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Modern Native Nations and Sovereignty, 1988-Present / Tribal Disenrollment /

In Tribal Disenrollment, the Oppressed Become the Oppressors
Disenrollment takes away people's acknowledgement as Indians, and it was not originally a Native idea. Modern
American Indians picked it up from the federal government. Ironically, through Indian enrollment for the last 180
years, the United States has been killing, on paper, Indians who are still very much alive on the ground. Federal
enrollment started under Jacksonian Removal in 1830, but it intensified under the Dawes Act of 1887. Because
all that some people learn from oppression is how to oppress others, today, some reservation Indians have
begun disenrolling their own members, committing self-genocide.
One of the greatest con jobs in the history of America, federal Indian enrollment was a centerpiece of the
infamous Dawes Act (1887), even though enrollment and recognition were never mentioned in the original law.
Federal enrollment started, instead, as a mop-up operation mounted nine years later to undercut the intensive
Native American resistance to Dawes, the government's newest land-theft scheme against Natives.
The Dawes conspiracy officially took millions of acres of Indian land on the false premise that Native Americans did not use it correctly,
and then parceled the land back out with a stingy hand: 160 acres to a head of household; 80 acres to a single adult; and 40 acres to
orphans. "Leftover" land was then opened to American settlement.
Because Native Americans would not cooperate with this federal program to gut their remaining land holdings,
Congress forced compliance on June 10, 1896, by creating the Dawes Commission. It was the Commission that
hit upon the idea of enrollment, and the point of enrollment was never to determine whether or not someone was
an American Indian, but to determine whether or not a person was eligible to receive any acreage under the
Commission's guidelines. Enrollment was a benefits determination, not a testament to Native American identity.
Instead of starting from scratch, Dawes Commissioners began with the old rolls, i.e., lists of Natives rounded up
under Jacksonian Indian Removal, an earlier land-theft scheme to "clear" the eastern United States of American
Indians. Dawes Commissioners openly acknowledged that the Removal rolls, mostly provided by partial
clergymen and crooked Indian agents, were corrupt. Importantly, the eastern lists of people thus rounded up
depended heavily on missionary lists of converts to Christianity. These rolls not only enumerated family members but also gave their
addresses, so that the militias knew exactly where to go to raid their houses.
There was an unintended side effect to this method, however. Native Americans who had refused even to talk to missionaries were not
listed. The sites of their homes were unknown to the invaders. Many such "longhairs" had already long been taking measures to hide
themselves in places that Americans did not know about, in the back hills and on the high grounds of swamps. These were the
Non-Treaty Peoples, and they stayed put in the east.
The government knew perfectly well that one-fourth to one-third of the eastern peoples had never signed land-stripping treaties and had
flatly refused to have been transported west. Their refusal was the direct reason that President Andrew Jackson called up militias to
"round up" eastern Indians, forcing them from their homes in the middle of the night, with marauding settlers plundering their homes
and stealing their farm animals before the Native Americans had even been marched, barefoot, to the military concentration camps, the
launching points of the many Trails of Tears.
On the one hand, Non-Treaty Peoples were able to continue their cultures in their homelands. On the other hand, the federal
government did not take kindly to the snub. In retaliation, its laws and courts deliberately defamed the Non-Treaty Peoples as those
who did not care about their cultures. The government even claimed that they had knowingly "dissolved their connection with their
nation" by voluntarily becoming citizens of whatever eastern state of the United States they were in.
This was untrue, of course. The people who stayed behind did not do so to assimilate as state citizens, but because they were among

