Winnemem Nick Wilson, 14, exchanges a hongi, the traditional Maori greeting, with Rick Tau of the Ngai Tahu tribe.
My first Maori welcoming ceremony, or Pōwhiri, began with a towering woman with emerald, tattooed lips belting a sonorous summoning song as we entered the grounds of the marae, or community center.
We sat down on benches and opposite us were Maori elders who introduced themselves in their traditional language, te reo, with stoic glints in their eyes.
This spring I traveled as a journalist with the Winnemem Wintu, a small California tribe, to cover their remarkable journey to commune with the New Zealand salmon, genetic descendents of the fish that once spawned in their river, the McCloud.
The Pōwhiri was the Maori’s way of acknowledging the significance of the Winnemem’s visit and the honor they took in hosting them.
They fed the Winnemem ambitious feasts and secured them a pristine spot along the Rakaia River to conduct a four-day salmon ceremony. The Maori listened closely to the tribe’s spiritual leader Caleen Sisk-Franco as they exchanged creation stories, histories and their shared struggle to protect sacred lands from the avarice of corporations and developers.
The great irony of the Winnemem’s trip was that after two weeks of being treated as esteemed ambassadors from a sovereign nation, they would return to the United States and promptly cease to exist.
In the 1980s, the Winnemem were unceremoniously dropped from the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ list of recognized tribes because of a bookkeeping error (not an uncommon occurrence).
Recognition establishes a formal government-to-government relationship with the U.S. and a tribe, and without it Indians have no access to Indian Health Services, college scholarships and billions of dollars in government aid. It also means that tribes have no protection under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which theoretically ensures their access to sacred places.
For the Winnemem, it’s meant being cornered into poverty and living in a bizarre No Man’s Land where the ability to hold their ceremonies at sacred sites is completely at the whims of government agencies and private landowners.
The federal recognition process was established to identify “real” tribes in the late 70s when there was a resurgence in Indian cultural pride after decades of boarding schools and government policies had sought to disconnect them from the old ways.
The Winnemem’s New Zealand trip was emblematic of just how broken that system is. How else could a tribe be so well-received, even revered, abroad but then return home to a cold shoulder?
For years, the General Accounting Office has documented the persistent problems with federal recognition, but little has been done about it. The BIA’s Office of Federal Acknowledgment is perennially understaffed, and hundreds of applications are lodged in a growing backlog. The average processing time for an application is now about 20 years.
The BIA has also been deluged with lawsuits from tribes who believe they’ve been denied recognition unfairly. This is largely because, as the GAO has documented, the BIA makes inconsistent judgments about tribes based on criteria that are too vague and opaque.
In order to be recognized, tribes have to prove they’ve existed and persisted as a distinct culture. Genealogists, historians and anthropologists examine the evidence provided by a petitioner and make a recommendation to the Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs who accepts or rejects it. According to the GAO, there is no real guidance as to how much evidence the tribes need to present and the Assistant Secretary often contradicts the recommendations with little discernible justification.
Other factors muddy the process. Some recognized tribes aren’t eager to share a limited pot of funds, and recognition often means tribes can open casinos. Not surprisingly, recognition has also become plagued by politics.
Deciding who is and isn’t an Indian is no easy task, and it’s a sad commentary on what we’ve done to Indian cultures that we need to do so in the first place. But we created this problem, and we need to do a better job of fixing it.
In California, where more than 650,000 people identify themselves as Indian, only 65,000 actually belong to a recognized tribe. For some, like the Winnemem, their survival hangs in the balance.
The GAO has already outlined what must change. Reform must come swiftly or we risk losing what’s left of our indigenous cultures and languages. We’ll also lose the environmental insight embedded within these cultures that we so desperately need at a time of global warming and widespread animal extinctions.
While in New Zealand, the tribe’s headman Mark Franco was adamant in declaring that they were “not American but Winnemem.”
After 150 years of atrocities and indignities, it was an understandable distinction to make.
A first step in making things right would be acknowledging the Winnemem, and others like them, as historical tribes and giving them the basic rights they need to preserve their culture.
As Franco says, they’re not looking for a handout. They’re simply looking for the right to exist.
Note: You can hear an interview on Capitol News Network with Caleen Sisk-Franco about recognition and the United National Declaration on the Rights for Indigenous Peoples here.
