Eligibility for Enrollment Is a Matter of Tribal Law

Whether or not you or your child is eligible for enrollment in a particular tribe depends primarily on the tribe’s enrollment ordinance.  It may also depend on politics. The two basic criteria in most enrollment ordinances are blood quantum and lineage.

The candidate for enrollment must have a certain amount of “Indian” blood, usually one eighth.  In addition, a percentage of that blood often must be from the candidate’s own Tribe.

In terms of lineage, usually the candidate must be the biological issue of an enrolled member. In the alternative, in some tribes, the candidate may only need to prove that he is the issue of someone who was a de facto member of the tribe, even if, for some reason, the tribal member was not officially enrolled.

Unfortunately, whether or not a Tribe will accept you or your child for enrollment may depend on the current political climate and the relative generosity of the Tribe as much as the ordinance.

If the Tribe is affluent but tribal income is relatively fixed, the tribal council may not want to divide the tribal pie any further and therefore may try to exclude you.  However, if the tribal pie is quite small to begin with, dividing it further won’t make much of a difference and the tribal council may not care one way or another.

Likewise, if the tribal council feels threatened by you or your family, you may be excluded for extra-legal reasons.  Whether you can beat these reasons in tribal court will depend to a large extent on your facts but it may also depend on whether the tribal court is properly insulated from tribal politics.