In April of 2003, Eddie Vedolla got the letter telling him he’d been kicked out of the Guidiville Band of Pomo Indians. The tribal council informed him it was revoking his membership, and that of his 86-year-old mother, two sisters, and niece. The family was no longer eligible to vote in tribal elections, and Vedolla’s niece lost her tribal scholarship to San Francisco State University. Most notably, they each would no longer receive the $2,455 quarterly dividend checks that tribe members get from California’s Indian casinos.
Vedolla missed the benefits, but said he was more bewildered by having his identity denied by former friends and neighbors. “I got over the anger, but I never got over this feeling that I have in my gut,” he said. “You know how you feel helpless when someone takes something from you and you can’t do anything about it? It’s that kind of feeling.”
Eddie Vedolla, sister Elinore Trippa, and niece Arial Trippa were among those kicked out of the Guidiville Pomos. Credits: Chris Duffey “There are people who support me, but who won’t stand up,” Vedolla said. “They all fear that they’re going to be cut off from their benefits.” Credits: Chris Duffey
The experience of Vedolla and his family typifies, in many ways, that of California’s Indians in the 20th century, from the era of “termination” to the era of casinos. The 65-year-old retired elementary school teacher grew up in a modest house on one of California’s rancherias, the small plots of land that serve as reservations. He remembers his grandfather speaking the Pomo language with the other old folks around the house — to the young boy, it seemed a mysterious language, full of laughter. But part of his experience was hearing from his elders that no good could come from his Indian heritage.
“My grandfather never would teach me the language,” he said. “I’d ask him to teach me and he’d get kinda annoyed with me. I’ll never forget one time, he said, ‘You don’t want to know all that. That’s not what’s important. What’s important is to go to school … and marry a white woman.'” Only many years later did Vedolla figure out that his elders were trying to protect him from the discrimination and brutality they had experienced.
American Indians have fought to preserve their identity in the face of many attacks. Over the past one hundred years, the opposition usually came from US government policies designed to wipe out tribes and disperse their members through assimilation. Not until recently have Indians felt the need to protect their identity from other Indians.
But casinos have brought an abrupt influx of money into California’s tribes, not all of which are handling it well. Across the state, tribes have begun to kick out longtime members with a variety of tactics. Some tribal councils have cited missing birth certificates and reinterpreted membership rules to remove members from the rolls, while other tribes refuse to enroll people who feel they’ve been wrongly excluded for years. The exiled and excluded Indians say all the cases were prompted by the same motivation: the tribes’ desire to increase the remaining members’ shares of the profits from Indian casinos.
While no firm statistics exist for the number of disenrolled Indians, in 2004 the Associated Press estimated that at least 1,160 people in fourteen California tribes were embroiled in membership disputes. According to California Indians for Justice, an organization comprised of former members of fifteen tribes, more than 1,500 people have been disenrolled since gaming was legalized by the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988. And the problem is spreading beyond state borders: Conflicts have recently cropped up in Nevada, New York, Connecticut, and other states where Indian gaming profits have raised the stakes of tribal membership.
Since the tribes are sovereign entities within the United States, tribal members who feel mistreated by their governing councils find themselves with little recourse. State and federal courts have rejected lawsuits brought by disenrolled members, saying that membership disputes must be appealed to tribal officials — usually the same people who made the original decisions.
This Catch-22 allows tribal councils to get away with all sorts of misdeeds, alleges Mark Maslin, who is organizing a coalition of disenrolled tribe members called the American Indian Rights and Resources Organization. “The reality is, the tribal constitutions and enrollment ordinances are just words on paper,” Maslin said. “Tribes don’t follow their own laws. It’s lawlessness. It doesn’t matter what race you are; if there are no checks and balances then the greedy people will rise to the top, because they don’t play by the rules.”
While California’s tribes have always lacked an independent judiciary system, no one paid the situation much mind until casino profits led to the recent spate of disenrollments. “It’s because of the casinos,” Vedolla said. “Because of the money, that’s what it’s all about. Before the casinos came along, membership wasn’t such a big deal. We could all be poor together.”
The days of being poor together are over. According to the National Indian Gaming Commission, Indian casinos pulled in a combined revenue of $19.4 billion in 2004. California’s 61 casinos accounted for about $5 billion of that total.
