I put a bid in for a freelance opportunity last week and they asked for an educational TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) script. (Θ︹Θ)ს
I’m not a fan of free labor, so I’m sharing my script with you! (✪㉨✪)
I ended up writing this blurb on Indigenous federal recognition politics based on an article I wrote last year in American Archivist about archival complicity in recognition politics. Read the full article for free in Zenodo!
Globally, countries categorize their relationships with Indigenous peoples based on “recognition status,” which in legal terms means a tribe has a special political-economic relationship with that country’s government. In the United States (U.S.), tribes have two main recognition statuses: federal and state recognition. Federal recognition is the highest status level where as a tribe you get access to federal special programs and services, like healthcare provided by the Indian Health Services, and protection of their tribal land and resources like minerals or oil. State recognition means the state the tribe lives in, like Georgia or Florida, acknowledges the tribe and gives access to state-funded resources and programs.
The U.S.’s recognition status policy is problematic. Congress stopped issuing treaties with Indigenous groups in 1871 and for the last hundred years, getting recognized has nothing to do with size. Take the Lumbee Tribe in North Carolina for example. They are the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River with 55,000 members, yet they’re not federally recognized. Even when a tribe is federally recognized that status can be revoked by the government as was the case for the Duwamish Tribe, a treaty people in Seattle, Washington who gained federal recognition in 2001 but were unrecognized by the George W. Bush administration in 2002.
For many Indigenous tribes and communities, recognition status is a Catch 22: recognition is vital for survival as a community, yet it undermines their inherent sovereignty to self-govern their own tribal citizens. Many unrecognized and state recognized tribes today continue to seek federal recognition in part because Native Americans experience health, sexual violence, and climate change disparities at higher rates than other ethnicities in the United States.