Ward Churchill - Acts of Rebellion - The Ward Churchill Reader

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90. Ibid., p. 138.
91. Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (436 U.S. 49, 98 S. Ct. 1670 (1978)). In this case, an enrolled
Santa Clara woman who married an enrolled Navajo sued in federal court after the Pueblo’s
government denied enrollment to her children on the basis of her “out marriage.” Ms.
Martinez argued that since the tribal government duly enrolled offspring of out-married
Santa Clara men, it stood in violation of the Equal Protection provision of the Indian Civil
Rights Act of 1968 (P.L. 90–284, 25 U.S.C.A. §§ 1301–41). The court ruled that, since
determination of its membership was “the internal prerogative of each Indian tribe,” the
inequitable conduct of the tribal government was in this instance protected by the doctrine of
sovereign immunity. Kimberly Craven, for one, has stated flatly that the 1990 Act was
drafted with the Martinez precedent in mind (“Sovereignty Symposium”).
92. A tidy survey of enrollment criteria is offered by Russell Thornton in his American Indian
Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1987) Chap. 8. More broadly, but less accessibly, see Thornton’s “Tribal History,
Tribal Population and Tribal Membership Requirements” (Chicago: Newberry Library
Research Conf. Rpt. No. 8, 1987). C.Matthew Snipp also includes considerable information
as Appendix 1 in his American Indians: The First of This Land (New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1989). Snipp’s data is extracted from an unpublished table prepared by Edgar
Lister for the Indian Health Service under the title “Tribal Membership Rates and
Requirements” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 1987).
93. Jerome A.Barrons and C.Thomas Dienes, Constitutional Law in a Nutshell (St. Paul, MN: West,
[2d ed.] 1991) p. 218.
94. Sheffield, Arbitrary Indian, p. 158.
95. See generally, Janet A.McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887–1934
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
96. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, “Address to the Senate on the Arts and Crafts Act of 1990,” Congressional
Record, Vol. 137, Pt. 1, Nov. 26, 1991, pp. S.18150–3.
97. Ibid., p. S.18152.
98. Ibid., p. S.18153.
99. Quoted in Sheffield, Arbitrary Indian, p. 113. Cornsilk habitually identifies himself in this
fashion, and, in 1993, was described in print as a “genealogist for the Cherokee Nation of
Oklahoma”; Rave, “Few who know Churchill.” According to the CNO enrollment office,
however, he “does not now, nor has he ever held such a position.” In reality, he was at the
time an admissions assistant at Bacone College; Nagel, Ethnic Renewal, p. 239. As was
mentioned earlier, fraud can assume many forms.
100. Cornsilk is at least straightforward. “I don’t believe in the right to self-identification” under
any circumstances, he says flatly; quoted in Nagel, Ethnic Renewal, p. 239. He is also prone to
spewing blanket disparagements of the ancestors of those currently unenrolled. They “were
ashamed,” he asserts, without offering the least substantiation, “hid among the whites and
participated in the oppression of the tribal Indians”; quoted in Sheffield, Arbitrary Indian, p.
113.
101. Ibid., p. 100. Along with Sheffield (p. 153), and Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, I
take “arbitrary” to mean a “random or convenient selection or choice…arising from
unrestrained exercise of will, caprice, or personal preference…rather than reason or
nature.”
102. U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Indian Affairs, Hearings on an Act to Transfer Administrative
Consideration of Applications for Federal Recognition of an Indian Tribe to an Independent Commission
(Washington, D.C.: 102d Cong., 1st Sess., Oct. 22, 1991) p. 105.