Steve Russell: Tribal sovereignty and slime in modern politics

The interplay between law and language is fascinating. “Blood quantum” started without the modern racist connotations in early English cases involving inheritance from a particular person rather than from a racially defined category of persons. The earliest written form of the verb “to slime” appears in Susquehanna Fertilizer v. Malone, a Maryland air pollution case from 1890. Before discovering that, I thought slime became a verb in the movie Ghostbusters.

Indians may be struck by the fact of slime legally mentioned it in the same year as what the American Indian Movement has caused us to call Wounded Knee I, a massacre of non-combatants after photography, that spelled the end of the physical extermination as Indian policy.

By the time Wounded Knee II came around in 1973, the gut issue had become economic dead zones on reservations. “Sovereignty” is window dressing when we understand that the federal government will never and should never fund anything it does not control. “Self-determination” will be defined by what the colonists allow to any tribal government that cannot offer tribal citizens self-sufficiency.

That the colonists made us dependent on purpose does not change the fact of the matter. Extractive industries don’t help, because the profits do not stay on the reservations while the slime does. Casinos are good if they bring in outside money and leave no slime, physical or moral.