David Wilkins: Disenrollment expanding across Indian Country

Tribal governments justify disenrollments on several grounds: fraud, documentary errors, insufficient blood quantum, and criminal activity are frequently cited reasons. Disenrollees, on the other hand, often assert that their tribes’ official rationales are mere pretenses that conceal the real motivation for disenrollment—the casting out of members who challenge tribal political figures who appear intent on expanding their own economic and political empires.

Disenrollees are deprived of explicit political and economic benefits and lose their legal status as tribally and federally recognized citizens. Culturally, of course, they remain imbued with the core values, beliefs, and knowledge associated with being an indigenous citizen, even if their ability to exercise cultural sovereignty is denied them on tribal lands.

Disenrollment is expanding throughout Native America, with Native nations in at least seventeen states engaging in the practice. Precise numbers are nearly impossible to track down since the nations carrying out the practice are loathe to reveal their numbers, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs will not divulge the data, asserting that it is an internal matter left to each native community.