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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting. Is this the first time a major city has fallen within a reservation?

Don't know if you'd qualify it as a "major" city, but over 10% of Palm Springs CA is on an Indian reservation. For interesting historical reasons, though, the reservation is basically shaped like a checkerboard, where every other 640-acre square is reservation land. This obviously has huge implications on real estate - none of the reservation land is sold, just leased, and there were some recent cases where the tribe made the tenants leave after their (like 50 year or so) lease was up.

Google "palm springs indian reservation map" and it will show you the checkerboard.

That seems like an insane way to divvy up land. My first instinct was that it was done that way to make the land effectively unusable as tribal land, just because that's how the government tends to roll in these cases

Correct. It was a policy to encourage Native Americans to move to the agricultural model used by European Americans, as well as incorporate socially. It was relatively easy for a white American farmer to set up a farm in the state administered squares, but it was relatively difficult for Native Americans to roam nomadically- it essentially reduced the density of available foodstuffs in the checkerboard by half. The presumption was that Native Americans would/should start farming and adopt American social and economic norms.

Another somewhat common practice was splitting up reservations into homestead sized blocks and assigning each block to an individual Native American adult male in traditional common law property ownership ways, which didn't map to any Native American social/economic norm.

There was a lot of effort put forth by the US government after the Reconstruction to coerce Native Americans to act like white Americans. Which was bizarre considering citizenship wasn't fixed until 1924. You would have thought they would have led with that.

> You would have thought they would have led with that.

It's actually very rational, cynically speaking: you don't want to extend the franchise until you're sure that the new guys will "vote the right way", so to speak.

Railroad land grants in the Western US were generally handed out in a checkerboard pattern, and that's apparently what happened here.

https://www.pscondos.com/palm-springs-indian-lease-land/

Same is true of Green Bay, WI. About 15% of the city intersects with the Oneida Nation reservation. While also not a "major" city, it is over twice the size of Palm Springs.

And, either way, what are the implications to non-tribe citizens and non-tribe governments?

The Atlantic wrote about this in 2018, it seems like the framework of inter-agency cooporation won't be much of a change for most non-Natives: behttps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/murphy-cas...

For non-natives not really. For natives, it depends on the agreements. This isn't really a traditional reservation situation, since the tribes really are not going to have the traditional governance over the land. For example, the cops are not going to get replaced by BIA or Tribal police.

Why not? If they're on tribal land, what's to stop the tribe from governing?

Tribal governments only have criminal jurisdiction over crimes committed by Native Americans (an enrolled member of the tribe, or an enrolled member of some other federally recognised tribe). If the perpetrator is not Native American, the tribal government and courts cannot deal with the case, only local/state/federal courts and authorities can. (There is an exception to this rule, created by Congress, that domestic violence crimes committed by a non-native against their Native American spouse or partner can be dealt with through the tribal legal system.)

Civil legal jurisdiction over non-native individuals is somewhat broader, but still subject to various complex legal limits.

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43324.pdf

No, the big issue is the collection of taxes.

There are other places that are technically on tribal land, and that hasn't allowed the tribe to government them. The city and state is not going to cede governance on non-members to the tribe. Its going to end up being an agreement between the state and the tribe.

And how do you even define a tribe citizen? Is there like an ID card? Is it a DNA test? Does Elizabeth Warren qualify?

Every tribe handles this themselves, it's based on ancestry. They define their own cutoff points, such as 1/16 etc.

Not all tribes calculate blood quantum at all.

Which one doesn't and is it federally recognized? The feds are a bit of a pain on that issue.

The Cherokee Nation doesn't impose a blood quantum test, you just need to have an ancestor listed on the Dawes rolls.

https://cherokeeregistry.com/blood-quantum/

Ok, thanks. All the northern plains groups do the quantum. I suppose the Cherokee have a pretty scary history so that makes sense. The difference between the two tribes in their statement isn't because of blood, its distance to a major city.

That's why he said the tribe decides.

Right, but the implication was that tribes had each decided on a minimum blood quantum, but not all of them use blood quantum at all.

The tribes have their own mechanisms for identifying citizens like any other jus sanguinis nationality. The specifics depend on the tribe in question.

So could a tribe welcome every single person who asks to become a tribesman? Does the government just accept whatever the tribe says? Would the government then be required to apply all the same rules and exclusions of law for such new members of the tribe?