In the East Bay alone, four tribes have expressed casino ambitions. The Lytton Band of Pomo Indians tried to outfit Casino San Pablo with up to five thousand slot machines until state opposition forced the group to downgrade; a smaller casino with five hundred electronic bingo machines opened in August 2005. The Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians still hopes to build a casino on thirty acres along Richmond Parkway, and while federal, state, and county officials oppose the plan, city officials and the tribal chairman remain optimistic. Last summer the Koi Nation withdrew its plans for a casino near the Oakland airport in the face of county and city opposition.
Meanwhile, Vedolla’s former tribe, the Guidiville Band of Pomo Indians, has hitched its hopes to Harrah’s star, teaming up with the Nevada-based casino giant and an Emeryville developer on a proposed complex at Richmond’s Point Molate. The investors have an option agreement to buy the 354-acre waterfront parcel, a former Navy fuel depot, for $50 million. Their plan calls for a casino with 150,000 square feet of gaming space, a 1,100-room hotel, a theater, and sundry other extras. While rumors have circulated that the plans are stalled, Richmond’s city manager and Guidiville tribal officials both insist that nothing has changed. Michael Derry, CEO of the Guidiville Band’s economic development corporation, said the tribe is busy drafting environmental impact reports and an application to have the land put into a federal trust. Derry said he expects the documents to be submitted in the next two months.
The Guidiville Band will have to prove its historic connection to the land for the federal government to put it in trust, and Contra Costa County’s board of supervisors will likely raise objections. Should the tribe get past that hurdle, it will then try to negotiate a compact with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to allow for Vegas-style slot machines. With the governor and most state legislators firmly opposed to more urban casinos, the Guidiville Band might have to search for a loophole of its own, like the one the Lytton Band used to build its bingo palace. Despite all the obstacles, the potential payoff seems to make the challenges worthwhile.
Members of tribes with small memberships and particularly successful casinos have gotten wealthy very quickly. For many Indians in such tribes, the last ten years have rocketed them from a life of struggle and scraping by to a comfortably plush existence. For instance, the roughly 75 members of the Table Mountain Rancheria get a share of the monthly profits from their Table Mountain Casino near Fresno. Kathy Lewis, whom the tribe has refused to recognize as a member, said tribal members get about $20,000 every month, as well as tax bonuses in March, vacation bonuses in May, and a Christmas bonus every December that has climbed to $200,000 per person.
In fact, casinos have changed the life of every Indian in California, even though there are seventy federally recognized California tribes that don’t have so much as a bingo parlor to their names. Each quarter, the gaming tribes pay a share of their overall profits into a trust fund administered by the California Gambling Control Commission, which then apportions the money among the nongaming tribes. Each tribe gets a total of $1.1 million each year, which is distributed as each sees fit. Some direct most of the money toward programs such as health care and college scholarships, while others distribute all of their money directly to their members. The Guidiville Band doles out 100 percent of its share to its 112 members, which amounts to $9,821 a year per person.
Vedolla, who has a broad, kind face and an aura of gentle firmness that served him well in his 25 years as a schoolteacher, alleges that the tribal council uses these steady paychecks as leverage to keep the general membership in line. “There are people who support me, but who won’t stand up,” he said. “They all fear that they’re going to be cut off from their benefits, especially the state money. Most of those people are very, very low income. Some of them are almost homeless. So they don’t want to take the chance of giving up their distribution, or their homes on the rancheria, or any future benefits they might get. They’re afraid they’re going to get disenrolled too, if they support us.”
In addition to the members’ fear of losing out on present and future casino benefits, Vedolla thinks they also may have been swayed by the increase in their quarterly checks when the five members of his family were disenrolled. The family’s shares were put back into the general pot and divided among the remaining members. Vedolla said that’s a powerful incentive to stay quiet. “Wow, man, that’s money, and these people need it,” he said. “So it’s hard for them to stand up.”
Across California, the diverse cases are bound together by the blank wall of silence that the disenfranchised encounter when they ask for answers from their tribal councils. Eric Enriquez, of the Pinoleville Band of Pomo Indians, thinks he’s been disenrolled, but can’t say for sure. “You can call up the tribal council and ask if you’re a member, and they’ll say it’s confidential,” he says. His children haven’t been allowed to enroll, but the tribal council won’t tell them why — they simply refuse to hear their application.
