Fairness Is the Loser in Tribal Identity Crisis

To any outsider looking in on California Indian politics, the apparent surge in tribal membership disputes over the last few years seems ugly in the extreme.

Tribes with multimillion- dollar casinos are ejecting members by the score, questioning ties of heritage and blood that hadn’t been challenged in three or four generations. Throw in accusations of doctored or nonexistent evidence, hints of bribery and embezzlement and the alleged manipulation of votes, and Indian community affairs start to look like what goes on in the U.S. Congress.

Except that it’s almost impossible to persuade an outside mediator, such as a federal or state judge, to review a tribal dispute.

“I’ve seen the pain and agony on the faces of people who were Indian one day and not the next,” says Dennis Chappabitty, a Sacramento lawyer of Comanche extraction who has represented disenrolled members of several tribes. “They’ve lost hope, because there’s no place to take this violation of due process.”

No one is entirely sure how many enrollment disputes have arisen in recent years among California tribes. Nor is it certain that there are more today than there were before casino wealth pumped up the value of tribal membership. “All I can say is that they’re more widely reported,” says Brian Golding Sr., a tribal operations specialist at the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs regional office in Fresno.

Laura Wass, a regional officer for the American Indian Movement, told me she’s personally familiar with threatened or consummated disenrollments at 13 of the 107 California tribes.

Among them is a case at the Redding Rancheria that this column previewed in September. The rancheria’s disenrollment of 76 members of a single family was based on an allegation that the member to whom they traced their ancestry had never borne children. The disenrollment formally took place in January, even though DNA from the exhumed bodies of the woman and her purported daughter produced nearly a 100% family match. As a result of the vote, the remaining members stand to receive an increase of about 40% each in their monthly stipends from the tribe’s Win-River casino.

It may be simplistic to attribute membership disputes exclusively to casino-fueled greed. Some tribes may be legitimately trying to define their historical heritage. Others are playing out old family feuds or settling ancient scores.

“These involve money, the power that’s related to participation in tribal government and vengeance,” says Chuck Schillings, who is among 174 members of a family -- about 15% of the tribe -- disenrolled by the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians in 1999. “Sometimes it’s spite, because ‘Your grandfather shot my grandfather’s dog.’ ”

Federal policies also contributed plenty to the confusion about tribal membership. Some disputes date from the so-called termination era of the late 1950s, when the government dissolved California’s rancherias by distributing their land to the remaining tribal residents. An unsavory chapter in the altogether discreditable chronicle of federal-tribal relations, termination ceased after 1979, when many rancherias were reestablished. But because many tribal members had moved off the land, it left a muddle -- resolved differently by different tribes -- over how membership should relate to a family’s residence in any given period.

Even when the division of gambling spoils is not directly implicated in a disenrollment, the casino issue is often lurking somewhere in the background. One Northern California woman says she was thrown out of her tribe in 2000 for suggesting that its casino earnings needed to be audited.

Schillings traces his family’s disenrollment to his grandmother’s opposition to a deal the Yosemite-area Chukchansis made with San Francisco-based Cascade Entertainment Group to develop the Chukchansi Gold casino. His grandmother, Daisy Liedkie, then the tribal chairman, discovered that Cascade had gone behind her back to cut the deal with other tribal leaders. When she objected, he says, she was thrown off the council. Shortly thereafter, family members started receiving curt letters informing them they’d been disenrolled -- a violation, Schillings says, of rules requiring that they first be granted notice and an opportunity to present evidence on their own behalf.

What adds to the anguish of the outcasts is that so few options for legal recourse exist. The state and federal governments traditionally view tribal membership decisions as expressions of sovereign authority and therefore none of their business. Some legal scholars say that’s as it should be.

“Tribal membership is central to the operation of tribes,” says Carole Goldberg, a specialist in Indian law at UCLA School of Law. She says it’s natural that more attention is being given to defining membership today, because casino wealth has attracted masses of putative members who wouldn’t have bothered to claim tribal ancestry before. “Tribes are taking a closer look,” she says. “It didn’t used to matter so much if you made one or two mistakes.”

But many disenrollees aren’t satisfied to leave tribal councils with unreviewable authority over actions so rife with self- interest. Accordingly, their lawyers have been stretching their creative powers to find pretexts to shift these disputes into state or federal courts. They’ve had little success.

“The tribes try to scare judges off these cases,” says Jon Velie, a lawyer for 130 recently disenrolled members of the Pechanga tribe, which runs a huge casino-resort in Temecula. Velie recently persuaded Riverside County Superior Court Judge Charles D. Field to review the case by arguing that a federal law grants California state courts jurisdiction over certain civil disputes that arise on the reservation -- including the question of whether a tribal council is acting within its authority or in compliance with its own laws and procedures.

But so far, Field is the only state judge to bite. Other state judges, including one who was asked to rule on the Redding case, have refused, which suggests that the matter may eventually end up before the California Supreme Court. (The Redding case is now before a state appeals court.)

The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which functions as a sort of State Department charged with managing sovereign relations between the federal and tribal governments, has also been stepping carefully through the membership minefield. “As a general proposition, tribes have inherent and unextinguished sovereign powers to determine their own citizenship,” says the agency’s Golding.

The BIA has opened an inquiry into the Chukchansi disenrollment, responding to the allegation that by ignoring tribal procedure, the tribal council may have violated the federal Indian Civil Rights Act and other laws.

But the BIA’s authority is limited. The bureau can suspend recognition of a tribal government if it believes the government has been trampling over its own laws or rules of procedure. That’s an extreme option, however. More modest steps, such as cutting off federal program funding on the rancheria, might not have much bite in an era in which casino profits make federal grants look like crumbs.

Some people believe it may be time for the tribes to think about their public standing, for nasty membership disputes may eventually undermine their claim to be interested in restoring their traditions and right of self-determination. But for now, the fights continue.

Says Chappabitty: “I don’t see anyone stepping forward to say we’ve got to stop this, and really think about what it means to be a tribe.”

Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.