The Navajo Times covered Gabe Galanda's recent lecture to students at UNM-Gallup, publishing a column titled: "Lawyer: Disenrollment Threatens Indian Country." The article makes the point that disenrollment is not the way the Diné People; instead kinship is the norm on Navajo Nation.
An excerpt:
To mitigate disenrollment Galanda suggested kinship and a Navajo student who saw his talk pointed out that the Dine certainly have a word for that.
'We call it k'e,' Vanessa Leonard, a sophomore at UNM, said.
For Galanda, k'e is the natural foil of the imposed system of enrollment and disenrollment based on so-called 'blood quantum'...
He recognized that changing the view from blood quantum to kinship to deter disenrollment could take a ling time, but he saw a means by which Navajo could provide a kind of model as a tribe that doesn't have disenrollment.
'It seems that tribes that are still rooted in their traditions, specifically their language, their songs, their customs, aren't [disenrolling] themselves.'
Gabriel S. Galanda is the managing lawyer of Galanda Broadman, PLLC, in Seattle. Gabe is a descendant of the Nomlaki and Concow Tribes, belonging to the Round Valley Indian Tribes of Northern California.