Because of this lack of openness, Vedolla’s story is difficult to confirm. The Guidiville tribal council refused to comment on the specifics of his case, or on its membership policy in general. “The Guidiville Band of Pomo Indians Tribal Council is a government,” tribal chairperson Merlene Sanchez wrote in a letter. “The matters to which you inquire are personal in nature and would not be allowed to be discussed by any government agency.” From the few comments Derry would make, it’s clear that the tribal council has a very different perspective on Vedolla’s case, and disagrees fundamentally with his allegations.
“There’s absolutely no correlation between casinos and membership,” Derry said. “Maybe in some cases there are, but not in this case. It has nothing to do with the casino whatsoever.” Derry said Vedolla was disenrolled because he violated the membership policy of the tribal constitution, and that Vedolla was given plenty of chances to appeal the tribe’s decision. “The tribe has gone well overboard, in my opinion, to make sure he has every possible right, when it’s clear they could have just made a determination,” he said.
While it’s hard to gather enough information to judge the validity of individual claims, it’s easy to see that there’s a larger problem: an absence of accountability and the checks and balances that ensure a fair government. Kendall Smith has listened to the grievances of the disenrolled for years, first working for Congressman Mike Thompson in his Mendocino office, and now as a member of Mendocino County’s board of supervisors. Although she counts herself an outsider, she said she has heard enough to recognize the legitimacy of the problem.
“When individual tribal members go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and say, ‘Gee, I think this is an unjust disenrollment,’ the Bureau is more inclined to say, ‘This is a tribal issue, a sovereign issue, and you need to work it out at the tribal level,'” Smith said. “The problem is, individuals who think they or their families have been treated unfairly then need to turn back to the very people who are disenrolling them to seek a remedy. And that’s where I think the system fails.”
A public conversation about the problem is long past due, Smith said. “There needs to be a broader dialogue to seek the appropriate appeal process and review process to hear these tribal enrollment questions. They need to create a transparent and uniform and just review process.” As the situation stands now, she said, “it is a civil rights concern and issue.”
Politicians have shied away from stepping into the debate or proposing oversight mechanisms, however, because interactions between Indian tribes and the US government are so fraught with tension. After hundreds of years of broken treaties and broken promises, politicians are understandably wary about making any move that would appear to re-establish federal authority over the tribes. Tribal sovereignty is seen as a hard-won right, and many people believe that what the tribes do with it is their own business.
On a recent afternoon in Ukiah’s Henny Penny diner, Vedolla told his family’s story over a cup of decaf while CNN blared above the counter. Vedolla is a typical modern Indian, inhabiting two worlds at once: a heavy turquoise and silver ring weighs down his left hand, counterbalancing his chunky black digital watch. He’s the product of a family that fought hard to hold on to its Indian identity, which makes it all the more painful for them to have that identity snatched away just when life was finally getting easier.
Back in the days of Prohibition, Vedolla’s grandfather Jesse Elliott was a young man, living with his wife and three children in Pinoleville. On an ill-fated New Year’s Eve, Elliott went out with his buddies to visit a grape grower named Guidi who had sold the tribe the land that became the Guidiville rancheria. The men often bought bootleg wine from Guidi, but that night, something went wrong. There was a scuffle, the sharp report of a gun, and Guidi was dead on the floor. The Indian men scattered into the night.
Soon enough, the cops knocked on Elliott’s door, and hauled both him and his wife, Daisy, off to the county jail. In the morning they released Daisy, acknowledging that she had not been involved in the shooting. But she arrived home to an empty house — the town authorities had taken away their three girls.
Vedolla said his grandmother ran to the courthouse to try to find out what had happened to her daughters, but that no one would help her. “She spent most of her life in front of that courthouse, on those benches, waiting to see the judge that made that order,” Vedolla said. “But he would never see her.”
The girls had been shipped to orphanages in southern California. The eldest was thirteen — old enough to run away when she got the chance, and find her way back north to the family. But the other two were too young. A white family adopted Vedolla’s mother, Benedicta, who was about four, and pulled her out of school in third grade so she could do more work around the house.
“My mom was a little girl, and she didn’t know what was going on,” Vedolla said. “She didn’t know that they ripped her away from her culture, her identity, her roots, her heritage, her family, her language.” There’s an awful symmetry to his mother’s life, he said: Now she’s an old woman suffering from dementia, once again unaware of what’s happening around her as her Indian identity is stripped away from her.
