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