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Tribal Nationhood Requires Citizen Civil Rights Protection
Monday, March 7, 2022
The United Nations’ intercession in a human rights calamity on Nooksack tribal lands in northern Washington state spotlights an unacceptable truth: Tribal citizens are the only United States citizens not universally guaranteed civil rights protection.
Before 1776, Indigenous kinship societies did not honor individual rights. Reciprocal obligation and duty were normative among Indigenous groups, who commonly self-identified as “the People.” According to Vine Deloria, Jr. and Clifford Lytle in The Nations Within, there was “no concept of civil rights because every member of the society was related, by blood or clan responsibilities, to every other member.”
Rights were unnecessary. As Ella Deloria explained in Speaking of Indians: “The dictates of kinship demanded of relatives that they not harm each other.”
Gabriel S. Galanda is an Indigenous rights lawyer in Seattle. He belongs to the Round Valley Indian Tribes of northern California. This opinion derives from his forthcoming academic essay, “In the Spirit of Vine Deloria, Jr.: Indigenous Kinship Renewal and Relational Sovereignty.”
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