Vedolla’s mother left her loveless adopted home as soon as she could, and got married young to Vedolla’s father, Edward, who was an alcoholic. When he died of a heart attack, she found herself adrift in Santa Ana with three small children. She applied for welfare, and went to speak with the social worker about her case. By a strange twist of fate, the social worker had recently worked in Ukiah, and knew the story of Daisy’s lost children. She put the stories together, called Daisy in Ukiah, and told her to come south to see her daughter.
“Right about the same time, my grandfather got out of prison on that murder charge,” Vedolla said. “They made an agreement that when we got back north, he would have a place for us.” The reunited family moved to Ukiah in the late 1940s, living first in a tent on the banks of the Russian River; they were one of many Indian families camped out for the summer season of farm work. Vedolla’s mother and grandfather went to work in the orchards as well, and saved enough money to build a house on the Guidiville Rancheria, in the foothills of Cow Mountain. They built the modest one-story clapboard house themselves — Vedolla remembers carrying lumber, and sweeping up the bent nails and sawdust.
The family moved in just before the beginning of the so-called termination era, when the federal government sought to get rid of the “Indian problem” by assimilating Indians into American society. In 1958, California state legislators approved the Rancheria Termination Act, which distributed the small rancherias among the people who were living there at the time. When each plot had been distributed, the rancherias were no longer federally protected entities, but rather collections of privately owned lots suddenly subject to state property taxes. In the eyes of the government, the tribes no longer existed.
On the Guidiville Rancheria, most of the distributees eventually sold their land and moved away. Vedolla’s grandfather stayed put, even when the government didn’t come through with all the amenities it had promised would make up for the loss of tribal status.
Vedolla grew up on that traditional Guidiville land, hunting in the woods and fishing in the creeks. His family raised enough money to send him to Humboldt State University, where he got a BA in psychology and a teaching credential. He was one of the first members of the Guidiville Band to graduate from a four-year college, and felt a heavy obligation to come back to teach at the Ukiah school district to help the next generation along.
In those years, a member of the Guidiville Band named Keith Pike was laboring to revive the tribe, which didn’t officially exist. In the late 1980s, the Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians filed a lawsuit against the federal government, alleging that the termination of the tribe was illegal and that the amenities promised the tribe were never provided, and seeking restoration of its federal recognition. When the Scotts Valley lawsuit succeeded in 1991, it cleared the way for other landless Indian tribes to be reinstated.
Pike was working to reinstate the Guidiville tribe, and in the late 1980s he gathered people together. “Eddie’s a sharp guy, and I thought he’d be a good resource for the tribe,” Pike recalled. Vedolla’s family was officially enrolled in the Pinoleville Band of Pomo Indians, because his maternal grandmother was listed on the original Pinoleville membership roll. But Pike suggested that Vedolla and his family relinquish their membership in the Pinoleville tribe and formally join the Guidiville Band. “Eddie grew up right north of where I grew up — his mother was best friends with my mother,” Pike said. “We’re the same people. He had belonged to another tribe based on a different branch of his family tree, but he was raised as a Guidiville.” Vedolla and his family agreed to officially switch over, and their application was accepted in 1991.
The trouble in the Guidiville Band began right about when the tribal council started talking about the possibility of a casino.
Vedolla had been tribal chairman briefly, in the early 1990s, but resigned when he realized he didn’t have enough time or energy to be chairman while maintaining his full-time teaching job. However, he stayed involved in tribal affairs, and at general meetings began asking questions about tribal finances. He also requested that the entire tribe be allowed to participate in the revision of the tribal constitution that was under way. Dissatisfied by the council’s responses, he ran for chairman in the late 1990s and lost by a couple of votes.
“I became a pain in the neck to them, I guess,” Vedolla said. “And lo and behold, one day we got this letter saying that we were removed from the rolls because of dual enrollment.”
The council claimed that the Vedollas had been enrolled in the Pinoleville Band at the time they applied for membership with Guidiville. But Vedolla said that by the time they petitioned to join the Guidiville Band, they had already relinquished their previous membership.
