“I want . . . salt, and pepper, for the old people.”— Red Cloud
Kinship is an Indigenous cultural tradition. It is also a political practice.
Indigenous societies and nations withstood colonization for centuries by wielding the political power of kinship. Inter-Tribal kinship alliances prevented the total annihilation of Indigenous peoples during the colonial and early American eras and defeated threats to Tribal national existence in modern times. Indigenous peoples leveraged kinship first to withstand genocidal wars and territorial assaults and later, U.S. Congressional and Supreme Court attacks.
Today, Indigenous kinship and its inter-Tribal safety net are under duress. National Tribal political practices and federal policies catalyzed by gaming capitalism weaken historical inter-Tribal kinship alliances and jeopardize Tribal nationhood writ large. Tribal per-capitalism has transmuted certain Indigenous peoples into casino enterprises. While Tribal gaming politicians wield per capita dollars to sustain their political prominence, Tribal members clamor for the individual distribution of those monies instead of Indigenous community reinvestment and revitalization.
These intra-Tribal dynamics create a race to the bottom with Tribal gaming politicians seeking to increase unearned per capita income by building new casinos and related amenities in the ancestral homelands of others. Meanwhile, the Obama and Biden administrations’ laissez faire approach to the generation and use of Tribal gaming dollars contributes to the erosion of Indigenous kinship systems. These forces create inter-Tribal division and weaken time-honored kinship alliances.
Unless inter-Tribal territorial and relational balance are restored, the divisions will only broaden and deepen, rendering Tribal nations ill-prepared to defend or preempt the next existential attack.
Five Centuries of Inter-Tribal Kinship Alliance
Indigenous kinship is a traditional practice rooted in duty and responsibility. Historically, an Indigenous person belonged to a fireside family and, emanating outward, to a clan, moiety, lodge, village, or society. Although kinship was rooted in reciprocity, it could also be coerced, as with war captives who were often later included as kinfolk through adoption or intermarriage. Kinship involved the abiding protection of the People and, in turn, Indigenous political allies.
An Indigenous society’s kinship relations and duties extended to lands, waters, plants, and animals. As Vine Deloria, Jr. explained in God Is Red: “Thousands of years of occupancy on their lands taught tribal peoples the sacred landscapes for which they were responsible.” Place-based relationships and responsibilities established what Native Land Talk author Yael Ben-Vi calls “Indigenous geopolitics.” As Indigenous societies evolved to Tribal “nations” according to Treaties, kinship responsibility transformed into Tribal territorial authority and national identity.
Kinship as a centuries-old Indigenous political practice is obscure to the uninitiated. In The Nations Within, Deloria and Clifford Lytle explain why: While Europeans documented “everything they believe essential to the formation and operation of a government,” Indigenous societies “benefitting from a religious, cultural, social and economic homogeneity,” did not find it necessary “to formalize their political institutions . . . in a document.” Indigenous kinship as “source of great power” during European colonial and early American times is only now being fully chronicled.
According to Pekka Hamalainen, whereas “European empires, and especially the United States, invested power in the state and its bureaucracy . . . Native nations invested power in kinship.” In Indigenous Continent: The Epic Conquest for North America, Hamalainen describes “an all pervasive sense of relatedness and mutual obligations” within Indigenous societies, which undergirded “advanced political systems that allowed for flexible diplomacy and war-making.”
Through those inter-Tribal systems, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy dominated New England throughout the seventeenth century; and the Lakota in the northern Great Plains and the Comanche in the southern Great Plains withstood colonization into the early nineteenth centuries. “Kinship was the crucial adhesive that kept people and nations linked together” geopolitically, until disease—not war—weakened inter-Tribal alliances and bolstered European imperialism.
By the mid-twentieth century, inter-Tribal kinship alliances defeated another existential assault: Congressional termination of Tribal nations. In 1944, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) arose as a national inter-Tribal organization that, according to Thomas Cowger, “campaigned fervently and, on the whole, successfully against termination policy.” In The National Congress of American Indians: The Founding Years, Cowger chronicles how NCAI achieved political prominence by defeating termination, particularly given the organization’s original commitment to protect Tribal rights and federal benefits and to “preserve cultural values.” NCAI was a political manifestation of kinship.
