ALERT - FED WRECK IS BACK
Buffalo Chronicle - December 20, 2020
President-elect Joe Biden is offering his formal backing to an ‘omnibus Indian recognition bill’ early in the next Congress. Sources close to the matter expect the bill to include formal federal recognition of the indigenous political status of Native Hawaiians and Alaska Natives, allowing those indigenous groups to move their current land holdings into federal trust and to organize self-determining tribal governments recognized under federal laws pertaining to American Indians.
Former Senator Daniel Akaka tried several times to achieve passage of the Native Hawaiian Recognition Act, from 2000 to 2006, and nearly achieved Senate passage, falling short by only a few votes. That bill would have allowed Native Hawaiians to organize a tribal government and enjoy the federal protection of their lands from encroachment. More than 500,000 individuals in Hawaii identify as Native Hawaiian in the 2010 census.
Alaska Native Villages and Alaska Native Village Corporations are not currently able to organize under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, largely because of the work of former Senator Ted Stevens to ensure that indigenous Alaskans would not need the federal approval of the Department of the Interior to sell or lease their lands for the purpose of resource extraction.
The bill is also expected to include Congressional recognition of a dozen American Indian tribes and bands of tribes that are currently unrecognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs — including the Lumbee Nation of North Carolina, the Buffalo Creek Band of Haudenosaunee Indians, the Wampanoag Nation of Indians, the Eastern Cherokee Nation of Georgia, and the Lenape Nation, among others.
It’s unclear if the legislation will include formal recognition of Canada’s First Nations communities, for the purpose of (among other things) enabling cross-border tribal banking with financial institutions in the United States, both for Reserve governments and entrepreneurs....
...Tribal leaders hope that the ‘Indian Recognition Act’ will pass both houses of Congress and be signed into law during the Biden administration’s first 100 days. Indian Country has its hopes set on securing an Indian Bank Regulatory Act, in order to ensure that Tribes have the tools to exercise their own civil regulatory jurisdiction over their own sovereign financial markets. The legislation is seen as the ‘holy grail’ of economic development for Indian Country, which would give Tribes and tribal entrepreneurs unprecedented access to the global capital markets.
Although some hope that legislation will pass in the next legislative session, others predict that it will take into early 2022 to cultivate sufficient congressional support for it.
