Post by Okwes on Aug 31, 2005 15:40:45 GMT -5
by: Roy Cook
The question of who's really an American Indian, what with the variation in blood quantum requirements from tribe to tribe, is confusing enough, and it's mostly because the Federal government has a long history of meddling, claiming the right to tell Indian people who they are and who they ought to be.
Blood Quantum is the total percentage of your blood that is tribal native due to bloodline. All of the Nations use Blood Quantum as a requirement for membership. Usually this is detailed on a CDIB (Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood) Card issued by the United States Government. Additionally, many of the Nations have other requirements for Membership.
Some Native Americans will never recognize you as "Indian" unless you are an enrolled member of a Federally Recognized Tribe, Band, or Nation. Others will recognize you as "Indian" if you are making an honest effort to reconnect with your own ancestral culture.
Today over three hundred American Indian tribes (excluding Alaskan villages) in the US are by treaty or executive order federally recognized government and receive services from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. There are additionally some 125 to 150 groups seeking federal recognition, and dozens of others that might do so in the future.
Let us look at these issues from a traditional and political viewpoint. Non-federally recognized tribes have been around for a long time. In fact, ALL tribes were non-federally recognized until the Continental Congress began to negotiate treaties with some Native nations in the 1770s. But the new U.S. federal government chose to concentrate its attention upon nations found west of the Appalachians or in Florida, ignoring virtually every tribe located within the core boundaries of the original thirteen states. The eastern tribes were left to flounder in a sea of neglect, racism, and ambiguity, in spite of the new federal Constitution that established federal supremacy over "commerce" with the tribes. Historically this clearly documents that the original Native American traditional culture is to be Non-federally recognized. Ironic how political definitions get turned around to suit current generations?
The issue of sovereignty is at the heart of current disputes over the opening of casinos by Native communities. It is generally conceded that federally recognized tribes possess a residue of sovereignty (self-rulership/government), which enables them to use their land base in self-determined ways not subject to state laws (except in certain cases). However, it is not generally recognized that state-recognized tribes, which possess reserved lands (formerly known as "Indian towns" and later as reservations), also are likely to possess the same degree of sovereignty as federally recognized tribes.
Another factor involves our country's "love affair" with racism and stereotyping, a factor, which very much affects most eastern tribes. Tragically, non-tribal people have come to believe that Native Americans should physically resemble the Sioux or Navajos seen on television, or the Italians playing Indians in old Western movies. Our contemporary schoolbooks and films do not explain to the public that eastern Native communities were often places of refuge in the colonies and states, places where the laws of racial segregation did not apply.
From New England to Florida most Native tribes provided homes for persons of mixed white and Native, Black and Native, and other combinations of ancestry. As a result many eastern Indians began to partially resemble African-Americans. This presents a challenge, then, for white people obsessed with stereotypes. They might be willing to accept a white-Indian mixed person as an Indian, but their racial sensitivity balks at recognizing a person of part-African appearance. Things have not changed all that much in two centuries!
The 1990 U.S. Census reported the largest number of Native Americans in the states of Oklahoma, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. The census also indicated that slightly over half of Native Americans live in urban areas; cities with the largest Native American populations are New York, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Tulsa, Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Anchorage, and Albuquerque. Around one-fourth of American Indians in the United States live on 278 reservations (or pueblos or rancherias) or associated "tribal trust lands," according to the census.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs has used a "blood quantum" definition?generally, one-fourth degree of American Indian "blood"?and/or tribal membership to recognize a person as an American Indian. However, each tribe has a particular set of requirements, typically including a blood quantum, for membership (enrollment) in the tribe. Requirements vary widely from tribe to tribe: a few tribes require at least a one-half Indian (or tribal) blood quantum; many others require a one-fourth blood quantum; still others, generally in California and Oklahoma, require a one-eighth, one-sixteenth, or one-thirty-second blood quantum; and some tribes have no minimum blood quantum requirement at all but require an explicitly documented tribal lineage.
Recently, December 16, 2003, a Southwest Tribe made headlines when it announced that 50 Percent Isleta Blood Needed To Stay In Tribe. Dozens of people who spent their whole lives thinking they were members of the Isleta Pueblo are finding out they are not. People on the Pueblo have been getting letters telling them they have to have 50 percent Isleta blood to be part of the tribe. The letters they received say that people can challenge them if they fill out a family tree proving their heritage.
Also in Southern California,2/03/ 2004, Tribal power is exercised to fulfill political goals.
