Gabe Galanda will reprise his lecture, "The American Indian Disenrollment Epidemic: Finding a Cure," in Tucson this Friday, January 30 at 2:30 PM, as a part of the Arizona Law Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program's "Practicing Law in Indian Country" speaker series.
Gabe will speak from a similarly titled forthcoming Arizona Law Review article, whereby he and Ryan Dreveskracht explain that over the last two centuries of American Indian policy:
- Federal ideas of membership and exclusion have supplanted inherent indigenous values of kinship and inclusion, by design for colonialist purposes.
- Tribal enrollment, and in turn disenrollment, have been designed and perpetuated by the United States to further the dispossession of Indian lands and resources—to advance Manifest Destiny.
- Removing Indians from federal or tribal rolls has closely correlated to the pro rata or per capita distribution of tribal communally held lands, monies and other assets, as a mode of Indian assimilation and tribal termination.
- Indian disenrollment—which must be distinguished from the sovereign power to set limits on citizenship—is not a matter of inherent tribal sovereignty; disenrollment is instead a federal plenary power that has been delegated to tribes.
Gabe recently foreshadowed the paper, and otherwise decried disenrollment as a colonial and wholly non-indigenous construct, in an Indian Country Today column.
Gabriel “Gabe” Galanda is the Managing Partner at Galanda Broadman. He is a citizen of the Round Valley Indian Tribes. Gabe can be reached at 206.300.7801 or gabe@galandabroadman.com.
