South Jersey's most prominent Native American tribe has won a victory that keeps its legal quest for full state recognition moving ahead, while the mystery of how the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation lost its state designation in the first place remains unsolved.

A Superior Court Appellate Division panel revived the tribe's legal case last week, deciding that a lower-court judge had wrongly tossed out the case by accepting one of the state's key claims: that the Lenni-Lenape never had official recognition by the State of New Jersey.

There are more holes in that claim than in an initial Donald Trump Jr. account of a meeting with Russian operatives. In 1982, the Legislature clearly passed a resolution granting acknowledgement of the 3,000-member Lenni-Lenape as an official American Indian tribe. The tribal population lives throughout the Northeast, and its official headquarters is in Fairfield Township, Cumberland County.

The importance of the recognition isn't limited to the ability to stamp tribal craft items as "genuine," or to grant authenticity to the Lenni-Lenapes' open-to-the public South Jersey pow-wows. A state's official recognition of a tribal nation allows it to receive federal anti-poverty funds and preferred-bidder status for certain contracts.

As tribal officials tell it, the first they learned of any problem was early in the Christie administration, when a federal inventory listed no official tribes based in New Jersey, even though the Nantikoke Lenni-Lenape and two other tribes had been given the designation by the Legislature.

The state Attorney General's Office backed up the "no tribes here" claim in 2012, which is what sent the Lenni-Lenape running to court under civil rights and anti-discrimination statutes. Although a separate federal court suit is ongoing, a trial court in May 2016 upheld the AG's position in the state litigation.

What's never been clear is why the AG's office even bothered to defend the apparent de-listing. Official recognition mainly qualifies a tribe for federal benefits, not state-financed ones that Garden State taxpayers pay for directly.

We see only two likely motives here, neither of which would speak well of the Christie and his administration.

One possibility is that the administration was carrying water for Atlantic City casino interests, who feared that the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape would claim rights to plop a competing tribal casino somewhere in Cumberland or Salem counties. And, although this is pure speculation, "Atlantic City casino interests" at the time could have included President Donald Trump.

At any rate, tribal officials have claimed to have no interest in developing their own gambling site.

Secondly, there is an alternate view among some local historians that too little proof exists that the Lenape who inhabit South Jersey are a legitimate tribe. But, that's just speculation, too, and American Indians should not lose tribal status based on blind acceptance of an unproved theory that turns generations of history books upside down on their spines. Every fourth-grader in New Jersey knows about the Lenni-Lenape.

Gov. Christie seemingly joined the "climate-change deniers" when he yanked New Jersey out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). His administration's strange actions concerning the Nanticoke-Lenni-Lenape suggest he has a charter membership in the "Native American deniers," as well.

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