This is a straw man argument, Mr Merkey.  Nobody is arguing that federally unverified tribes, clans or groups should be identified as having any kind of federal recognition. What's being said here, something that you seem unwilling to accept as even being a valid view, is that those groups claim to have cherokee lineage (in many cases, having verifiable documented evidence to that effect), and as such, they should be figured on the cherokee page, not simply expunged from wikipedia because they don't fall within the very narrow rules defined by the very government that has historically persecuted them. If nothing else, they should be included to highlight the controversy that their claim to being cherokee engenders.  Legally, they may not be recognised cherokees, but anthropologically they are. Removing non federally recognised groups on the basis of some imagined legal threat would seem to be ridiculous; this is intended, after all, to be an encyclopedia, and thus, encyclopedic.  What it's not intended to be is a vanity publishing service, and to remove all reference to non-recognised tribes and the controversy surrounding them would, in my view at least, turn this article into just that.  It certainly wouldn't, as you imply, improve Wikipedia.