Opinion ID: 213960
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Applicability of the Citizenship Act to Declare Cherokee Citizenship on C.D.K.

Text: According to the Citizenship Act, C.D.K. was a citizen of the Cherokee Nation at the time of his adoption and thus an Indian child subject to the protections of the ICWA. See 25 U.S.C. § 1903(4) (`Indian child' means any unmarried person who is under age eighteen and is . . . a member of an Indian tribe. . . .). The Ketchums challenge whether the Citizenship Act can apply at all in this situation, arguing that it could not grant C.D.K. citizenship for ICWA purposes. We agree. Assuming, without deciding, that the tribe possessed the authority to declare that the offspring of a nonmember is a citizen without the nonmember's consent for internal tribe purposes, the type of citizenship provided by the Citizenship Act does not make the child a member within the meaning of the ICWA. The ICWA explicitly defines Indian child as any unmarried person who is under age eighteen and is . . . a member of an Indian tribe. 25 U.S.C. § 1903(4) (emphasis added). While the Citizenship Act purports to make newborns who are directly descended from Dawes enrollees temporary citizens for 240 days following their birth, the ICWA does not apply to this sort of temporary membership. Appellees have not identified any other law by any other tribe that provides for temporary membership, let alone that such a temporary membership was within the contemplation of Congress when it applied the ICWA to children who are member[s] of Indian tribes. We find that Congress did not intend the ICWA to authorize this sort of gamesmanship on the part of a tribe e.g. to authorize a temporary and nonjurisdictional citizenship upon a nonconsenting person in order to invoke ICWA protections. Therefore, we conclude that § 1903(4)(a)'s definition of an Indian child as including a member of an Indian tribe does not include the type of temporary membership provided in the Citizenship Act. Not only does the temporary membership provision of the Citizenship Act fail to bring temporary members under the protection of the ICWA, but the Citizenship Act's broad definition of citizenshipeven if it was full citizenship as opposed to temporaryviolates Congress' intent. The legislative history of the ICWA shows that Congress considered, but ultimately rejected, an expansive definition of Indian child that was comparable to the definition employed in the Citizenship Act and that would have included C.D.K. within its terms. Specifically, an earlier draft of the ICWA did not define Indian child, but rather defined Indian as any person who is a member of or who is eligible for membership in a federally recognized Indian tribe.  (App. at 414 (123 Cong. Rec. S37223 (1977)) (emphasis added).) Under this rejected definition, C.D.K. would have been an Indian child even without the Citizenship Act because he was eligible for membership in a federally recognized tribe. But the final draft of the statute limited membership for those children who were eligible for membership because they had a parent who is a member. Appellees contend that this court cannot interfere with the tribe's determination of who is a member because tribes . . . have exclusive authority on membership determinations for tribal purposes. Ordinance 59 Ass'n v. U.S. Dep't of Interior Sec'y, 163 F.3d 1150, 1153 n. 3 (10th Cir.1998); see also Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49, 72 n. 32, 98 S.Ct. 1670, 56 L.Ed.2d 106 (1978) (A tribe's right to define its own membership for tribal purposes has long been recognized as central to its existence as an independent political community.). In this context, however, the Cherokee Nation does not seek to define membership only for tribal purposes, but also seeks to define membership for the purposes of a federal statute. We are interpreting the ICWA, a federal statute, and conclude only that the Citizenship Act does not bring C.D.K. within the definition of Indian child under the ICWA. The tribe cannot expand the reach of a federal statute by a tribal provision that extends automatic citizenship to the child of a nonmember of the tribe. Based on the definition of Indian child provided in the ICWA, we conclude that C.D.K. was not an Indian child at the time of the adoption proceedings for ICWA purposes, and so the procedural safeguards provided for in the ICWA did not apply to the relinquishment hearing and adoption proceedings. The district court's conclusion that those proceedings had to comply with the ICWA was in error.