Vedolla and his siblings were shocked by the letter. “We requested a hearing with the tribal council so we could explain our case, present our documents, have a lawyer present, and all that,” he said. “They refused. However, they did grant my sister an informal meeting. At that meeting, she asked, ‘What leads you to believe we’re dually enrolled? Show us the documents.’ They wouldn’t provide those to us. ‘We have evidence that you were dually enrolled,’ was all they’d say. So that was it.”
Although the general membership of the tribe could vote the current tribal council out of office, and could vote to reinstate the disenrolled members, Vedolla isn’t holding his breath. The council hasn’t been holding regular membership meetings, the members don’t know the whole story, and what’s more, they don’t care to know, he said. “As it is right now, the council has the power to do whatever they want, until the membership rises up,” he said. “And they won’t ever rise up, as far as I can tell, because they got into a casino project.” The membership doesn’t want to risk derailing such a potentially lucrative project by roiling the tribe, he said.
The Vedolla family appealed to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and is currently engaged in a court-ordered mediation process in hopes of arriving at a voluntary agreement. But having seen other disenrolled Indians go through similar, and ultimately fruitless, processes, Vedolla is not optimistic. Many disenfranchised Indians have filed suit in federal and state courts, while others have petitioned the Bureau of Indian Affairs in hopes of convincing the bureau to intercede. The result — a steady drumbeat of rejections and dismissals — has made it clear that the disenrolled will not find their answer in courtrooms.
The court rulings all hark back to a 1978 Supreme Court decision, Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez. “A tribe’s right to define its own membership for tribal purposes has long been recognized as central to its existence as an independent political community,” wrote Justice Thurgood Marshall in that majority decision, establishing that individual tribe members can’t bring membership disputes to federal courts.
In recent decisions, like one filed in September 2005 by the Ninth District Court of Appeals, judges have shaken their heads at the situation, but admitted that their hands are tied. The September ruling concerned a claim by Kathy Lewis and her siblings that they were wrongly denied membership by California’s Table Mountain Tribe. “Although their claim to membership appears to be a strong one, as their father is a recognized member of the tribe, their claim cannot survive the double jurisdictional whammy of sovereign immunity and lack of federal court jurisdiction to intervene in tribal membership disputes,” the judge wrote.
“These doctrines of tribal sovereign immunity were developed decades ago, before the gaming boom created a new and economically valuable premium on tribal membership,” the judge wrote elsewhere. “We agree with the district court’s conclusion that this case is deeply troubling on the level of fundamental substantive justice. Nevertheless, we are not in a position to modify well-settled doctrines of tribal sovereign immunity. This is a matter in the hands of a higher authority than our court.”
On a recent Saturday afternoon, about two dozen Indian protesters gathered outside the flashy Table Mountain Casino near Fresno. From the casino steps, the neon-pink posterboard signs were small spots of color across the rural highway, and the voices of the protesters were faint. “Boycott Table Mountain!” “Table Mountain discriminates against its own people!” “We want our civil rights!” Every time the casino’s doors slid open, the distant shouts mingled with the ceaseless din of the slot machines inside. The casino was packed — the six-story parking garage was jammed with cars, and legions of determined gamblers squeezed between the tight rows of slot machines.
The protesters on the highway’s grassy verge came from tribes all over California. This core group of activists has previously protested in Ukiah and Sacramento, and gathered this time to focus attention on the Indians locked in a dispute with Table Mountain Rancheria. Marilyn Brantley, a mild woman with long, graying hair, was one of the locals. She told her story as casino security guards cruised by in golf carts, walkie-talkies held to their mouths.
Brantley’s mother voted for the tribe’s original constitution in 1980, one of only seventeen people to do so, and lived on the rancheria with her kids without incident until the late 1980s. “She was a member up until the bingo came in,” Brantley said. “When the bingo came in, they said, ‘Sorry, you’re not a member.'” Nearly two decades later, Brantley is still trying to convince the tribe to officially enroll the family, but in one way, it’s too late. “My mom, in her last days …” She trailed off and started again. “We really could have used the money to take better care of her, make her more comfortable. That would have been such a blessing to her.
“She’s buried up there,” Brantley said, nodding toward a rocky hill adjacent to the casino, marked with a cross on the hilltop.
