The Grand Ronde tribe of Oregon, based near Salem, is one of many tribes in the U.S. where deep, bitter conflict is waged on a regular bases over the emotional issue of who is a member of the tribe.
It is not usual for dozens of people who had long been considered tribal members to be purged from membership.
In August the Grand Ronde tribal appeals court over overturned 66 of the disenrollment of 86 members that occurred in 2013.
Debi Anderson and her family members, descendants of Chief Tumulth, have waited for many years to be reinstated according to the court order. But it hasn’t happened yet. Without that they can’t vote, get elder pay or even apply to exercise their right as Indians to hunt on federal land.
While she was waiting for the reinstatement to happen, Anderson addressed a tribal general meeting and described the financial hardships that the disenrollment had wreaked on her kin.
Such internal battles occur regularly because the Bureau of Indian Affairs does not have policy on disenrollment that applies to all the tribes. Instead, each of the 567 tribes has its own enrollment rules.
It is considered a vital element of sovereignty for tribes to make rules about so-called “blood quantum,” which translates into what percentage of tribal blood an individual is held to possess.
There is a patchwork of requirements. Some tribes require a 1/16-blood quantum. Others a one-eighth. Some don’t require that a parent be on the tribal rolls at the time of a birth.
Anderson, for example, had 1/8 blood quantum but the tribal members disagreed over whether Chief Tumulth qualified as a proper ancestor, even though he signed the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855 with the U.S. government. Because the U.S. cavalry killed him the year after the treaty, before the reservation was created, his ancestry is not allowed.
In the intervening years the tribe was abolished by the federal government and then reinstated in 1983. Chief Tumulth’s descendants were disenrolled in a 2013 roll audit.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Policy Director and Senior Researcher at the Center for World Indigenous Studies in California told the Statesman Journal, “Dis-enrollment is an epidemic right now in Indian Country. In the last 10 years it has been increasing and it’s sort of a crisis.”
The one factor that seems to bring all these disenrollments to the fore is possession of a successful casino. She said, “The problem is there is no way to prove it, but it does seem to be correlated to successful gaming, indicating a motive of greed.”
The Oregon tribe’s members each are paid a quarterly stipend of $1,100. Until recently it has paid out more than $1 million each quarter. That is likely to decrease catastrophically because a rival tribe will soon open a casino in neighboring Washington. That is expected to cut into the revenues of the Spirit Mountain Casino by 41 percent.
One that revenue loss happens, the tribe will be at a loss to continue offering health care, elder care and education.
After the appeals court overturned the disenrollment, tribal Chairman Reyn Leno spoke against the ruling, and so far his council has not acted to reinstate the members. Some say that it’s the job of the enrollment board to take that action, but the board isn’t going to meet for another couple of months.
Meanwhile, says Gilio-Whitaker, “Imposing blood quantum has always been a problem. It’s the opposite of the ‘one-drop’ rule. We call it statistical genocide.”
