Tribal Enrollment Research Articles

Tribal Enrollment Councils: Lessons on Law and Indian Identity

O N THE COLVILLE INDIAN RESERVATION in October 1915, Superintendent J. M. Johnson opened a special council of residents with these words: There have been many councils and you all understand the purpose of this one. Then he described the purpose anyway. One by one, he would summarize the applications of nineteen people who wished to be on the official roll of Colville Reservation Indians. You decide, he told the men in the room, each applicant is a Colville Indian. If the applicant is of Colville blood he should be admitted, provided he has no established rights elsewhere. If the applicant is not of Colville blood or if long disassociated for generations from life among the Indians of the Colville Reservation the question is whether you desire to adopt the applicant into the tribe.1 A council member named Little Alex probably had the superintendent's words in mind when he said, First time when we began this council business us Indians we don't know how to act on this.... Here now we learn and understand what this is for and for this reason we should do just right. Indians at the meeting did seem to

Factors influencing utilization of mental health and substance abuse services by American Indian men and women

This study investigated the effects of gender, number of lifetime psychiatric diagnoses, and childhood victimization on utilization of mental health and substance abuse treatment services in a Southwestern American Indian tribe. A total of 582 individuals were recruited based on tribal enrollment and membership in large multigenerational pedigrees. Subjects were interviewed using a modified version of the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia-Lifetime Version, a semistructured psychiatric interview. For this study the definition of childhood victimization was limited to childhood sexual abuse. Fifty-six percent of the subjects had received mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, or both. Patterns of service utilization differed by gender with the odds of inpatient and substance abuse treatment higher for men than for women. Women were more likely than men to receive mental health treatment. Subjects who had been sexually abused as children were more likely to have three or more psychiatric diagnoses and to have received extensive treatment, compared with subjects who reported no childhood sexual abuse history. Logistic regression demonstrated strong relationships between number of psychiatric diagnoses and the likelihood of treatment among both men and women. Gender, number of psychiatric diagnoses, and childhood sexual abuse are strong predictors of utilization of mental health and substance abuse treatment services. These factors should be considered in designing treatment interventions.

Tribal membership requirements and the demography of ‘old’ and ‘new’ Native Americans

This paper examines the twentieth-century population recovery of Native Americans with reference to urbanization, intermarriage, and differing definitions of the Native American population from census and tribal enrollment data. The recent increase in the Native American population reflected in regular US decennial censuses since 1960 is discussed in terms of changing self-identification of individuals as ‘Native American’. Also discussed are criteria for enrollment in Native American tribes, particularly blood quantum requirements. Census enumerations are compared with tribal enrollment data, and it is illustrated that a large proportion of those identifying as ‘Native American’ in the census are not enrolled in Native American tribes. Special attention is given to how Native American tribal enrollment criteria might impact future population size.

American Indian and Alaska Native Tribal Enrollment Made Easy

American Indian and Alaska Native Tribal Enrollment Made Easy

Learning "The Language the Presidents Speak": Images and Issues of Literacy in American Indian Literature

