David Wilkins – Turtle Talk

An excerpt:

To her credit, it appears that the Chief Judge was attempting to console the disenrollees and explain a decision that gravely disappointed them. Unfortunately, she also utilized words that profoundly diminished indigenous sovereignty:
“While the Court recognizes the important entitlements at stake for the proposed disenrollees, this is a fundamentally different proceeding than a loss of United States’ citizenship…. In the case of tribal disenrollees, the disenrollee loses critical and important rights, but they are not equal to the loss of U.S. citizenship. A person who is disenrolled from her tribe loses access to the privileges of tribal membership, but she is not stateless. While she loses the right, for example, to apply for and obtain tribal housing through the Tribe, her ability to obtain housing in general is unaffected. Though she loses the right to vote in tribal elections, she does not lose the right to vote in federal, state, and local elections. While the impact on the disenrollee is serious and detrimental, it is not akin to becoming stateless.” (Emphasis mine.)

Whatever one’s views on the way each Native nation chooses to exercise their sovereignty with regard to defining membership, the judge’s view of Native nationhood is chilling. By ruling that the termination of a Native person’s citizenship is “not equal to the loss of U.S. citizenship” and the loss of tribal membership is “not akin to becoming stateless,” she places Native citizenship in a position squarely inferior to U.S. citizenship. The implications are profound. It is not realistic to expect to maintain true government to government relations with states and the federal government if we begin by diminishing our own status as citizens of sovereign nations.

David Wilkins on Tribal Disenrollment and Banishment

June 9, 2008Matthew L.M. Fletcher3 Comments

David Wilkins has published “Exiling One’s Kin: Banishment and Disenrollment in Indian Country” in Western Legal History. This excellent piece describes banishment and membership laws from traditional law through the early 20th century and into the modern era of tribal banishment and disenrollment.

The Myth of the Model IRA Constitution?

November 21, 2007Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

I’ve always taught my federal Indian law students that many — if not most — of the tribal constitutions adopted in the years immediately following the Indian Reorganization Act were imposed on the tribes by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. These were the model IRA constitutions. If you look at the constitutions adopted around that time, you see a lot of similar features: lack of separation of powers, no tribal courts, Secretarial approvals for everything up to and including breathing. But as Blake said, he who generalizes is a fool.

Recent works of scholarship challenge that notion that the Bureau imposed model constitutions. First, Elmer Rusco’s chapter in American Indian Constitutional Reform and the Rebuilding of Native Nations. And now David Wilkins’s introduction to the new book, Felix S. Cohen’s On the Drafting of Tribal Constitutions. Elmer Rusco’s 2000 book on the IRA, A Fateful Time, argues that the BIA considered thrusting model constitutions at tribes, but rejected the plan in favor of an outline. Wilkins notes that it appears some tribes did receive a model constitution from the BIA (the one reproduced as Appendix A in the Cohen book), and others received a model corporate charter or the outline.

It would be worthwhile to do a survey of the 181 tribes that voted to accept the IRA. What do their constitutions say?