Native American Press/Ojibwe News

Shakopee Mdewakanton enrollment problems, IIM problems endemic to BIA

September 27, 2002
We have printed Barbara Buttes letter addressing problems of Shakopee Mdewakanton enrollment in full because Dr. Buttes deals thoughtfully and in carefully documented detail with an issue that deeply affects the lives of Indian people.

As this newspaper has documented by publishing case after case over the years, a lot of Indian people are being cheated out of their enrollments, denied recognition of their heritage, their identity, and the benefits of tribal membership.

Dr. Buttes addresses enrollment problems at Shakopee, but there are equally disturbing enrollment problems at Prairie Island and Lower Sioux. The similarity in enrollment problems across these communities is not accidental: the Dakota tribal governments in Minnesota are all using the same law firms to maintain their authority. Certain unscrupulous, self-interested attorneys have set up a cartel controlling the “Indian law” hegemonic in the Dakota communities, where the two or three same law firms that serve as tribal attorneys for some tribal governments and gambling enterprises also provide “tribal courts” for other reservations. If any state judges were participating in this kind of scheme in Minnesota, they would be disbarred and censured.

The problem of enrollment has been plaguing us ever since the BIA took control of Indian people and forced, exiled and concentrated us on reservations. Generation after generation, the problems with enrollments have gotten worse.

The history of the Mdewakanton Sioux, who were all but annihilated due to historical events after 1862, is just one of many in the sordid chronicles of US-Indian relations. Despite the fact that there is a pretty clear definition detailing the criteria of who is entitled to be a member at Shakopee, the BIA has chosen to ignore the very “tribal constitution” that the BIA wrote for the Shakopee Mdewakanton, along with standards of “blood quantum” (which were also created by the BIA).

The BIA’s failure to deal with enrollment inequities, like the overwhelming mess of the IIM accounts, is symptomatic of their incompetence and ineptitude. It’s not that there aren’t qualified people working at the BIA, but somehow there systemic with the organization and nothing ever seems to get better, although in many cases it seems to get worse.

Enrollment issues are just as important to Indian people as the IIM problems still being unraveled in federal courts.

Enrollment problems are currently even more intractable than the IIM mess, because through a unique series of legal decisions, maneuvers, and blunders, tribal enrollment questions are generally heard in tribal courts, where the same group creating the problems is in charge of the courts, and there has been absolutely no accountability because both the BIA and the tribal governments keep hiding behind “tribal sovereignty.”

It’s time that Congress amended the Indian Civil Rights Act, ensuring that impartial federal courts have jurisdiction over these thorny issues. We must get beyond the malevolent charade that the tribal courts are anything more than kangaroo courts supporting the tribal establishment, perpetrated by the tribal governments, their enabling lawyers, and those who benefit from the present corrupt system.

If the BIA had dealt with the problems forthwith, as they arose (or refrained from creating them in the first place), Indian people wouldn’t have to spin our wheels contending with the morass of problems brought to us by the BIA. These problems are the same across the country, reservation after reservation: basic problems of enrollment, money, crime, injustice, and despair.

Indian people, and in fact American people, have lost confidence in the BIA and in the “tribal government” system which the BIA has established and supported under “Indian self government.”

Without access to federal courts to deal with issues like tribal enrollment, they will never be resolved. Until we have separation of powers, and we can take these problems to an independent tribunal, they will always be there, and will continue to persist and to grow.

The problems confronting Indian people are not just “Indian problems.” As more and more non-Indian Americans are realizing, they have become national problems: tribal recognition, perpetuation of extinct tribes made up of a few people who have minute or nonexistent blood quantums, and the broad-ranging social costs which are engendered by the system.

Presently, there are a number of small communities of government-made Indians with lucrative casinos who are able to buy substantial influence Washington and in state governments. The situation at Shakopee is just one case in point.

Dr. Buttes letter includes extensive research, and if a private person can such extensive research and writing, there is no reason that the government could not carefully re-examine the system it’s created.