the American Indians most devoted to their old cultures and homelands, refusing conversion, assimilation, and transport west, at all
costs. However, the con was on, and the government's rationalization was that, because they had refused to sign any treaties with the
United States, Native nations in the east constituted nothing but "social clubs."
Notwithstanding, the central fantasy of Removal was that all of the indigenous peoples, from the Atlantic seacoast to the Mississippi
River, had been rounded up and shoved west to "Indian Territory" (Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas). To this day, Americans of every
stripe subscribe to this belief, refusing to believe that anyone of American Indian heritage is still residing in the east. As Grandmother
Barbara Crandell, Bird Clan, Ohio Cherokee, puts it, "When the government killed Indian people on paper, they intended for us to stay
dead!"
The freewheeling enrollment procedures of the Dawes Commission quickly devolved into an unwieldy farce. Since actually being an
American Indian was never the criterion for being enrolled, the Commission yielded the ridiculous spectacle of Euro-Americans being
enrolled (and thus securing Indian land for free), at the same time that American Indians were being ruled ineligible.
In fact, the whole purpose of Dawes Act was to serve as a real estate agency, which it did magnificently, ultimately deeding almost 90%
of Indian land to Euro-Americans. As a side effect, the Dawes Act forced Euro-Christian concepts of property law and family structure
on Native America. The Dawes Act stripped us of our land bases while disrupting our matriarchies by imposing patriarchy.
Even as these wheels turned, the numbers of American Indians out west were deliberately minimized.
Only 300,000 western American Indians ever applied for Dawes enrollment, and 200,000 of them,
although undoubtedly American Indians, were rejected. The point of Dawes enrollment had never been
to prove the authenticity of this or that Indian claimant, but simply to authorize the handing out of as little
land as possible to the American Indians. The best way to do that was by simply refusing to recognize
their very existenceand there were far more than 200,000 unrecognized American Indians in the
United States in 1907.
The modern twist of disenrollment is just another type of documentary genocide. Disenrollment removes the name of someone once
granted Indian status, thereby making that person's heritage officially invisible. This tactic has actually been going on since Dawesian
times, but today, disenrolling previously recognized American Indians has burgeoned into a cottage industry on some Indian
reservations, from New York State to California.
The incentives for "disappearing" members include bad blood and squabbling over money. As to the first, there are traditional rules, well
understood, for dealing with difficult quarrels. As a peace-keeping measure, whenever factions simply could not get along, they split,
with each going its separate way, nevermore to tangle with its "frenemies." However, in thus departing, traditionals never denounced
the departing factions as no longer American Indian. Separate or together, they were still Mahican, or Choctaw, or Seneca, or
Cherokee.
Modern disenrollment by Indian vs. Indian is usually undertaken, however, for the most unworthy reason imaginable: money. Quarrels
over who receives the casino proceeds mark the current disenrollment frenzy, for the fewer the American Indians, the larger the take for
each. In booting people out, the tribal councils involved are simply aping the worst aspect of Western culture, its relentless greed,
although a shameful pretense of the disenrollers, echoing Dawes, is that those being disenrolled have lost their culture.
Worse are the allegations of insufficient "Indian blood" to be "authentic" Indians. Blood quanta were set up by the Dawes Commission in
1897.Quanta are racist to the core, but culture, not "blood," determines identity. Furthermore, traditional culture never supported sorting
people out by race, but was widely welcoming of all people. Our openness was, after all, how the Europeans gained a strong enough
foothold on the continent to attack us, in the first place.
Still, I see an upside to disenrollment. Since it was always a colonial control mechanism, anyway, ending enrollment could reinvigorate
the people. Should the enrollment system fail by its own racist, corrupt, and antiquated weight, then Indians will necessarily come
together without the "incentives" of governmental programs, which traditionally did little more than pit Indians against each other.
American Indians will then be judged on how they behave, not on what governmental dog tags they wear. What will come to the
organizing fore will be the better spirits of everyone's nature, as greed, hostility, and self-loathing fall away under the pressure of
decolonized reality.

About the Author

Barbara Alice Mann
Barbara Alice Mann, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Honors College at the University of Toledo, in Toledo, Ohio. She has authored nine
books, the latest of which is The Tainted Gift (2009), on the deliberate spread of disease to Natives by settlers as a land-clearing tactic. She is
currently working on an international project examining historical massacres, around the world, 1780 to 1820. The Cooper Connection, her book
on the influence of Jane Austen on James Fenimore Cooper is coming out in the spring of 2013 from AMS Press, while her Spirits of Place:
Native North American Spirituality, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Her internationally famous Iroquoian Women: The
Gantowisas (2001, 2004, 2006) is in its third printing. Two other internationally known books include George Washingtons War on Native
America (2005, 2007), Daughters of Mother Earth (2006, as Make a Beautiful Way, 2008). Her Where Are Your Women? Missing in Action
(2006) has been anthologized. An Ohio Bear Clan Seneca, Mann lives in her homeland and works for the rights of the people indigenous to Ohio,
resident in Ohio. Ohio is a Seneca word meaning Beautiful River, a spiritual designation.

Select Citation Style:

MLA
Mann, Barbara Alice. "Tribal Disenrollment: In Tribal Disenrollment, the Oppressed Become the Oppressors." The American Mosaic:
The American Indian Experience. ABC-CLIO, 2015. Web. 5 May 2015.
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Entry ID: 1818245