In 1953, Congress called for the termination of federal services to all Tribal nations. The next year, Congress began passing termination laws, ultimately extinguishing 109 Tribal nations. Beginning in February of 1954, when delegates from 43 Tribal nations descended upon Washington, DC for an emergency meeting, NCAI successfully “went on the offensive to prevent other tribes from being terminated.” Cowger describes a “persistent desire to preserve culture and identity” as the force that bound together NCAI’s inter-Tribal alliance and eventually defeated termination.
“Flexing its newfound political muscle, NCAI had made an important stand in the nation’s capital.” That successful inter-Tribal stand gave birth to the Red Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s and to federal Indian self-determination policy that has prevailed ever since.
In the early 1970s, inter-Tribal kinship alliances inspired by Red Power helped Northwest Treaty fishing peoples win the Fish Wars. Since time immemorial those peoples fished the waters of today’s Washington state and Oregon, migrating to fishing areas according to “use patterns based on kinship.” Mid-nineteenth century Treaties reserved their right to harvest fish from those waters and areas. But a century later, when Nisqually, Puyallup, Muckleshoot, Yakama and other fishers attempted to fish salmon in those places free of state regulation, they were violently assaulted and inhumanely arrested and imprisoned by state police officers.
While those Treaty fishers held the frontline against the state’s attacks along ancestral riverbanks, their Tribal nations drew upon extended kinship relations with one another to defend the treaties. “While the stalwart presence of Indian fishers on the rivers was a sin qua non,” as Charles Wilkinson wrote in Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations, “the tribes could not prevail without political and legal strategies.” The Northwest Treaty Tribes joined forces in federal court as well as the court of public opinion, and prevailed.
The landmark U.S. v. Washington decision affirmed the Treaty Tribes’ right to fish in traditional places free of state restriction. Judge George Hugo Boldt’s decision—which turned 50 last month—expressly affirmed the Treaty peoples’ kinship relations with the rivers and salmon. The ruling was a “historic endorsement” of Tribal sovereignty, according to Wilkinson. In a recent interview with the National Museum of the American Indian, Carol Craig recounts what fueled the Treaty Tribes to victory: “[I]t was really helping out one another. Reaching out to the other tribes, how are we going to help? Having that connection, because of age-old relationship between the tribes. . . . [It was] a coalition.” It was inter-Tribal kinship.
Most recently, a robust inter-Tribal kinship alliance helped defeat an attack on the federal Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). In Brackeen v. Haaland, the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether the placement of “Indian” children in foster care or adoption proceedings, into Tribal member homes, violated the U.S. Constitution. It’s self-evident according to Indigenous kinship tradition that a child belongs to their society or nation at birth. Although an Indian child’s citizenship in their nation has been recognized as a political classification, racial “Indian blood” quantum metrics undermine that proposition and exposed ICWA to constitutional scrutiny in Brackeen.
Brackeen laid siege to Indigenous kinship, including the placement of an Indian child with a Tribal nation other than the child’s own nation under ICWA. Recognizing the broad existential threat posed by that case, 486 Tribal nations and 59 inter-Tribal organizations joined forces and defeated that assault on ICWA. As that alliance proclaimed: “Kinship stretches far beyond blood relation. This same belief is shared by American Indian and Alaska tribal communities, and why ICWA is crucial to ensuring Native children and families preserve their cultures and strong kinship connections.” The United States also shared that belief. During Supreme Court oral arguments, the Trustee argued for ICWA’s “extended kinship proposition” vis-à-vis inter-Tribal child placements.
While Brackeen’s inter-Tribal alliance preserved kinship protection for Indian children, the Supreme Court left the door open for an equal protection challenge to ICWA and, more generally, the political status of Tribal nations. Inter-Tribal solidarity will again be needed.
Neocolonial Threats to Inter-Tribal Kinship
The federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) of 1988 is the single most successful Indian economic development law ever passed by the U.S. Congress. Tribal nations are generating billions of dollars in casino revenues to help run and rebuild their nations—$40 billion annually at last count. But a provision of IGRA that allows billions of those gaming dollars to be distributed as “per capita payments” to Tribal members is having injurious effects on Tribal nations.
A rising number of Tribal members feel entitled to a “per cap” from gaming revenues and every other large tranche of Tribal governmental money. Tribal councils thus face the untenable choice of resisting the per capita clamors and enduring threats of recall or ouster; or acceding to the payment demands and forgoing multi-million dollar opportunities to rebuild their nations. These dynamics typify the Tribal per-capitalism phenomenon.
