Some Indians are more equal.
Looks like the Tribe is being a better steward of other people’s money than our national government. Anything that reduces our costs of care for the Sovereign Nation can’t be all bad. A reduction of 25,000 potential, additional wards of the government and their ensuing offspring sounds real good to me.
Strange. The slaves were freed under US federal law and got US citizens rights. Why should they be allowed citizenship and voting rights in the Cherokee Nation issues if they don’t have a blood relative listed on the census at the time of the treaty? Membership in the Nation is by blood right, not by federal law.
Both my children have membership based on their great grandmother’s census roll number and they are the last in our line that will be able to claim it because of their mixed blood.
One of the great, festering problems of the US is that the treaties between the tribes and the federal government are disastrous. Which was known even back when they were cobbled together, often with unrelated padding cut and pasted from law books, and using transitory features to establish boundaries, etc. Broad chunks of many of those treaties are gobbledegook. Almost random words stuck together.
1) The big reasons that most tribes live in backwards conditions today is, oddly enough, a *lack* of federal business law. Corporations would love to make contracts to enter the reservations and develop them to the benefit of the tribes, but they *can’t*, because there is no contractual framework.
2) The Bureau of Indian Affairs is a nightmare. It has basically stolen billions of dollars that were supposed to be given to the tribes as royalties for mining, oil drilling, forestry, etc. And to make matters much worse, intentionally threw out the paperwork, so nobody knows who owes what to whom.
3) Though there is some modest improvements, many tribal governments are utterly worthless as well. Several tribes should regularly have federal elections monitors, and nepotism and favoritism are rife in tribal governments.
Again, it all goes back to the treaties. The best way to deal with this is for the president and congress to set up an office of the State and Interior Departments, for long term negotiations with the tribes, with an eye to creating new treaties that are far more satisfactory to both nations.