"Tribes ? as sovereign nations ? are shielded from lawsuits filed against them. Velie, however, contends that individuals are not protected by sovereign immunity when they act outside the authority granted to them by the tribe.
The plaintiffs allege that the committee members violated Pechanga Band law and imposed standards above those required by the Pechanga Constitution by launching disenrollment proceedings against them. The lawsuit also accuses the committee members of trying to increase their own portions of casino profits by diminishing the number of tribal members eligible for profit-sharing payments.
The plaintiffs trace their family line back to Manuel Miranda, granddaughter of Pablo Apish, the Pechanga headman who received a 2,223-acre land grant from California Gov. Pio Pico in 1845.
The committee members maintain that Miranda, who was half Pechanga according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, moved off the reservation and cut her ties to the tribe 80 years ago. As a result, they are now demanding additional documentation of linear descent from the disputed members, most of whom have enjoyed full membership rights for 25 years."
History is being rewritten across the Americas in this new millennium. Native Americans (peoples marginalized by modernity) are perfectly capable of defending themselves; you don't have to do it for them. Written history is a seriously overrated Enlightenment construction. Most peoples have lived without for most times. Written history is used to justify political and social power. Western civilization thought seems to be arguing that mythic histories, epics, folk-knowledge and non-historicized versions of the past open up possibilities for thinking. Utopian thinking is the only response possible when you have destroyed all other possibilities for thinking the past when history has become the only legitimate resource for accessing the past. This situation has come to dominate Western societies experience of the past. The west has destroyed its past outside history.
The post-industrial, Pan-Indian Movement emerged in 1977 when the Haudenosaunee, and Indians from North and South America, presented their Great Law of Peace to the United Nations, with a warning that Western civilization, through the process of colonialism, was destroying the earth's ability to renew her. They recommended the development of liberation technologies, which would be anti-colonial, or self-sustaining, and the development of liberation theologies. A liberation theology will develop in people a consciousness that all life on the earth is sacred and that the sacredness of life is the key to human freedom and survival (Akwesasne Notes 1978: basic call to consciousness). The Peacemaker argued not for the establishment of law and order, but for the full establishment of peace, and universal justice.
In 1978, Indians walked from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., this trek was called The Longest Walk. The outcome of this walk was the Native American Freedom of Religion Act. During this walk participants were taught spiritual wisdom. The spiritual leaders got together and worked out ceremonies that did not conflict with any one Indian Nation's spiritual beliefs. Many Indian Nations are forbidden, by prophecy, to share their specific religious beliefs, even with other Indians, and with members of their own tribe who are less than full bloods. A Lakota spiritual leader had a vision that the colors black, red, yellow and white, our sacred colors, stood for the four races. The Lakota offered their Sweat Lodge ceremony and the Sweat Lodge has become the most widely spread ceremony in Pan- Indians. It was in the Lakota Sweat Lodge that we first learned to pray for all my relations.
After the Longest Walk the Lakota Sun Dance extended to California at D-Q University at Davis. Many of the Indians who had been on the Longest Walk, participated in that Sun Dance. Now, reportedly, there has been another vision of Buffalo Calf Woman turning into buffalo of the four sacred colors. This has served to bolster the idea that the Red Road is for everyone.
The Pan-Indian movement is made up of all four races, but the largest contingency are non-federally recognized Indians, primarily urban, who are desperately clinging to their Indian identity. These people are not white, although some white people do also Sun Dance, they are very much in the minority, and are usually related to or have married into Indian families. Many Mixed Bloods (with less than 1/4 from a single tribe), because the federal government no longer recognizes them as Indians, even though they may have 100% Indian blood, do not come under the jurisdiction of the BIA or Tribal councils, so their rights to the Bill of Rights have not been abrogated. Nationhood implies conformity with international human rights ethics. Ethnic cleansing is a violation of human rights.
Indians ceded their land to the government by Treaty. A Treaty is an international contract. Contracts are the crux of Western civilization. It is unconscionable in today's world to deny a whole group of people the fulfillment of their contracts solely on the basis of race.
To understand the current USA mis-adventure in Iraq, look a little closer to home. Keetowah Cherokee Ward Churchill book Struggle for the Land excerpts lay bare a devastating account of land robbery and genocide against the Native American peoples in North America, from the earliest days of the Republic. Racism, disdain, and greed for Native American lands drove 13 small British colonies to break away from England. In Struggle for the Land, the earlier of these two books, Churchill clarifies that "independence" from England was little more than King George's giving up his "option" to buy native lands which he had by virtue of the "right of discovery." Likewise, the Louisiana Purchase was acquiring from Napoleon the right to purchase land from Indians. As a rogue rebellion looking for Nationhood, our earliest legal documents from the 1820s endeavored to legitimize the United States by treating Indians as sovereign nations with whom we (USA) would enter into treaties. "Legally speaking," quotes Churchill from one such document, "so long as a tribe exists and remains in possession of its lands, its title and possession are sovereign and exclusive."
