You know it's bad when you start to lose Indian Country Today...
From Scott Richard Lyons' (Leech Lake Ojibwe/Mdewakanton Dakota) editorial:
Acting and thinking as a nation means more than respecting one's treaties; it also means using national terminology and conceptual frameworks to characterize what is going on. For instance, it would be more appropriate to use the word ''denaturalization'' instead of ''disenrollment'' to accurately describe what is happening to the freedmen, who, after all, have long been citizens of the Cherokee Nation regardless of blood.Denaturalization is legally losing your citizenship, and the idea didn't exist until World War I when France, Belgium, Italy and other European nations passed laws revoking the citizenships of ''enemies of the state.'' Those laws targeted individuals, but it wasn't long before ethnic groups were denaturalized, too. The Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped citizenship from non-''Aryans'' using a system that eerily resembles today's Indian blood quantum formulas. Four German grandparents made one a German, three or four Jewish grandparents made another a Jew, while one or two Jewish grandparents made one a ''mischling'' or mixed-blood. We all know how that social experiment ended.
From its inception, denaturalization has been considered a human rights issue of major importance because the global community generally loathes seeing citizenship revoked. Citizenships are considered permanent in ways that ''memberships'' are not. When a country club grants memberships to whites only, that's rightly decried as racism but not considered to be a national emergency. When a nation does the same thing to its existing citizens, it raises concerns about ethnic cleansing, refugees and other national matters.
Ethnic cleansing is the deportation of an ethnic population from a national territory, and the last time it happened at the Cherokee Nation it was called ''removal.'' If the freedmen were purged today, they wouldn't become ''non-Indians.'' All propaganda aside, Indian identity is not really in question here. It's citizenship. The freedmen would become refugees.
(HT Indianz.com)
