Russell: Assimilation and the borders of the Wanabi Nation

Cherokees, as my Plains Indian pals never hesitate to remind me, are among the most assimilated peoples indigenous to North America. We’ve been a constitutional republic since 1827, but our fascination with written law goes back farther. In Oklahoma, they say a Creek who gets too much education becomes a poet and a Cherokee who gets too much education becomes a lawyer.

Well, it’s hard not to notice that when the United States acted against Cherokee sovereignty in ways that amounted to acts of war, we did not go to war but rather went to court and won. In the end, though, we took as many casualties as those who did go to war and still lost their land, as the aforesaid Plains Indians always point out.

We are in fact highly assimilated in two distinct ways.

First, there is assimilation into the culture of the Bible Belt yahoos who govern Oklahoma: the culture that sends a fool to the Senate who claims global warming is a hoax; the culture that thinks allowing gay people to marry will raise the divorce rate among heterosexual couples; the culture that regrets the outcome of the War of Northern Aggression and denies the Tulsa race riots like Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust. This is the missionary culture that finds virtue in ostentatious public prayer, Matthew 6:5-6 notwithstanding.

Second, there are Cherokees assimilated like me, and I know more of them than I can count without taking my shoes off. We leave the Nation in pursuit of an education or a career. We always say we intend to go back. Then we get a dose of realism and think maybe we will retire there, because it’s always ”home” in some sense.

If we visit home often enough, though, we know that there are a great many Cherokees in both Oklahoma and North Carolina who are not assimilated in either sense. That is, home is home to them and they are not going anywhere, but they retain the open-ended epistemology that makes American Indians such easy marks for missionaries. That is, they respect everybody’s idea of truth, and do not consider government an instrument of spiritual conquest.

”The spirit world takes care of its own business,” an old lady used to tell me, meaning that if you do right, you will know it in your bones. And if you do wrong, the wrong will come back and bite you and you can’t change either result by making a law. The way of things does not need a law; and so if marriage is one man and one woman, a law saying that is absurd. Law is not to enforce the way of things; law is to direct traffic. Here I am with three college degrees, two of them in law, and I still believe that primitive stuff.

I think there is a sense in which one can be ”more Indian” or ”less Indian,” and it has nothing to do with blood quantum. If it did, I would long ago have had a transfusion to cure my problem with Cherokee verbs. It’s a set of customs and values that get weaker with geographical distance. As the Choctaw philosopher Lee Hester says, white people care about orthodoxy while Indians care about ”orthopraxy.” With distance, we lose the practice of being Indian. Whether that is a function of time as well as distance, I cannot be reliably informed, but I hope not.

Since the U.S. Census decided to go with self-identification in multiple categories, the fastest-growing Indian tribe has been the Wanabi Nation. Either urban Indians multiply like bunnies or everybody is honoring the Cherokee princess in their lineage, who of course looked like a Lakota from central casting.

This leaves those of us who have chosen to attenuate our connections with Indian communities wondering what separates us from those who have to hire a genealogist to discover an Indian ancestor. One possibility that comes to mind is that enrolled absentees could be a tax base: head tax, income tax or poll tax. The argument goes:

Why did you leave? I was chasing a career.

Did you find it? Yes.

Then you can afford to pay tribal taxes, right?

The poll tax has evil implications in mainstream politics because it was used to deny the vote to freed slaves on account of their race until the Supreme Court shut down the practice. However, Indian nations have pretty sensible reasons for making voting harder for outlanders than for homelanders. Those in the homeland, or some of them at least, personify cultural preservation. Without them, we outlanders would be nothing but historical relics, repositories of family memories rather than representatives of living cultures.

Without a doubt, many of my fellow outlanders will have kittens when they read this because they think they are Indian by blood rather than by practice. Maybe so, just like British royals. Lots of peoples have taken the position that virtue is inherited rather than accomplished, so the idea cannot be dismissed out of hand. Therefore, it would be a good idea to put some numbers to this theory and see if the Cherokee Nation could come up with enough of a tax base to replace the money some in Congress want to take away to punish our treaty violation.

So I e-mailed my tribal registration office and asked how many outlanders there are in relation to citizens in the homeland. I got an e-mail back asking why I had asked for an ”as of” date and I immediately replied, citing the time between writing and publishing an academic paper. There was no reply.

Over the Christmas holidays, I called my tribal registration office and got told that the only person with that information would be back in January. Deadline? So sorry. She got back and still refused to answer.

When I threatened to make this public, she punted to her supervisor. At this point, there have been three levels of bureaucracy refusing to answer a straightforward and simple question. Yes, I know most of the tribal council, not to mention the chief, but there are two possibilities about this contretemps.

Either this is my punishment for having supported the loser in the last tribal election, or I am being treated exactly the way every tribal citizen is treated when they ask their government for information. No matter which is the case, my enthusiasm for paying tribal taxes is waning. Not because of personal insult, but because a taxpayer expects competence and professionalism. Perhaps that’s an argument in favor of tribal taxes rather than against them?

This will work out the way it should. Bad government carries consequences. The worse government is, the more it resembles a social club rather than a government. My Choctaw friends are in the same boat when they can’t get a voter list to run a campaign against tribal government incumbents. A government acting that way preserves the privilege of individuals to benefit themselves – not the prerogatives of a sovereign.

If we become less Indian with time as well as with distance, then whatever it is that Indians bring to the human table will die out, and I do not want to see that happen. It seems like we have been through too much for that result. But at some point, we have to govern ourselves or accept that the United States will always have to govern us. I am content that the political world, like the spirit world, will take care of its own business.

Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and an associate professor of criminal justice at Indiana University – Bloomington. He is a columnist for Indian Country Today.