But of course it was not to be. Chief Justice John Marshall, who had received 10,000 acres in grants west of the Appalachians in return for fighting in the Revolutionary War, declared, invoking an obscure Norman law, that the land was "vacant" and therefore Euro-American deeds were legitimate. By 1832, he was declaring that all natives were "subordinate" to the U.S., a simple statement of colonialism, before the genocide of Western tribes had even begun. Marshall went even further and declared that natives "committed aggression" when they attempted to regain control of their land.
In 1823, the Christian Doctrine of Discovery was quietly adopted into U.S. law by the Supreme Court in the celebrated case, Johnson v. McIntosh (8 Wheat. 543). Writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice John Marshall observed that Christian European nations had assumed "ultimate dominion" over the lands of America during the Age of Discovery, and that - upon "discovery" - the Indians had lost "their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations," and only retained a right of "occupancy" in their lands. In other words, Indians nations were subject to the ultimate authority of the first nation of Christendom to claim possession of a given region of Indian lands. [Johnson:574; Wheaton:270-1]
According to Marshall, the United States - upon winning its independence in 1776 - became a successor nation to the right of "discovery" and acquired the power of "dominion" from Great Britain. [Johnson:587-9] Of course, when Marshall first defined the principle of "discovery," he used language phrased in such a way that it drew attention away from its religious bias, stating that "discovery gave title to the government, by whose subject, or by whose authority, the discovery was made, against all other European governments." [Johnson:573-4] However, when discussing legal precedent to support the court's findings, Marshall specifically cited the English charter issued to the explorer John Cabot, in order to document England's "complete recognition" of the Doctrine of Discovery. [Johnson:576] Then, paraphrasing the language of the charter, Marshall noted that Cabot was authorized to take possession of lands, "notwithstanding the occupancy of the natives, who were heathens, and, at the same time, admitting the prior title of any Christian people who may have made a previous discovery." [Johnson:577]
The question of who's really an American Indian, what with the variation in blood quantum requirements from tribe to tribe, is confusing enough, and it's mostly because the Federal government has a long history of meddling, claiming the right to tell Indian people who they are and who they ought to be.
Blood Quantum is the total percentage of your blood that is tribal native due to bloodline. All of the Nations use Blood Quantum as a requirement for membership. Usually this is detailed on a CDIB (Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood) Card issued by the United States Government. Additionally, many of the Nations have other requirements for Membership.
Some Native Americans will never recognize you as "Indian" unless you are an enrolled member of a Federally Recognized Tribe, Band, or Nation. Others will recognize you as "Indian" if you are making an honest effort to reconnect with your own ancestral culture.
Today over three hundred American Indian tribes (excluding Alaskan villages) in the US are by treaty or executive order federally recognized government and receive services from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. There are additionally some 125 to 150 groups seeking federal recognition, and dozens of others that might do so in the future.
Let us look at these issues from a traditional and political viewpoint. Non-federally recognized tribes have been around for a long time. In fact, ALL tribes were non-federally recognized until the Continental Congress began to negotiate treaties with some Native nations in the 1770s. But the new U.S. federal government chose to concentrate its attention upon nations found west of the Appalachians or in Florida, ignoring virtually every tribe located within the core boundaries of the original thirteen states. The eastern tribes were left to flounder in a sea of neglect, racism, and ambiguity, in spite of the new federal Constitution that established federal supremacy over "commerce" with the tribes. Historically this clearly documents that the original Native American traditional culture is to be Non-federally recognized. Ironic how political definitions get turned around to suit current generations?
The issue of sovereignty is at the heart of current disputes over the opening of casinos by Native communities. It is generally conceded that federally recognized tribes possess a residue of sovereignty (self-rulership/government), which enables them to use their land base in self-determined ways not subject to state laws (except in certain cases). However, it is not generally recognized that state-recognized tribes, which possess reserved lands (formerly known as "Indian towns" and later as reservations), also are likely to possess the same degree of sovereignty as federally recognized tribes.