Does the government just accept that Israel or Germany get to decide who are Israeli and German citizens?

Tribes are legally foreign nations with a very, very close treaty relationship.

"Falsehoods programmers believe about maps. #1 It is possible to create one consistent and complete world map"

Law and geopolitics is not code. Treaties only have the meaning that signatories read into it.

> Does the government just accept that Israel or Germany get to decide who are Israeli and German citizens?

Certainly not!

Israel has its uncertain relationship with the occuptied terrotories / Palestein.

Germany had the East/West occuptation.

China has its disputes regarding Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Can you give an example of a country recognizing some but not all citizenship decisions of another country?

Like I think the US would respect a Taiwanese citizen presenting a PRC passport for instance. The PRC considers all RoC citizens to be PRC citizens and will fill out the relevant documentation for them.

So the answer is yes? This seems like a potential business opportunity for any tribe that was so inclined. They could bestow favourable tax status on anyone who wanted to go down that path.

There are limits. Allergan tried some shenanigans with a drug patent[1].

Re: taxes, the US government will make you pay all your taxes. If you pay taxes to a foreign govt then you can get a waiver for what you paid but if the tribe gives you a good deal the US govt will still demand the rest.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/us/politics/allergan-eye-...

The Allergan example is interesting, super ballsy and got struck down.

It had to do with patent challenges through inter partie reviews (IPR) Basically Allergan transferred the patents to the tribe and said “they are sovereign and thus can’t be challenged through IPR”.

> Re: taxes, the US government will make you pay all your taxes. If you pay taxes to a foreign govt then you can get a waiver for what you paid but if the tribe gives you a good deal the US govt will still demand the rest.

That's the rule for US citizens. You would no longer be a US citizen. Presumably the rules would be exactly the same as they are for current tribe members.

>You would no longer be a US citizen

You would also still have US citizenship. You don't lose that unless you formally renounce it.

A tribe member is still a US citizen. They just aren't State citizens (residents).

Assuming you are planning to work in the US your income will still be taxed. And based on the rules from the Eduardo Saverin case you won't be able to escape taxes on what you earned before you left.

So it doesn't really work.

> So it doesn't really work

Yeah, you're right. In Canada, "status indians" get a tax exempt card to avoid sales tax at least. I didn't realize that in the US all American Natives are actually considered US citizens and are taxed federally just like everyone else. Only the tribe itself is tax exempt.

That is according to: https://www.thebalance.com/do-native-americans-pay-taxes-417...

Nations with no control over their mineral rights. Will they be able to demand a cut from the oil pumped off their land?

Depends on the treaty.

Reservations vary from quite well off (I personally knew a guy who basically had a few hundred thousand in trust from his band when he turned 18 - money from resource extraction on tribal territory) to reservations that resemble shanty towns in developing countries.

Can’t lump them all together.

Uhm, well yes they do. Check out Three Affiliated for a tribe whose people made quite a bit of cash from fracking.

They are “domestic dependent nations,” which are more like states than foreign nations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_sovereignty_in_the_Unit...

Its pretty universal, mainly because of the Federal requirements, that its based on blood quantum. Most tribes are 1/4 some are 1/8.

Having Ancestry dot com or similar service tell you anything is not accepted by any tribe.

How does this work with government? Or let's go into one specific question, can I start my own tribe?

The Bureau of Indian Affairs has a process for being recognized as a tribe[0], and the criteria is at 25 CFR § 83.11 [1].

0: https://www.bia.gov/as-ia/ofa

1: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/25/83.11

Look up the saga of the Little Shell Tribe for a modern look at recognition.

Just like it does for any other foreign citizenship.

Getting your tribe you just started recognized without any of the treaties in place is about the same level of effort as getting your new country recognized. I don't see TSA accepting Sealand passports.

No bs: I've had TSA refuse to accept my US passport card for domestic travel. He claimed there is no such thing. Twenty years down the line and we need some basic training...

Oh, I don't doubt it. I've had them refuse to take my New Mexico driver's licence...

Large parts of the City of Tacoma and surrounding cities fall inside the Pyuallup Indian Reservation in Washington state. In fact, out of >40,000 people on the reservation, only 2500 are members of the tribe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puyallup_people

Parts of Tulsa already overlapped with reservations, I believe.

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