Bethany Berger is a first rate legal scholar who has done a great deal of useful work for Indians in academia. Before that, she paid her dues in the legal trenches of Dinébe’iiná Náhiiłna be Agha’diit’ahii. Because my respect for her work knows few bounds, I’m bound to pay attention when she engages persons like myself, who advocate cultural standards for tribal citizenship.

She asks, “…do you know who would become American Indians under such a test? Germans! In part because of the craze for the Native American adventure novels of turn-of-the-century German writer Karl May, Germans obsessively study elements of tribal cultures that many Native teenagers no longer practice. An anthropologist friend recalled sitting in a bar in Stuttgart and hearing a group of Germans next to him having a fluent conversation in Lakota. Despite efforts to reinvigorate tribal languages, not every patron of a diner in Lakota country could carry on such a conversation.”

She’s right, and she reminds me of some people in my tribe complaining that the Cherokee Nation was funding a language immersion program in the public schools that had, by their lights, too many non-Indian kids enrolled.

What, exactly, are we trying to protect, people or cultures?