On December 5, 2020, the California Indian Legal Services (CILS) Board of Trustees passed a new policy that forbids the organization from assisting tribal governments in disenrollment or similar scorched-earth controversies.
CILS has a longstanding police of assisting “people with enrollment in particular Indian tribes because of potential professional conflicts of interest,” but that did not prevent it from helping California Indian politicians and in-house lawyers disenroll countless tribal members over the last couple decades. CILS most recently counseled Rincon Band of Luiseno Indians politicians in regard to a disenrollment purge in 2019, and also afforded counsel to tribal politicians like Cayuga Chief Clint Halftown in internecine tribal controversies.
In Dr. David Wilkins and Shelly Wilkins’ disenrollment exposition, Dismembered, CILS’s role in the disenrollment epidemic is discussed. They attribute the modern surge in disenrollment in part to “the powerful role played by lawyers who work for tribal governments, and particular organizations like the California Indian Legal Services entity.” CILS, the Wilkinses explain, “was cited numerous times by several disenrollees from California-based nations” as a disenrollment culprit.
But no more.
This policy reform helps realign CILS with its original mission of 1967 and helps prevent further extermination of California Indigenous peoples.
Gabriel S. Galanda is the Managing Lawyer of Galanda Broadman, PLLC, an Indigenous rights law firm. He belongs to the Round Valley Indian Tribes, descending from the Nomlaki and Concow Peoples.
