Author:
Read if you dare (Corruption.)
|
[
Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
]
Date Posted: 13:39:08 02/18/08 Mon
By Sean Paige
www.insightmag.com
American Indians are redrafting their constitutions
to emphasize freedom and accountability,
righting corrupt rule decreed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Banding together as a grass-roots group, Call to Action, Vargas and other San Carlos Apaches are among a growing number of American Indians who, fed up with the dysfunctional and corrupt tribal governments foisted upon them by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, more than half a century go, are going back to the drawing board. They plan to write new and better tribal constitutions codifying new laws that better suit their traditions and cultures than the "cookie-cutter constitutions" issued to them by Uncle Sam like another slab of surplus cheese.
It’s a movement born from the frustration and despair of rank-and-file tribal members, tired of corrupt and incompetent tribal councils against which the Indian Reorganization Act, or IRA, constitutions provided no serious checks or balances, and which many believe have provoked the current crises. An Insight survey of Indian country suggests that constitutional crises among the tribes are coming with growing frequency.
At San Carlos, the slow boil began several years ago when tribal members began to ask questions about some $8 million in tribal monies that allegedly had gone missing. Council members reacted to the accusations by suspending officials who wanted to investigate. Protests by Call to Action led to arbitrary arrests, new elections and a paralyzed tribal council, split to this day between the old guard and the new.
In April, tribal elders of Northern California’s Round Valley Nation became fed up with chronic poverty and social problems. Fearing that the tribe was straying from tradition, the elders disbanded their allegedly corrupt tribal council and demanded a referendum on a new constitution.
According to Chippewa Bill Lawrence, whose Bemidji, Minn.-based Ojibwe News has made a reputation (and enemies) for its hard-hitting investigations of corruption, tribal sovereign-immunity provisions codified in the IRA constitutions not only have led to corruption and lack of accountability but to abuse of the civil rights of rank-and-file Indians as well. "The biggest abusers and exploiters of Indians are other Indian people," Lawrence has said, and reservations won’t become more democratic as long as tribal officials can hide behind the claim of immunity. "You have to pierce the veil of sovereign immunity", says Lawrence, because tribal councils that exercise absolute control on many reservations have been hiding their criminal conduct behind it for years.
"There is no U.S. Constitution on many reservations," declares Morrison Standifer. "We have no free speech, no right to assemble. All of this is in the U.S. Bill of Rights, which we don’t have. We have only a watered-down version of that bill of rights, but it’s not enforceable because, where do you go to enforce it? We have to go to tribal courts, which are in the pocket of the tribal councils, which are often the ones violating the rights."
The BIA, by most accounts, is doing a better job of facilitating constitutional overhauls than it did in the past - spurred on by a 1988 amendment to the IRA that imposed strict timelines on the BIA for ratifying new constitutions because of a reputation for dawdling. The result is that the biggest hurdles most tribes face now are internal ones.
Is it worth all the trouble? Have new constitutions made life better for the tribes that have tried them? "I’d say the tribes that have reworked their constitutions tend to be happier, if for no other reason than because they see the document to be their own," says the University of Iowa’s Clinton. "That sense of ownership is awfully important."
[
Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
]
|
Feedback: 