaid reform, it was reported by Politico on April 22 that the Trump administration is considering steps that would undermine the United States Constitution and upend hundreds of years of federal Indian law court precedent by dismantling federal recognition of tribal sovereignty, which acknowledges tribes’ right to govern themselves.

They have denied requests by tribal leaders to grant natives exemption from new Medicaid work requirements by disregarding tribes’ distinct political status as native nations and changing their designation to a racial group only, thereby making such an exemption a potential illegal racial preference. This action breaches the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, that says that treaties with tribes are the supreme law of the land, and shirks the government’s legal responsibility to provide health care for tribal citizens.

Native nations have existed for millennia on the North American continent as distinct Indigenous groups. The federal government currently acknowledges the existence of at least 567 tribes located in the U.S., although there are more that are recognized by states. The federal government officially recognizes these tribes’ through treaty, and most recently, through a regulatory process established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1978. 

Trump’s apparent decision comes from the President’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and would suddenly eliminate treaty and trust obligations owed these tribes by removing their distinct classification as sovereign political entities and instead recategorize natives as a race only.

READ THE OP ED HERE:

Organized Labor DEFEATS TRIBAL LABOR BILL

Another crack in the sovereignty dam. 

Organized labor managed an increasingly rare feat on Monday — a political victory — when its allies turned back a Senate measure aimed at rolling back labor rights on tribal lands.

The legislation, called the Tribal Labor Sovereignty Act, would have exempted enterprises owned and operated by Native American tribes from federal labor standards, even for employees who were not tribal citizens.

The A.F.L.-C.I.O. said passage of the measure, the subject of several years of tribal lobbying, would have amounted to the most aggressive erosion of labor protections since 1940s.

A package of bills containing the measure fell five votes short of the 60 needed to break a filibuster.

CATHOLIC CHURCH and Native American Tribe Reach Consensus

After centuries of abuse of Native Americans, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez signed 17 new protocols in March that serve as guidelines for churches and their institutions to welcome and include Native Americans of California.


The protocols include a range of topics, including the prohibition of using Native American burial sites as construction sites, allowing events that involve the formal participation of Native Americans to use a traditional blessing with a sacred herb, and specifically stating that Native Americans are not to be invited to events "merely for purposes of demonstration or cultural expression but for appropriate, full and active participation."

Twice the church has apologized for the treatment and punishment of Native Americans by Catholics, as well as the spread of disease to tribes by Westerners.

Read MORE of the story HERE

Courts SAYS NO to Disenrolling Tribe: GUIDIVILLE RANCHERIA WILL NOT GET CASINO 100 Miles Away From Ancestral Lands

Despite the fact that its reservation is situated 100 miles to the north, in Ukiah, Mendocino County, the Guidiville Rancheria claimed the Point Molate promontory should be transferred to the tribe under the “restored lands” provision of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. The tribe said its ancestors had once inhabited the Bay hundreds of years ago.

Read the whole story here

CA Senator Dianne Feinstein and former Senator Barbara Boxer were against the casino plan for Point Molate, which we wrote about in 2009.

Guidiville is a tribe, one of many which has disenrolled over 11,000 Native Americans, stripping rightful members of their Native identity.

Nooksack's Nabob Ne'er Do Well kNOCKED OUT: BOB KELLY fails to advance in Election

Karma is a bitch, as Nooksack Tribal Chairman Bob Kelly found out this week.

After years of abuse of his own tribe's members, racist attacks on the Nooksack 306 and being such a poor leader that the federal government had to step in, was eliminated from contention as tribal chairman.

3rd place in the primary, shows how little the tribe thinks of him anymore. CAN THE TRIBE get on the right track and follow the leads of the Enterprise Rancheria and Graton Rancheria in bringing the tribe together again?

3rd place and not a SINGLE 306 vote?  Can we HOPE for JUSTICE?

Congressman Doug LaMalfa OKAY with RESERVATION SHOPPING, or SHOPPING FOR A REAL TRIBE?

