The Unintended Consequences of Disenrollment

Year

For most of the modern tribal self-determination era, American Indian nations have emphasized inclusion. Starting in the early 1970s, higher tribal membership numbers equated to higher federal self-determination dollars. As tribes otherwise redoubled their efforts to reverse the destruction caused by preceding federal Indian removal, assimilation, and relocation policies, tribes found strength in numbers through expanded membership. Once-terminated tribes that were restored over the last few decades were particularly aggressive about bulking up their membership rosters in order to rebuild everything that the United States destroyed in the 1950s. Because of the once normative nature of American indigenous kinship-based systems of inclusion, the Indian Nation rebuilding efforts were second nature...

Resource Type
Citation

Galanda, Gabriel S. "The Unintended Consequences of Disenrollment." Indian Country Today Media Network. February 2, 2015. Opinion. (https://ictnews.org/archive/the-unintended-consequences-of-disenrollment, accessed February 22, 2023)

Related Resources

Image
An Essay on the Federal Origins of Disenrollment

Disenrollment is not indigenous to Native America. It is a creature of the United States. The origins of disenrollment are traced to the United States’ paternalistic assimilation policies of the 1930s. In 1934 the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act (“IRA”), wherein the federal…

Image
Tribal-citizen entrepreneurship: What does it mean for Indian Country, and how can tribes support it?

The following feature, a special to Community Dividend, is the condensed version of a speech Professor Cornell delivered at the Montana Indian Business Conference in Great Falls, Montana, on February 2, 2006. The conference, which was cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, focused…