Meanwhile Tribal politicians dangle those same dollars to members as a quid pro quo for election votes and other political support, including silence as those politicians disenroll their opponents or commit other human rights atrocities. These maneuvers exemplify what Hank Adams decried as “the transformation of tribal government from an instrument of popular will or of the People into private seats of personal power for a few individuals.”
Even though IGRA intends to prevent such “corrupting influences” and the National Indian Gaming Commission once regulated instances when gaming dollars were used “for the benefit of certain tribal officials or tribal factions rather than the benefit of the whole,” the Obama administration deregulated those monies under the guise of Tribal self-determination. That federal shift furthered the “belief among some tribal leaders, aided by tribal lawyers, that they are free to convert tribal citizenships into profit and political gain.”
Tribal per-capitalism is now “an indomitable force in tribal policy and governance,” especially insofar as it motivates Tribal politicians to protect or expand gaming markets. Tribal gaming politicians oppose the federal recognition of other Indigenous peoples for fear of a new casino in the politicians’ existing market. This dynamic is exemplified by Eastern Band of Cherokee politicians’ cut-throat opposition to Lumbee federal recognition. The Band distributes gaming revenues to members “as shareholders in the tribe’s casino enterprises” in North Carolina. Band politicians fear that any casino Lumbee might develop upon its recognition would lower per-capita distribution amounts, which is also why those politicians have disenrolled their own kin.
Other Tribal gaming politicians seek to develop casinos in other ways that are antithetical to inter-Tribal kinship. They are emboldened by the United States, which is “allowing Tribes to acquire land for casinos in areas to which they have no historical connection, and are in many instances, the ancestral homelands of other Indigenous peoples.” Under the banner of Indigenous land reacquisition, that free market approach to Indigenous affairs commenced in earnest during the Obama administration. Now the Biden administration is doubling down.
In January 2024, the U.S. Interior Department promulgated a new rule for “off-reservation acquisitions” of trust land despite opposition from Tribal nations throughout the country. Under the rule, Interior will “presume” an off-reservation gaming trust acquisition is in a Tribal applicant’s best interest, without regard for other Tribal nations’ ancestral, historical, or Treaty interests. As the Yakama Nation warned, that “regulation dramatically increases the likelihood of disputes amongst tribes encroaching on each other’s territory.” The Gila River Indian Community cautioned Interior against gaming acquisitions within the “aboriginal territory of another tribe.” The Navajo Nation predicted “intertribal jurisdictional conflicts” as a result of the rule.
Indigenous homeland restoration is necessary but the federal government’s free market approach is already proving to be an over-correction. The Biden administration’s policy fosters an every-Tribe-for-itself mentality, encourages Tribal politicians to dishonor ancestry and manipulate anthropology, and threatens the extended kinship proposition. Not even casino construction atop Indigenous ancestral burial grounds or the exhumation of ancestors has proven beyond the pale for certain Tribal politicians or the federal Trustee. With Indigenous kinship responsibilities impinged and ancestral relations desecrated for economic gain, the inter-Tribal conflicts are quite personal and prone to spilling over into other arenas where solidarity is needed to protect Tribal nationhood or Indigenous humanity.
Meanwhile, Tribal neocolonialism has overrun NCAI, supplanting any semblance of Indigenous kinship within the organization. This became obvious in early 2021, after the NCAI General Assembly resolved to form a Tribal Citizenship Protection Task Force. Resolution #20-001 recognized that in NCAI’s prior 76 years, the organization had never “passed any Resolution affirming Tribal citizenship.” At that time Brackeen was making its way through the federal courts, while the Trump administration claimed Tribal peoples were a “race” in the context of federal Medicaid rules. These federal assaults on Tribal sovereignty “threaten[ed] the future of Indigenous citizenries and nations” according to the Resolution, which also recognized Tribal nations’ need “to establish and maintain the civil rights of their citizens” amid such threats.
In November of 2020, an inter-Tribal kinship alliance caused NCAI’s General Assembly to pass the Resolution, establishing the Task Force “to study, educate, and develop recommendations regarding issues of Indigenous tribal citizenship for consideration by NCAI.” By January 2021, however, politicians on the NCAI Executive Board killed the Task Force in fear that its work would expose their own Indigenous human rights records back home. Those politicians disavowed NCAI’s original purpose to preserve Indigenous cultural values, and its core policy mechanism — the resolution process. That ploy hearkened criticism leveled against NCAI by Adams decades ago: “I have great discomfort in a national situation where so many Indian officials are able to maintain ‘impeccably good relations’ with non-Indian public and political officials, while their relations with their own communities and Indian constituencies have deteriorated.”