Another factor involves our country's "love affair" with racism and stereotyping, a factor, which very much affects most eastern tribes. Tragically, non-tribal people have come to believe that Native Americans should physically resemble the Sioux or Navajos seen on television, or the Italians playing Indians in old Western movies. Our contemporary schoolbooks and films do not explain to the public that eastern Native communities were often places of refuge in the colonies and states, places where the laws of racial segregation did not apply.
From New England to Florida most Native tribes provided homes for persons of mixed white and Native, Black and Native, and other combinations of ancestry. As a result many eastern Indians began to partially resemble African-Americans. This presents a challenge, then, for white people obsessed with stereotypes. They might be willing to accept a white-Indian mixed person as an Indian, but their racial sensitivity balks at recognizing a person of part-African appearance. Things have not changed all that much in two centuries!
The 1990 U.S. Census reported the largest number of Native Americans in the states of Oklahoma, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. The census also indicated that slightly over half of Native Americans live in urban areas; cities with the largest Native American populations are New York, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Tulsa, Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Anchorage, and Albuquerque. Around one-fourth of American Indians in the United States live on 278 reservations (or pueblos or rancherias) or associated "tribal trust lands," according to the census.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs has used a "blood quantum" definition?generally, one-fourth degree of American Indian "blood"?and/or tribal membership to recognize a person as an American Indian. However, each tribe has a particular set of requirements, typically including a blood quantum, for membership (enrollment) in the tribe. Requirements vary widely from tribe to tribe: a few tribes require at least a one-half Indian (or tribal) blood quantum; many others require a one-fourth blood quantum; still others, generally in California and Oklahoma, require a one-eighth, one-sixteenth, or one-thirty-second blood quantum; and some tribes have no minimum blood quantum requirement at all but require an explicitly documented tribal lineage.
Recently, December 16, 2003, a Southwest Tribe made headlines when it announced that 50 Percent Isleta Blood Needed To Stay In Tribe. Dozens of people who spent their whole lives thinking they were members of the Isleta Pueblo are finding out they are not. People on the Pueblo have been getting letters telling them they have to have 50 percent Isleta blood to be part of the tribe. The letters they received say that people can challenge them if they fill out a family tree proving their heritage.
Also in Southern California,2/03/ 2004, Tribal power is exercised to fulfill political goals.
"Tribes ? as sovereign nations ? are shielded from lawsuits filed against them. Velie, however, contends that individuals are not protected by sovereign immunity when they act outside the authority granted to them by the tribe.
The plaintiffs allege that the committee members violated Pechanga Band law and imposed standards above those required by the Pechanga Constitution by launching disenrollment proceedings against them. The lawsuit also accuses the committee members of trying to increase their own portions of casino profits by diminishing the number of tribal members eligible for profit-sharing payments.
The plaintiffs trace their family line back to Manuel Miranda, granddaughter of Pablo Apish, the Pechanga headman who received a 2,223-acre land grant from California Gov. Pio Pico in 1845.
The committee members maintain that Miranda, who was half Pechanga according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, moved off the reservation and cut her ties to the tribe 80 years ago. As a result, they are now demanding additional documentation of linear descent from the disputed members, most of whom have enjoyed full membership rights for 25 years."
History is being rewritten across the Americas in this new millennium. Native Americans (peoples marginalized by modernity) are perfectly capable of defending themselves; you don't have to do it for them. Written history is a seriously overrated Enlightenment construction. Most peoples have lived without for most times. Written history is used to justify political and social power. Western civilization thought seems to be arguing that mythic histories, epics, folk-knowledge and non-historicized versions of the past open up possibilities for thinking. Utopian thinking is the only response possible when you have destroyed all other possibilities for thinking the past when history has become the only legitimate resource for accessing the past. This situation has come to dominate Western societies experience of the past. The west has destroyed its past outside history.
The post-industrial, Pan-Indian Movement emerged in 1977 when the Haudenosaunee, and Indians from North and South America, presented their Great Law of Peace to the United Nations, with a warning that Western civilization, through the process of colonialism, was destroying the earth's ability to renew her. They recommended the development of liberation technologies, which would be anti-colonial, or self-sustaining, and the development of liberation theologies. A liberation theology will develop in people a consciousness that all life on the earth is sacred and that the sacredness of life is the key to human freedom and survival (Akwesasne Notes 1978: basic call to consciousness). The Peacemaker argued not for the establishment of law and order, but for the full establishment of peace, and universal justice.
