A lawsuit has been filed in federal court by the Wyandotte Nation seeking to have land the tribe purchased in Park City, a Wichita suburb, approved as a site for a tribe-owned casino. Kansas has received the court’s permission to intervene in the case.
U.S. Magistrate Judge David Waxse said “it is abundantly clear” that Kansas has an interest in the outcome since it now has taxing, regulatory and legal authority over the land where the tribe wants to build. Furthermore, the state has the power to regulate gambling within the state’s borders.
At issue, needless to say, is the doctrine of American Indian sovereignty. The Wyandottes filed suit to force the U.S. Department of the Interior to accept the Park City tract “into trust,” which would then give the tribe sovereignty over the land and allow it to build a casino on it, regardless of what the people of Park City or the government of Kansas think of the idea.
Cases such as this should result in overturning the impractical and fundamentally illogical doctrine of tribal sovereignty.
Historically, the doctrine became established as a means of establishing peaceful relations between the U.S. government and the native tribes, which occupied the land when it was conquered by the European immigrants who moved in and took over. It seemed like a Christian thing to do. Give them sovereignty, give them citizenship, give them a place to live and a low level of subsistence and put an end to the fighting.
But, in the name of all that makes sense, don’t enshrine these gifts — which should always have been seen as temporary support — in a phony sovereignty that didn’t confer true nationhood but did make the tribes a thorn in the side of state governments from that point forward.
Sovereign nations have a long, long list of powers which American Indian tribes do not. But American Indian tribes also enjoy privileges and powers that other U.S. citizens are denied. The system works to the disadvantage of the tribes and the general public.
Because of the apartheid effect of the reservations, the Indian population has been marked as separate and, unfortunately, inferior. Reservation families are among the poorest in the land. Their children are among the least educated. Reservation health statistics are miserable. “Sovereignty” has been a curse rather than a blessing.
Those native Americans who leave the reservation, get a good education and enter the profession for which they train melt into the population as have the millions of other members of dozens of different cultures who have become American citizens over the centuries.
That is the future our nation should want for our native American population — and it is the future that population should want for itself.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