As the slanting afternoon sunlight turned a deeper orange, the protesters rubbed their cold hands together and shouted more vigorously. Some of the cars and trucks speeding by honked their support, but most took the turn into the parking garage without hesitation. Carla Maslin, who held one end of the long banner reading “American Indians demand civil rights now,” wasn’t discouraged. She and her husband, Mark, have spearheaded the growing coalition of disenfranchised Indians known as the American Indian Rights and Resources Organization. Carla was disenrolled from the Redding Rancheria in northern California, along with 75 members of her extended family. The family had lived on the rancheria for generations, and Carla’s disenrolled father had been elected tribal chairman four times. The family helped organize and build the enormously profitable Win-River Casino. But in 2000, the tribal council said that the missing birth certificate of an ancestor threw the entire family’s claim of membership into doubt.
The family spent two years gathering official documents and medical and school records to prove their case. When the tribal council asked for DNA proof, the family reluctantly exhumed two bodies for testing. The tests showed a 99.9 percent probability that the family’s account of their lineage was accurate, but the tribal council refused to accept the results. The family went to court, taking the case all the way to the US Supreme Court. When it announced in May 2005 that it wouldn’t hear their case, the family realized it had reached the legal end of the road.
“Now that there’s money in the picture, and there’s no place for American Indians to seek remedy, the abuses are becoming more and more flagrant,” Mark Maslin said. “And they have no place to turn.”
The US Congress established the quasisovereign status of tribes, and therefore has the authority to modify the rules. But members of the American Indian Rights and Resources Organization say they’ve met with staff members for their US representatives and senators, and that government officials are slow to take up their cause. Vedolla and most of his allies are pushing for revision of the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act. That statute, intended to ensure that tribal governments provided their members with the same rights that other American citizens received, turned out to be toothless. The listed rights were meant to be enforced by tribal forums, but the bill’s expectation of objective self-policing was overly optimistic.
Several revisions to the statute have been proposed over the years to rectify the situation, including a 1989 amendment introduced by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, and a 1998 amendment by Washington Senator Slade Gordon. Both bills would have given individuals the right to go to federal court if they felt their civil rights had been violated, and both denied that tribal councils could use sovereign immunity as a defense in such cases. Both bills died in committee. Now, members of the American Indian Rights and Resources Organization are drafting a new Tribal Justice Act, which closely resembles those earlier attempts to rein in the tribes.
Other Indian activists are developing a piece of legislation called the American Indian Heritage Act, which would address membership issues more specifically. The act would put a stop to fraudulent disenrollments and membership moratoriums by creating clear standards for membership, said Laura Wass, a former organizer for the American Indian Movement in Fresno who is now working with disenfranchised Indians. “As long as you can show proof of lineage and proof of heritage, then you belong to the tribe,” Wass said of her bill. It also includes provisions for an independent tribal court system to resolve disputes.
Wass said her faction has found members of Congress willing to sponsor its bill, but that she can’t name names until the spring, when plans are more firmly settled. But the activists behind the Tribal Justice Act have yet to find a sponsor. With outrage over the issue confined to a few thousand Indians, no one in Congress seems to have Indian civil rights high on the agenda.
“We’re aware there is a problem,” said Howard Gantman, a spokesman for California Senator Dianne Feinstein. “But those who feel they’ve been disenrolled unfairly can appeal to the BIA.” Thus far, he said, the senator hasn’t thought it appropriate to get involved in the process. “As the tribes are sovereign entities, we try to stay out of these disputes,” Gantman said.
But over at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, officials passed the buck. “Disenrollments are really internal, tribal issues,” said Dale Risling, the deputy regional director of Indian services in Sacramento. “We really expect the tribes to resolve the issues internally. They need to interpret their own laws.”
Left unaddressed, the disenrollment problem could ultimately affect many more people than just those who count themselves among the disenfranchised. Stated frankly, it is not an issue that makes Indian tribes look good. Rather, it makes them seem grasping, greedy, and incapable of running ethical governments. Many Indians fear that the actions of a few corrupt or misguided officials are setting up the larger Indian community for a backlash.
“I think this is going to be used as an excuse to decimate the tribes, once and for all,” says Eric Enriquez, the former member of the Pinoleville Band of Pomo Indians. “Bad behavior by certain Indian tribes will frustrate the American people and government, and they’ll find a way to whittle away tribes.”