In 1978, Indians walked from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., this trek was called The Longest Walk. The outcome of this walk was the Native American Freedom of Religion Act. During this walk participants were taught spiritual wisdom. The spiritual leaders got together and worked out ceremonies that did not conflict with any one Indian Nation's spiritual beliefs. Many Indian Nations are forbidden, by prophecy, to share their specific religious beliefs, even with other Indians, and with members of their own tribe who are less than full bloods. A Lakota spiritual leader had a vision that the colors black, red, yellow and white, our sacred colors, stood for the four races. The Lakota offered their Sweat Lodge ceremony and the Sweat Lodge has become the most widely spread ceremony in Pan- Indians. It was in the Lakota Sweat Lodge that we first learned to pray for all my relations.
After the Longest Walk the Lakota Sun Dance extended to California at D-Q University at Davis. Many of the Indians who had been on the Longest Walk, participated in that Sun Dance. Now, reportedly, there has been another vision of Buffalo Calf Woman turning into buffalo of the four sacred colors. This has served to bolster the idea that the Red Road is for everyone.
The Pan-Indian movement is made up of all four races, but the largest contingency are non-federally recognized Indians, primarily urban, who are desperately clinging to their Indian identity. These people are not white, although some white people do also Sun Dance, they are very much in the minority, and are usually related to or have married into Indian families. Many Mixed Bloods (with less than 1/4 from a single tribe), because the federal government no longer recognizes them as Indians, even though they may have 100% Indian blood, do not come under the jurisdiction of the BIA or Tribal councils, so their rights to the Bill of Rights have not been abrogated. Nationhood implies conformity with international human rights ethics. Ethnic cleansing is a violation of human rights.
Indians ceded their land to the government by Treaty. A Treaty is an international contract. Contracts are the crux of Western civilization. It is unconscionable in today's world to deny a whole group of people the fulfillment of their contracts solely on the basis of race.
To understand the current USA mis-adventure in Iraq, look a little closer to home. Keetowah Cherokee Ward Churchill book Struggle for the Land excerpts lay bare a devastating account of land robbery and genocide against the Native American peoples in North America, from the earliest days of the Republic. Racism, disdain, and greed for Native American lands drove 13 small British colonies to break away from England. In Struggle for the Land, the earlier of these two books, Churchill clarifies that "independence" from England was little more than King George's giving up his "option" to buy native lands which he had by virtue of the "right of discovery." Likewise, the Louisiana Purchase was acquiring from Napoleon the right to purchase land from Indians. As a rogue rebellion looking for Nationhood, our earliest legal documents from the 1820s endeavored to legitimize the United States by treating Indians as sovereign nations with whom we (USA) would enter into treaties. "Legally speaking," quotes Churchill from one such document, "so long as a tribe exists and remains in possession of its lands, its title and possession are sovereign and exclusive."
But of course it was not to be. Chief Justice John Marshall, who had received 10,000 acres in grants west of the Appalachians in return for fighting in the Revolutionary War, declared, invoking an obscure Norman law, that the land was "vacant" and therefore Euro-American deeds were legitimate. By 1832, he was declaring that all natives were "subordinate" to the U.S., a simple statement of colonialism, before the genocide of Western tribes had even begun. Marshall went even further and declared that natives "committed aggression" when they attempted to regain control of their land.
In 1823, the Christian Doctrine of Discovery was quietly adopted into U.S. law by the Supreme Court in the celebrated case, Johnson v. McIntosh (8 Wheat. 543). Writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice John Marshall observed that Christian European nations had assumed "ultimate dominion" over the lands of America during the Age of Discovery, and that - upon "discovery" - the Indians had lost "their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations," and only retained a right of "occupancy" in their lands. In other words, Indians nations were subject to the ultimate authority of the first nation of Christendom to claim possession of a given region of Indian lands. [Johnson:574; Wheaton:270-1]
According to Marshall, the United States - upon winning its independence in 1776 - became a successor nation to the right of "discovery" and acquired the power of "dominion" from Great Britain. [Johnson:587-9] Of course, when Marshall first defined the principle of "discovery," he used language phrased in such a way that it drew attention away from its religious bias, stating that "discovery gave title to the government, by whose subject, or by whose authority, the discovery was made, against all other European governments." [Johnson:573-4] However, when discussing legal precedent to support the court's findings, Marshall specifically cited the English charter issued to the explorer John Cabot, in order to document England's "complete recognition" of the Doctrine of Discovery. [Johnson:576] Then, paraphrasing the language of the charter, Marshall noted that Cabot was authorized to take possession of lands, "notwithstanding the occupancy of the natives, who were heathens, and, at the same time, admitting the prior title of any Christian people who may have made a previous discovery." [Johnson:577]