Word: tribalized
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Congress in 1924 capped the conquest of the American Indian by granting U.S. citizenship to all Indians born from that year on. Until then, tribal Indians had been considered "wards of the Government." But the gesture by no means fully extended the U.S. Constitution to about 70% of the country's Indians-the 380,000 tribal members who now live on 399 reservations and enclaves maintained by the Federal Government...
Because the law still regards Indian tribes as quasi-sovereign nations, state courts have no jurisdiction over reservations; federal courts try only major reservation crimes, such as murder. The vast majority of lesser crimes are left to 56 tribal courts manned by Indian judges, who are usually picked by tribal councils, but have little or no legal training. Tribal defendants cannot appeal to outside courts; they have even been consistently denied writs of habeas corpus. As a result, tribal judges have been free to ignore constitutional rights...
Guilty Without Trial. Fortunately, this situation is bound to improve-all because of Madeline Colliflower, 46, a stubborn member of the Gros Ventre tribe (part of the Blackfoot nation) on Montana's Fort Belknap reservation. In 1963 the tribal court ordered Mrs. Colliflower to quit pasturing her cattle in someone else's field. Having apparently ignored the order, she was arrested by the reservation's Police Chief Joe Plumage and Officer Lyle Reddog, and haled before Indian Judge Cranston Hawley. She pleaded not guilty. But without ever giving her a trial, Judge Hawley offered her the choice...
Chance for Defense. Father Conklin went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which last February broke precedent by holding that Judge Jameson had jurisdiction. However sovereign Indian tribes may be in theory, ruled this court, tribal courts are obviously "in part" arms of the Federal Government and are thus apparently bound by minimal standards of constitutional fairness...
...advice of his teachers and the clear facts-of-life lesson around him. The N.A.A.C.P.'s Roy Wilkins, after giving the whites their lumps for "keeping the screws on," writes: "We will have ghetto upheavals until the Negro community itself, through the channels that societies have fashioned since tribal beginnings, takes firm charge of its destiny. Not its destiny vis-a-vis a cop on the beat, but its destiny in the world of adults...