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Key Words: American Indians, First Nations, Moravian Indian, removal, reservation, Stockbridge-Munsee
The Delaware Tribe of Indians is one of a number of federally recognized tribes that are currently designated as "landless tribes." This uncommon status often limits a tribe in many ways as well as makes its federally recognized status potentially more tenuous and easier to terminate. A landless tribe is a tribe that may own land, but the land is not held "in trust" by the federal government. Instead, the land remains private land subject to state and local jurisdiction and is not considered a reservation. Thus, the land lacks the federal protections and exclusions afforded to tribes with reservations. Given the current politics of the modern self-determination era, many landless tribes, including the Delaware Tribe, often seek the security and economic advantages that come with establishing or restoring a federally protected land base of their own. However, such establishment can often be difficult; the reason a tribe is landless today is often the result of a history of dispossession, removal, and/or neglect by the federal government, and these errors of the past are not easily corrected.1
The Delaware Tribe's effort to restore a land base is further complicated by their current relationship with the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Their relationship began when the Delaware were removed to the Cherokee Nation in 1867. This final removal to what is today eastern Oklahoma included a provision that the Delaware would become citizens of the Cherokee Nation. As individual citizens, each member would be able to hold land in the Cherokee Nation, but the Delaware Tribe was not given a separate reservation of their own. Because the Delaware Tribe lacks a reservation or trust land today, according to the federal government, they must look to lands within the former boundaries of their last reservation in order to establish a federally protected land base. Although identifying the boundaries of the Delaware Tribe's last reservation may seem straightforward, the histories of dispossession for Indian communities from the colonial era to the twentieth century seldom involve uncomplicated narratives of loss. More often than not they encompass more disruptive and complicated experiences that weave together kinship networks, economic desires, political chicanery, and extralegal activities of all varieties. Whether...