two hundred tribal languages were spoken, where the colonizers themselves came from at least three different nations, each with its own language, the demand for literacy in English has naturally proved problematic. (I use a very conservative figure; both D'Arcy McNickle and Alvin M Joseph Jr. estimate that there were actually five hundred to a thousand mutually intelligible languages in North America in preColumbian times.) purports to mean simple competence in and the ability to communicate through the reading and writing of language. In actuality, however, it is a much more complicated issue, one with a myriad of political, social, cultural, and even moral implications. As C. H. Knoblauch has noted, Literacy never stands alone ... as a neutral denoting of skills; it is always literacy for something (75). Through the decades the promotion of and resistance to the acquisition of literacy or the accoutrements of literacy by Native American people have actually been tied to issues that go far beyond the reading and speaking of the English language. Although generally not viewed in these terms, the history of the relationship between the United States government and Indian nations has frequently revolved around issues of literacy. The making of treaties, for example, involved an assertion of the dominance of the English language over tribal languages and the dominance of the written over the oral. Treaties resulted in misunderstandings and deliberate deceit in the translation and recording of meaning, and they privileged a signature any signature on a document over the recognized verbal authority of legitimate leaders. Like the treaties, the policy of allotment involved the apparent owning and selling of land with the testimony of a signature or its substitute accepted in the place of true comprehension and willing participation in transactions. In these cases, as in the oil-payment thefts and the fraudulent incompetency declarations in Oklahoma Indian history, any written evidence, whether actual, manufactured, or produced through force or threat of force, was privileged in the legal interpretations of events. Other government policies of assimilation included forced education at English-only boarding schools where the use of tribal languages was forbidden and punished. Tribal languages were also invalidated by the wholesale renaming undertaken by the colonists, the renaming in English of individuals, tribes, places, and geographic features. Tribal identities themselves had to be and still must be legitimatized and quantified through written government records of tribal enrollment and BIA identification cards. Finally, t ibal identities continue to be appropriated when the accounts of Indian people collected and written by outsiders are accorded more status than those spoken or written by Native peoples themselves; when pieces of Indian lives and even their very bodies become the artifacts of literate culture bartered for, captioned, and displayed; and when Indian history is told only from the perspective of colonial culture. Given that Indian history is informed by issues of literacy, it is natural to find the reflections of these li racy struggles in the writing of contemporary Native American authors. Whether pictured as helpless victims of a system of literacy designed to eliminate or immobilize them, pictured struggling to resist the assimilation implied in literacy and to preserve tribal cultures, pictured working for the competence in English necessary in the battle for political power, or pictured as masters of the English language who have turned the weapons of literacy back on the colonial system, many of the protagonists of Native American literature are engaged in confrontations with literacy and its attendant circumstances. From D'Arcy McNickle's Archilde and Frank Waters's Martiniano, both of whom become alienated from their own culture when forced to attend government boarding school; to N. Scott Momaday's Abel, who struggles with the voicelessness which symbolizes his general powerlessness; to Linda Hogan's Greycloud a d Blanket families, who have their income, their land, and their identity as competent individuals taken from them by various types of legally documented swindling; to Jack Forbes's Indian basketball players, whose very Indianness is invalidated by their fa lure to produce BIA enrollment cards the issues of literacy are presented both overtly and more subtly. What follows is an examination of selections from the work of Leslie Marmon Silko, Diane Glancy, N. Scott Momaday, Linda Hogan, and Gerald Vizenor that illuminate various angles from which the historical struggle with literacy can be viewed.

The Comparative Political History of Two Tribal Governments

The recent history of two American Indian tribal governments, the Navajo Nation, and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona, provide background for the examination of the paths followed by two tribal governments in seeking to establish and maintain legitimated self-rule within the federal governmental structure of the United States. The Navajo Nation has its capitol at Window Rock, on a reservation of 25,000 square miles, in northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and a small area of southeastern Utah. The Navajo population is estimated between 160,000 and 170,000 people. It is the largest American Indian tribe in the United States. The Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona has the Pascua Pueblo Reservation, with a land area of 892 acres, near Tucson, Arizona, and off-reservation membership in four major villages, Yoem Pueblo in Marana, Guadalupe near Tempe, Barrio Libre in South Tucson, and Old Pascua in Tucson. All of the communities are in southern Arizona. The tribal enrollment was 8,200 at the time of the first election in June, 1988. These two Indian nations are unalike in many ways, but, then, no two tribes are alike, and each tribal government has its own unique history of how it came to be. Both tribes trace their ultimate origins to mythological events in the pre-columbian past. Both have been, in more recent history, included within the political boundaries of the Spanish colonial empire, the Mexican national state, and now the United States. The Navajo Nation retains a part of its ancestral homeland within the boundaries of its present reservation. The Pascua Yaqui communities are separated from their homeland in the Mexican state of Sonora by the United States/Mexican border. Each of these governments, whatever their historical origin, share the commonalities of having passed through the process of receiving federal recognition as a tribal entity (sovereign) from the federal government. These tribes, as all other tribes, have been forced to spend much of their time and energy either resisting negative federal policy or trying to obtain the benefits of favorable policy. Under recent policy as formalized in the Indian Self-Determination Act, P.L. 93-638, tribal governments have moved from being toy governments totally controlled by the federal government, to official establishment as parts of the American governmental structure of states, under the supremacy of the federal government (Wilkinson:1987,86). Some tribal goverments have used this status in some pragmatic ways to develop as governments utilizing the concept of tribal sovereignty of P.L. 93-638 policy to gain control over their own internal affairs. The Navajo Nation is one of those tribal governments which has developed in its particu56