Ranking Member Grijalva: I Join Tribes In Strongly Opposing Just-Passed Republican Bill That Politicizes Tribal Recognition Process

Washington, D.C. – Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva today highlighted Native American communities’ strong opposition to Chairman Rob Bishop’s (R-Utah) Tribal Recognition Act, officially designated H.R. 3764, which passed the Natural Resources Committee a few minutes ago largely along party lines. The bill eliminates the executive branch’s longstanding ability to recognize a Tribe for the purpose of government-to-government relations, making an act of Congress the only way for the federal government to recognize a Tribe.

During consideration of the bill, Republicans rejected Grijalva’s amendment reaffirming that any land the federal government took into trust for a Tribe prior to the controversial Carcieri Supreme Court ruling in 2009 is indeed trust land and is not subject to legal challenge. Grijalva’s amendment would have prevented further frivolous lawsuits being launched against Tribes that had land taken into trust before 2009, several of which have been filed in recent years.

Grijalva’s amendment mirrored the language of H.R. 3137, introduced by Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a bill on which Chairman Bishop has refused to hold a hearing since it was introduced in August of 2015. Bishop has similarly refused to hold a hearing on Rep. Cole’s H.R. 249, a bipartisan bill strongly supported by Native American communities that more fully addresses the issues raised by the Carcieri ruling.

The National Congress of American Indians yesterday sent a letter to Grijalva, Bishop, Subcommittee on Indian, Insular and Alaska Native Affairs Chairman Don Young (R-Alaska) and Ranking Member Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) highlighting concerns with the Tribal Recognition Act. The group wrote in part:

Diminishing the Secretary of the Interior’s authority to extend recognition to tribes will infringe on the long history of Secretarial Authority and tribal input and undermine a fair and orderly process required for the government to function effectively. [. . .] The Secretary’s authority to acknowledge the existence of Indian tribes as pre-existing sovereigns is deeply rooted in the laws passed by Congress and the structure of the Constitution.

The letter restates NCAI’s support for the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ ongoing reformation of its tribal recognition procedure, which relies on a standardized assessment of historical and cultural factors. The bill would inevitably politicize a process that should have nothing to do with politics, Grijalva said.

“The validity of a Native American or Alaska Native community’s request for recognition should have nothing to do with who won the last election,” Grijalva said. “This bill tells millions of American citizens that politics, not science and history, will determine their legal status from now on. It’s a patronizing and insulting way to treat communities that have already suffered far too many years of government neglect.”

Grijalva’s formal statement during debate on the bill today raised similar concerns.

“Republicans have broken our political process and now want to make tribes captive to that broken process,” Grijalva said during debate. “Do we really want Republicans to be able to stop tribal recognition by ignoring it the way they ignore filling vacancies on the Supreme Court?”

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