Congressman Doug LaMalfa, who co-sponsored a thieving water rights bill for an APARTHEID TRIBE, the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians recently introduced a bill to reinvent a terminated Rancheria as California's largest tribe with a reservation anywhere within Siskiyou County. 

Doug LaMalfa
Shady thinking?

Disturbingly, the bill’s proponents have no lineal connection to the original Rancheria.  They are led by a Chico attorney — Tahj Gomes — who in 2016 identified himself in county minutes as the “Shasta Nation Etna Band Chair” but a few months later he testified to Congress that he was the “Chairman of the Ruffey Rancheria.”  OP:  LOL! Doesn't know WHO he is...today?

When a lawyer tells the county one story but Congress another, you start to ask questions. We, along with numerous tribes within California and Oregon have done so, resulting in the congressional record swelling to 13 letters exceeding 200 pages of materials.

What we do know is that the original Rancheria’s namesake — Old Man Ruffey — was documented by the Department of Interior in 1905 as a landless Karuk Indian living in Etna. In 1907, DOI purchased land in Etna and created the Ruffey Rancheria for Old Man Ruffey and others. In 1961, Congress ended its federal relationship with the Ruffey Rancheria and distributed its 441-acre reservation to the four remaining members who were Karuk relations of Old Man Ruffey. Those four members of the Ruffy Rancheria are deceased and it’s unknown whether they had children.
READ THE REST OF THE STORY

Nelson Mandela is Dead, his wife WINNIE is DEAD, They Worked to End Apartheid in South Africa. Sad that Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians Practices Apartheid On Their Reservation.

Winnie Mandela is dead at 81, a member of South Africa's parliament and anti apartheid activist.

WE STILL have APARTHEID in CALIFORNIA, under Democrat leadership on tribal reservation...

PALA Tribe DOES NOT WANT HOMES Near It's CASINO. SOVEREIGNTY Goes BOTH WAYS

Isn't this rich? 

Porcine Pala Chairman Robert Smith's tribe, wants to tell a sovereign nation what to do, but remember when HE didn't need to produce evidence on disenrollment because PALA was sovereign?

Late this summer, a proposal to build 780 homes just north of state Route 76 and across the highway from the Pala Casino Resort & Spa will go before county planners and ultimately the Board of Supervisors or approval.

The developer, Ali Shapouri, has been working on the plans for his Warner Ranch project for 13 years and bases almost everything on a single concept — that thousands of casino and resort workers in North County (Pala, Pauma, Rincon, Valley View) drive great distances between their work and their homes.

But Pala is an Indian reservation and is technically a sovereign nation.

Gabriel Galanda Require Due Process for ALL Native Americans Targeted for Disenrollment

Ethics in Indian Country Law should NOT be an OXYMORON...

Gabriel Galanda
Champion for Native Justice

On Wednesday, April 4, 2017, at the National Native American Bar Association's (NNABA) Annual Meeting, which is being held in conjunction with the Federal Bar Association's 2018 Indian Law Conference, at TALKING STICK RESORT, Gabe Galanda will deliver the "Update on NNABA Formal Ethics Opinion No. 1: 'Ensuring Due Process For All Native Americans Targeted For Disenrollment.'"

Judge William Alsup Rules ELEM COLONY Can Bully, Threaten and Banish Members

 A California federal judge on Saturday tossed a suit by members of the Elem Indian Colony of Pomo Indians of the Sulphur Bank Rancheria over their alleged disenrollment, saying that a political struggle between the parties for control of the tribe didn’t offer the members access to habeas corpus relief under the Indian Civil Rights Act.

Adrian John Sr. and the other tribe-member plaintiffs had sought a writ of habeas corpus to prevent restraint of their liberty, claiming that the Elem Colony Tribal Council had tried to disenroll and banish them and that they remained under threat of being removed from the tribe’s California reservation.

In an order dismissing the case Saturday, U.S. District Judge William Alsup agreed with the tribal council that the members hadn’t shown their treatment by the tribal officials, based mostly on documents sent by the tribe in 2016 threatening them with disenrollment, reached the level of a “severe restraint” permitting habeas relief under the ICRA.