David Wilkins: Tribes abuse power to remove their own people

Outside Indian Country most don't realize that over the past 10 years, several thousand people have had their tribal citizenship status terminated. Most were not dismembered for wrongdoing or adopted by other Native nations. They were simply identified by their elected officials as allegedly no longer meeting revised citizenship criteria. One day they were Native citizens, the next day, they were not. This fate has befallen individuals on a case by case basis over the years, but the practice has now reached alarming proportions never before witnessed.

In California alone some 39 governments have, or are in the process of, legally terminating tribal members. In the Pacific Northwest, the Grand Ronde and the Nooksack are in the process of striking hundreds from their rolls. Some tribal governments are appropriately working to decipher their membership records and clarify their identities. Others are using the process to winnow out unrepentant criminals, or in some cases to silence political adversaries or avenge old grudges. The few who profit from gaming or other industries have been accused of shrinking their numbers to increase gains for those remaining. Whatever the motivation, those cast out are culturally adrift and politically uncertain as to their remaining rights as either tribal, state, or federal citizens.

Federally recognized Native nations are generally not subject to constitutional constraints because of their preexistence as separate sovereigns; and with their own structures of governance, are also mainly exempt from state jurisdictional authority. Several hundred treaties and accords have preserved these nations as bona fide sovereign governments with rights to hunt and fish, punish criminals, to inhabit and hold title to what little remains of their original homelands and, like all other sovereigns, to set their own citizenship criteria.