Putting the Noose on Tribal Citizenship: Modern Banishment and Disenrollment

Dr. David Wilkins, author of Dismembered has been discussing disenrollment for over a decade, case in point, this transcript from a 2008 Vine Deloria Jr. scholars program.  The link also has Dr. Wilkins on video.  Please, take the time to view it.  Learn, so that you can teach.

'Disenrollment' is a legal term of our art devised in the 1930s under the IRA in Indian Country that have increased dramatically in recent years. This issue -- the literal, physical reduction in the size of our nations goes to the heart of Fanon and Deloria's queries to the essence and meaning of Indigenous membership or citizenship or clanship or whatever term you're comfortable with and directly deals with social justice, civil rights and human rights in Indian Country. Native nations, as one of our inherent powers of governance, retain the right to remove, to exclude or to disenroll people from our nations, from our lands and from our membership rolls; both legally and culturally enrolled citizens and non-Indian and non-member Indian residents as well.

But it wasn't until I read a 1996 Federal Court of Appeals decision, Poodry v. Tonawanda Band of Seneca, which held that several Seneca, who had been banished, did indeed have recourse under federal law to test the legality of their tribal government's actions and that's what convinced me to take a closer look at this issue. This case raised a sticky question of whether Native individuals had the right to use non-Indian courts to contest what their nation had done to them in regards to their membership status. And this -- as I eluded to at the outset of my remarks -- is one of those areas where it's becoming clear that some federal courts are willing to intervene in these matters because of the importance of membership or citizenship to those facing banishment or disenrollment. As the court said in Poodry, "˜Banishment was indeed a severe enough punishment

involving a sufficient restraint on the liberty of those being banished to qualify as what the court said was detention and to thus permit the federal court to review under the Indian Civil Rights Acts habeas corpus rule.' The issue of citizenship as a fundamental property right may be in the works as well in terms of when the federal courts will get involved. Since property, as we all know, in one's person is also fundamental to Americans and the economic system of this nation. More recently, two related cases involving banishment and disenrollment among the Santa Rosa Rancheria in California, Quair v. Sisco 1 and Quair v. Sisco 2 have expanded the scope of federal review and may in fact be a harbinger of things yet to come, signaling that the feds are willing, in certain cases, to intervene if tribal governments don't provide adequate civil safeguards to those it desires to banish or disenroll.