Second-Class Sovereignty for Virginia Tribes?

On Tuesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would grant federal recognition to six tribes in Virginia, coinciding with the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement. But federal recognition comes at a price: the bill conditions the tribes' recognition on their waiver of gaming rights.

In our book, Indian Gaming and Tribal Sovereignty: The Casino Compromise, we discuss how Indian gaming has politicized the federal tribal recognition process. For many critics, federal recognition is a "license" to operate a casino, rather than an appropriate acknowledgement of a tribe's status as a sovereign government. By conditioning the Virginia tribes' recognition on waiver of gaming rights, members of Congress may think that they've hit upon a happy compromise: the tribes get recognition, and Virginia gets a guarantee that the tribes can't open casinos. But we think that Congress is using the legislative recognition process to fiat a second-class tier of tribal sovereignty: federally recognized tribes without all of the inherent rights that historically have been acknowledged through recognition.

It's important to remember that tribal rights are not granted to tribes by Congress; instead, they stem from tribes' status as separate, sovereign governments. And, by the way, the Virginia tribes have long been recognized by the state, and before that, entered into treaties as sovereign governments with England. To condition their recognition on the abrogation of gaming rights is a victory of politics over principle.

Read more in the Washington Post, here. Also see this story in Indian Country Today, here.

Filmmaker Juanita Giles has a forthcoming documentary on Virginia tribes' efforts to achieve federal recognition. (More on this in a later post.) View a preview at http://www.11pictures.org/

Lastly, here's NPR's All Things Considered story on the Monacan Indian Nation (3/25).