Cedric Sunray on the Attacks on Non Federally Recognized Tribes, Supported by Gaming Tribes

Cedric Sunray has an interesting (and long, there is more after the jump) piece on tribes that are not federally recognized.  We recently published on the Juaneno's that are having a problem with recognition.   Recognition can take 20 years. And disenrollments?  43 Federally recognized tribes have disenrolled their own tribal members within the last 10 years.  All run gaming enterprises  And don't you think tribes don't want MORE tribes to be recognized, so they can't open competing casinos?

From Cedric Sunray:

Here is brief narrative for those who do not have time to visit the site.  I thank you for supporting social justice and integrity.

Let us start it with a quote that guides my life. The quote comes from Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

At the last two National Congress of American Indians gatherings members of historic tribes such as the Lumbee and MOWA Choctaw, amongst others, told the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma clearly that their days of running around the country acting like Indian Identity Police are over.

In an article entitled, “Reconciling moral outrage with self-determination” in Indian Country Today on March 9, 2007, Keweenaw Bay Ojibwe Sheryl Lightfoot (Chair of the American Indian Policy Center, St. Paul, Minnesota) went directly at the moral injustice being perpetrated by the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She expressed a way that we all can deal with this. “

Another tactic which can be employed by other indigenous nations or the private citizens of other nations is the art of moral persuasion, or ‘moral suasion,’ as it has also been termed. This involves a campaign of exposure and embarrassment. This tactic has most often been employed in international human rights campaigns, with the purpose being to expose the immoral government action in the media and open up international discussion in order to embarrass the target government into changing its policy to better conform to international norms. This was done in the early days of the campaign against apartheid in South Africa and has been used often by groups like Amnesty International to urge governments to stop human rights abuses. Finally, follow the money. Those of us who find the actions of the sovereign Cherokee Nation disturbing or morally questionable also have some economic options…”

Certain members of the leadership of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma have made it their duty to play God to the identity of others with the belief that they will never be “found out” themselves. But now they are crumbling, falling back on their heels, and looking to once again change their words to sound good to a new audience who have not encountered them in the near past. There is nothing worse than people who create monsters and then attempt to walk away or act like they were never present when things go bad. A few years back the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma developed a “Task Force” to combat the validity of anyone or any tribe which is not federally-recognized. They simply went too far when instead of producing civil dialogue, they attempted to belittle and make fun of “non-federal” or “unrecognized” tribal people and communities. In an article entitled, “Indian identity remains in question”, which addressed issues at the 2008 State of Sequoyah Commission’s annual conference, members of the Task Farce’s actions (as I more appropriately renamed them; read on and find out why) where relayed, “Poteete and other panelists jokingly adopted such ‘wannabe’ names as ‘Chief flies High and Eats Pie’, ‘Chief Talks Trash’, ‘Princess Dream Catcher’, and ‘Princess Buffalo Wings”. One of the Cherokee council members Cara Cowan-Watts stated, “We would like to make impersonation of a tribe, or a tribal citizen, a felony”.