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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.