The ramifications could be relatively minor — such as a piece of legislation that erodes tribal sovereignty slightly by giving federal courts oversight in membership disputes. Or things could escalate. As some of the fractured tribes push for new economic opportunities, the disenfranchised members are getting louder with their stories. They hope to turn the tide of public opinion firmly against the tribes.
Already, the atmosphere in California has changed since voters approved the expansion of Indian gaming with a pair of ballot initiatives in 1998 and 2000. In the years since, critics have derided the practice of “reservation shopping,” where landless tribes try to obtain property for casinos. Then, the prospect of a string of casinos in the East Bay raised “not in my backyard” concerns among government officials and residents. The stories of corruption and trampled civil rights told by disenrolled Indians could give California voters a powerful reason to put stricter limits on Indian gaming.
While Vedolla believes gaming can be a powerful tool for the betterment of Indian people, he says the Guidiville Band doesn’t deserve the Point Molate Casino in Richmond. He plans to let the residents of Contra Costa County know how he feels. “When you have a tribal government that deprives people of civil rights, they don’t deserve to get into projects such as this,” he said. “I don’t think moral people should support it.”
Amy McNamara-Gillespie contributed to this story.
BLOOD WORK
The rise of Indian gaming has spawned a cottage industry of DNA testing to help people prove tribal membership.
By Amy McNamara-Gillespie
Defining just who is Indian hasn’t been this controversial in nearly a century. With California casinos reeling in about $5 billion per year, what was once a social stigma is now a winning Lotto ticket.
People who have been told they have Indian ancestry in their family are searching for old birth records and signing up for DNA tests. A saliva-covered cotton swab from a $250 test holds enough information to allow geneticists to determine what percentage of Indian blood a person has. But while that can get the eager client a college scholarship from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, it’s not enough to get them into a tribe. Each tribe has its own membership criteria, and all require documents proving direct descent from earlier tribal members.
But that doesn’t stop people from trying. As more people have suddenly become interested in their potential Indian heritage, DNA testing centers have popped up in San Francisco and Richmond. And the reasons clients opt for testing are changing.
“When we first started, people were looking for information because they had oral legends in their family history and they just wanted to see if there was any validity to it,” said Amy Schilling, until recently a spokeswoman for Trace Genetics, a Richmond lab that offers genetic tests including paternity tests, forensic evaluations, and testing designed to trace African and Jewish ancestry. “We get a lot more calls now from people wanting to prove that they are Native American because they want government funding, tribal enrollment, or scholarships for their kids.”
While DNA evidence can bolster someone’s claim of tribal membership, there’s little chance it will ever become the primary criteria. Tribes object for both practical reasons and on principle. They note that while DNA can establish that a person has Indian ancestry, it often can’t link a person to a specific tribe. It also ignores the attachment to culture and traditions that tribes say truly defines an Indian. But as more membership disputes crop up in California, more people are plunging into the debate over what defines an Indian: nature or nurture.
Trace Genetics cofounder Dr. Jason Eshleman has mixed feelings about using DNA to determine tribal membership. He opposes using it as the only evidence linking someone to a tribe. “For the sum total of human history, DNA was not how people determined if they were Native American,” he said. “They were Native American because they grew up that way. We’ve had terrible atrocities in human history when somebody tried to draw sharp genetic lines according to perceived genetic ancestry.”
Yet Eshleman does favor using DNA to assist a case for membership when written records are imprecise. He notes that old Census rolls were not necessarily accurate because many Indians were either afraid or simply refused to cooperate with the US government and did not want to be listed. “What at one time was a stigma is thankfully something now that people aren’t ashamed of,” he says
There are two main types of testing. The first is the relatively simple test often used to prove relationships between parents and children, which can demonstrate that someone descended from a particular family tree in recent history. The broader test that Trace Genetics performs looks at the mitochondrial DNA that is passed down the maternal line, and determines which of thirty human ancestry groups the client belongs to. If a DNA test shows a match with one of the five groups that first inhabited America, then the company tests the sample against its unique database of mitochondrial DNA samples from more than eighty American Indian tribes.
If, for instance, a test showed a positive tribal match to a Cherokee sample in the company’s database of DNA, Schilling notes that it does not prove that the person belonged to that tribe in modern times. “It shows a general affiliation that says the person might share characteristics in common with these Native Americans,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that the person is biologically related to a specific person. All it means is that the person shares a distant common ancestor who was Cherokee.”