NCAI’s wayward path was further displayed in November of 2022, when an alliance of disenrolled Indigenous persons from across the country attended the organization’s annual convention. NCAI had previously stated: “Disenrollment is an issue affecting a number of Tribal citizens. . . . NCAI encourages those interested in finding a solution to disenrollment problems to come to participate in the Congress and share their thoughts.” As NCAI acknowledged, approximately 10,000 Tribal citizens have been disenrolled or exiled from nearly 100 Tribes, largely since IGRA was passed. In keeping with its original charge, NCAI should be working towards solutions that harmonize Indigenous kinship and Tribal capitalism, including by helping stop neocolonial disenrollments.
Taking the organization up on its invitation, a group of disenrollees organized a peaceful political protest outside of NCAI’s convention in Sacramento, hoping to enter the General Assembly floor and plead with the Indian Congress to help devise a disenrollment solution. But in an astonishing act of hypocrisy and political suppression, NCAI officials refused to allow the disenrollees to enter the convention hall and called the local police on them. The organization not only went back on its word, but NCAI’s politicians also dishonored the legacy of the Red Power movement that the organization helped birth over a half century ago.
NCAI strayed even further at its annual convention in New Orleans last November, where a cohort of Tribal gaming politicians advanced proposed NCAI bylaw amendments to disqualify state recognized Tribal nations from voting membership. As pretext for protecting Tribal gaming markets and political fiefdoms, those politicians claimed the amendments would “protect the sovereignty of treaty and trust tribes.”
As Professor Robert Williams, Jr. commented, NCAI’s elitists “ignore[d] the colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial impacts on Indigenous peoples who may not have been fortunate enough to be recognized with the stroke of the pen by a federal Indian affairs bureaucrat.” Deriding the measure as antithetical to NCAI’s original charge, Dr. Deron Marquez explained: “since the arrival of Europeans, every tribal community has sought, and fought, to be secure and once secure, has fought to preserve its security. NCAI was assembled to assist in such endeavors for American Indians of the United States.”
Things turned ugly as “speeches during the deliberations led to high emotions and even physical altercations in the hallway.” A remark Williams published on the convention’s first day proved prescient: “NCAI has lost its way – it is culturally, spiritually and historically unmoored.” Although the amendments failed, the organization succeeded in “dividing and conquering itself — and Indian country writ large.” Felix Cohen’s famous words can now be said of NCAI: “Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere, and our treatment of the Indian . . . marks the rise and fall in our democratic faith.”
Last month, the perilous state of NCAI, and inter-Tribal political relations generally, drew an poignant response from Alaska Native Congresswoman Mary Peltola:
The word ‘sovereignty’ . . . is not prescriptive. There is not one Native way to be sovereign that we must practice. We are sovereign because of who we are, not how we organize. That is something we all need to remember because it is crucial to our unity. . . . Though we each have a responsibility to our own Tribal nations, we also bear a responsibility to look out for our collective interests as Native people. Treaty or non-Treaty, Alaska Native Corporation shareholder or non-shareholder, urban Native or villager, we are all Native. That should be a source of strength, not wedges to divide us. . . . This is where I see NCAI’s role so clearly. This is the National Congress of American Indians. This is the place where we can speak with one voice, where we can support one another and lift each other up.
Inter-Tribal responsibility and unity have helped Indigenous peoples withstand settler wars, Congressional termination, state Fish Wars, and Supreme Court attacks over the last five centuries. But that durable source of strength is under duress, with greed and gaming power gripping Indian country and quelling civil discourse. Inter-Tribal relational and territorial balance can and must be restored. It “can be found through renewed Indigenous kinship and relational sovereignty”— it “can be found within the People.” But with disunifying Tribal neocolonialism rising by the day and the next external assault on Tribal nationhood only a matter of time, the People’s renewal cannot happen soon enough.
Gabriel S. Galanda belongs to the Round Valley Indian Tribes and descends from the Nomlaki and Concow Peoples. Gabe is the Managing Lawyer at Galanda Broadman, PLLC, an Indigenous rights firm in Seattle, Washington. The opinions expressed here are his own. He thanks Debora Juarez, Robert Williams, Jr., and Eric Eberhard for their insightful comments on a draft of this essay. He dedicates this essay to the Frank’s Landing Indian Community.
