American Indian tribes in California have started using genetic testing to identify members of their tribes and to eject from membership those who do not qualify as authentic Indians, it has emerged.
According to an article in the New York Times titled “California Indian Tribes Eject Thousands of Members,” thousands of people who have claimed to be Indians have been expelled from tribe membership, a decision taken by a “majority of the Tribal Council.”
According to the article, thousands of Indians in California have “been kicked out of their tribes in recent years for the crime of not being of the proper bloodline.”
The motivation for the sudden interest in racial purity amongst the Indians is money, and more explicitly, revenue from casinos located in Indian reservations.
California has more than 60 Indian casinos that took in nearly $7 billion last year. Some small tribes with casinos on their land pay members monthly checks of $15,000 or more out of gambling profits.
“For Indians who lose membership in a tribe, the financial impact can be huge. Children who are disenrolled can lose access to tribal schools,” the New York Times explained.
“The money and the immense power it has conferred on tribes that had endured grinding poverty for decades have enticed many tribal governments to consolidate control over their gambling enterprises by trimming membership rolls, critics and independent analysts.”
According to official figures, some 2,500 Indians have been “disenrolled” by at least two dozen California tribes.
In all of these cases, tribal governments have exercised their authority in terms of laws enacted by the US Federal government in determining who qualifies as a tribal member.
“You have people who want to be tribal members, where no one knows who they are or where they came from,” Reggie Lewis, chairman of the Chukchansi Tribal Council told the New York Times. Disenrolled Indians are forced to leave tribal land.
The US’s Bureau of Indian Affairs says that tribal governments have sole authority to determine membership.
“The tribe has historically had the ability to remove people,” said Kevin
Bearquiver, the bureau’s deputy director for the Pacific region. “Tolerance is a European thing brought to the country. We never tolerated things. We turned our back on people.”
The most interesting thing about this development is of course, the crushing silence from white liberals.
It seems that anyone, except white European people, can claim a right to an own identity and an own existence, and white liberals will enthusiastically support it.
Yet any white people, who have just as much right to indigenous status as any other people on earth, are dismissed as evil and extremist to demand those same rights.
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Well ! What do you know. Truly, the hypocrisy of the true LIberal is truly amazing.
Wow! Good luck to these Indians if they can do things in a sustainable way and perserve their identity.
I hope the large financial source of income does not corrupt them.
Perhaps we can learn something from these people on how we can preserve our identity.
Again what is happening here is quite Biblical. In the books of Ezra and Nehemiah the Jews insisted on a genealogical test of who was of Jewish nationality because that is Jewishness, a race.
The actual word for race in the Hebrew and the Greek literally means to beget. It really could not be clearer.
We want to apply it in this country, our country. Celebrating diversity is all very well on the world plane but not at the cost of destroying, at the local level, individual nationalities and national homelands.
Fantastic. I’m really happy for them. Read this link from a Native American about ‘us’.
http://www.badeagle.com/2009/06/16/the-hated-white-race/
You will have a happy aurprise!