The case of the Foreman family, former members of the Redding Rancheria in Shasta County, seems like exactly the kind of situation that could be resolved via simple DNA testing. The heart of the Foreman controversy lies in the absence of a single birth certificate. Until the 1928 Meriam Act, Native Americans were not allowed to go to hospitals, so births were recorded in the family Bible, in family oral histories, and in Census records. The federal government accepts these documents, but the Redding Rancheria is being more stubborn.
The tribe demands birth records from all of its current members showing direct lineage to someone on the original membership roll. Bob Foreman’s grandmother was on that roll, but because she wasn’t allowed to give birth to her daughter in the local hospital, there’s no birth certificate. The tribe says it therefore lacks proof that the Foreman family is descended from an original tribal member. That the family has always lived on the Rancheria and that Bob Foreman wrote the tribal constitution, fought for tribal recognition, successfully campaigned for Indian gaming rights, and was elected tribal chairman four times doesn’t alter the lack of proof, tribal officials say.
That’s a situation where DNA testing could be useful, Eshleman said. “That’s the kind of thing where there is a real clear cut between whether or not a person is related,” he said. “That’s different from the fishing trip of, ‘Hey, maybe I’m a Native American, maybe I can open a casino.'”
In 2002, the tribe demanded DNA proof of lineage after turning down Census records, school records, Bureau of Indian Affairs records, and a state-authorized delayed birth certificate provided by the Foreman family. Decades after the deaths of his mother and grandmother, the only way for Foreman to get DNA samples was to exhume their bodies. He speaks with reluctance about digging up the graves. “I did it for my kids,” he said. “It’s not something anybody should have to do.”
The resultant DNA test gave a clear answer, declaring a 99.9 percent probability that the maternal lineage in question was accurate. “The statistical results would be accepted in any court of law in the US as proof of legal maternity,” the report read.
But that was not enough for the tribe. “Having failed to produce genomic DNA evidence,” the tribal council’s final decision stated, “the Tribal Council finds that the Foreman family has not met its burden of proof to establish their eligibility for membership in the tribe.” In 2004, 76 members of the extended family were officially disenrolled at a tribal hearing during which Foreman claims that lifelong neighbors and classmates of his relatives testified that they had never before seen the family.
“There’s all sorts of factors, and the percentages don’t tell the whole story,” tribal attorney David Rapport said. “If you’re only testing for one parent, your percentages are only based on half the DNA. If you haven’t heard all of the evidence and haven’t heard the explanation, it sounds overwhelmingly persuasive. But in the world of DNA evidence it isn’t necessarily so.”
But the Foremans say the tribe’s rejection of their DNA evidence points to a larger problem: that tribal councils have no accountability and can make arbitrary decisions.
Many disenrolled Indians have similar stories of tribes failing to abide by the membership conditions they set out in their own constitutions. John Gomez was on the enrollment committee of his southern California Pechanga tribe before he got disenrolled, along with almost two hundred others, in March 2004.
Gomez discovered that the enrollment committee had been acting irregularly in the past five years. “Male members who were enrolling their kids, they were asked to get DNA testing done for their kids, so they could prove that the child was theirs,” he explained. But even after members complied and spent money on the testing, the committee refused to process the applications. About three weeks after Gomez brought the situation to the attention of the tribal attorney, he says the disenrollment procedures against him were begun.
Although officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs insist they have no authority to intervene in internal tribal matters, some tribes say the bureau is pushing them to standardize membership requirements. They say it wants tribes to revise their constitutions to make membership dependent on a “blood quantum,” or the percentage of tribal blood flowing through a member’s veins. The usual thresholds are one fourth or one eighth, to be determined by birth records and family trees.
“The Bureau of Indian Affairs is trying to move on us today to use a blood quantum,” said Don Arnold, chairman of the Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians. “And I don’t think it’s right. The situation then is if our kids marry out, and the blood quantum goes down, then our grandkids can’t be members. But they’re still Indians, whether they’re black or whatever nationality.”
As long as he’s chairman, Arnold said the Scotts Valley membership requirements will stay the same. “We know who’s who in the zoo,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious. If you’re born into this family, you’re in this family. It’s like the old godfathers.”
