By Robert A. Williams, Jr.

At its annual meeting next week, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) will consider removing state recognized tribal governments from its voting membership. This proposal comes amid an all-out, misguided assault on state recognized Tribes based on the asserted claim that they somehow threaten Tribal sovereignty.

This self-righteousness about who qualifies and who doesn’t qualify as Indigenous is all too familiar.  This brand of identity-policing is based on the historically mistaken belief that there has been a foolproof, legitimate and consistent system developed by the United States as a colonizing government for recognizing the Tribal governments it believes it has successfully colonized. It ignores the colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial  impacts on Indigenous peoples who may not have been fortunate enough to be recognized with the stroke of the pen by a federal Indian affairs bureaucrat, or to have been participants in a federal court case, or to have been signatories to a treaty that Congress bothered to ratify but has never fully enforced or honored.

The proposal NCAI will entertain in New Orleans—that Tribal rights should be dictated and determined by a listing of select tribes made up by the federal government—is one of the highest and more efficient forms of colonization one can imagine; getting the “officially” colonized to do the dirty work of culling out and silencing the voices of those “unofficial” groups the colonizer doesn’t want to bother with.  

NCAI was “established in 1944 in response to the termination and assimilation policies of the U.S. government.”  According to Thomas W. Cowger’s book, The National Congress of American Indians: The Founding Years, the Indian Congress originally “stressed both civil and tribal rights by declaring that the common welfare of Native Americans required the preservation of cultural values.” The organization has drifted far from its original instructions.

In 1978, NCAI convened its historic National Conference on Tribal Recognition, unanimously adopting a Declaration of twelve principles, proclaiming that “as an organization that represents the common interest of all tribes,” NCAI demands that the United States “fulfill its obligation to all tribes . . . and acknowledge the existence” of non-federally recognized Tribal governments. That proclamation aligns with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), including its affirmation of the right to “distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions” and related “constructive arrangements” with nation-states.