Reviewed by: Dismembered: Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights by David E. Wilkins and Shelly Hulse Wilkins Jeffrey Shepherd Dismembered: Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights. By David E. Wilkins and Shelly Hulse Wilkins. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. Pp. 208. Notes, bibliography, index). David E. Wilkins and Shelly Hulse Wilkins state that two events in 1996 sparked their awareness of banishment and disenrollment in Native communities. The first was the banishment of George Whitecalf from the Monacan tribe in Virginia, primarily due to a change in political leadership, and the second was the appeals court ruling in Poodry v. Tomawanda Band of Seneca Indians that the federal government could review the banishment of tribal members. Whitecalf's banishment was eventually reversed, and he regained full tribal membership. But the Poodry ruling remained largely ignored by courts who gave preference to an earlier Supreme Court decision favoring the broad powers over tribal membership held by Native governments. Thus, we learn that membership and banishment are part of a wide array of complicated relationships associated with tribal sovereignty and treaty rights, human rights, individual liberties, cultural tradition, economic transformation, and political power. As the authors note, belonging to a Native community or nation is critical to the meaning of the word "Indigenous." Determining membership has typically been a function of Native traditions and customs, language, and other factors. Such methods remained resilient until the federal government placed Indians on reservations, introduced boarding schools, [End Page 383] launched assimilation policies, and implemented blood quantum measurements. While the cumulative effect of these processes threatened tribal identity, the authors argue that the past forty years have seen an historic erosion of those older systems. New conflicts have emerged as banishment and disenrollment have spiked. In response, tribal members have demanded clearer rules defining membership, access to redress of and appeal for banishment, and greater restraint on tribal governments. The authors support their work with extensive research and data. Early chapters summarize U.S.–Native relations during the late nineteenth century through the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. The 1887 Dawes Allotment Act, for example, implemented blood quantum as a metric for assessing Indian identity along a spectrum from traditionalism to progressivism; where "white blood" implied fitness to hold private property, Native people quickly began losing land. Land allotment included the systematic use of tribal censuses as "base rolls" to which membership in a tribe was anchored. Because the rolls contained estimates of blood quantum, which decreased as ensuing generations were born, the process increasingly threatened the survival of Native people as sovereign bodies. Later chapters investigate the Indian New Deal and the Indian Reorganization Act, particularly the undemocratic imposition of boilerplate governments onto Native people. These governments sustained the use of blood quantum as a central variable for tribal enrollment. By the late twentieth century, blood quantum politics were exacerbated by the rise of casino gaming as a source of revenue for Native communities. With this new income, some tribal governments contended with increased numbers of enrollment requests from people who held no enrollment or were enrolled in poorer communities. This pressure overlapped with partisan politics on reservations as families jockeyed for access to jobs and profit associated with casino revenues. The result of this friction was a painful uptick in disenrolling or revoking memberships to ensure that remaining individuals received large per capita payments from casino revenues. Tribal members contested these decisions and demanded access to appeals within and outside of the tribal courts on reservations. For better or worse, the broader U.S. court system has been wary of intervening in these decisions. This book is a powerful and painful analysis of the abuses of tribal governments against their own people and the rights of individuals against their leaders. The authors investigated hundreds of cases across the United States and offer aggregate data as well as interviews with people who have been harmed by this trend. Though the book will probably not see a wide readership outside academic and legal circles, readers who do delve into its troubling contents will have a deeper understanding of the challenges facing tribal peoples in the twenty-first...
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Sep 2, 2024
Brieanna Marie Watters + 2
Open Access