美国国家公共电台 NPR Banished Indigenous Women Fight Tribal Leaders In Federal Court（在线收听）

NOEL KING, HOST:

Banishment is a rare but serious form of punishment in Indian country. People can lose their homes, their jobs, they can't enter the reservation. It mostly happens to violent offenders or drug dealers. But on one reservation in Utah, some tribal members are suing in federal court because they say they were banished for more political reasons. Nate Hegyi from member station KUER in Salt Lake City has the story.

NATE HEGYI, BYLINE: Angelita Chegup and three other women are eating chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant in Roosevelt, Utah.

(LAUGHTER)

HEGYI: They seem happy right now, but Chegup says this past year has been hard ever since she and the others were banished from the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation by the Ute tribe.

ANGELITA CHEGUP: It changed our lives. One moment, I had a job; the next moment, I didn't.

HEGYI: Chegup says the banishment forced her into an early retirement from her job as a grant coordinator for the tribe. She still retains tribal membership but says she lost her health and life insurance that she got through her job. Now, unless Chegup has a police escort, she can't attend traditional ceremonies on reservation lands or visit friends and family, even when a few of those friends and family members passed away.

CHEGUP: Couldn't attend the funeral because of what the council decided.

HEGYI: Chegup says she and the other women were banished by tribal leadership because they were trying to bring history to light. The women say they are from two earlier bands of Indigenous people who lived here before the federally recognized Ute tribe even existed. And here's the claim that eventually led to their banishment - the women believe they have 19th-century treaty rights to an oil-rich part of the reservation.

CHEGUP: We've been bringing this issue out to where, hey, we all need to know our history here.

HEGYI: If these claims are true, it means that these women would have control over that part of the reservation and the oil and gas beneath it. Ute tribal leadership declined to be interviewed, but in court documents, leadership claimed the women were trying to destabilize its government. They interfered in ongoing litigation pertaining to the tribe and leadership called those court filings frivolous and nonsensical and said it cost them millions of dollars. Eventually, the tribe banished the four women, including Tara Amboh. She says banishment is like public shaming.

TARA AMBOH: We'll walk into a grocery store and we'll get the looks, you know, from people. But, yeah, it takes your liberty, your freedom, and all we were doing was just freedom of speech, you know?

HEGYI: After the women were banished, they sued the tribe in Utah's federal district court, arguing they weren't given due process and that the banishment was a violation of their civil rights. But the judge dismissed the case. He wrote in part that federal courts can't intervene because tribes are sovereign nations. Grant Christensen is an Indian law professor at the University of North Dakota. He explains that this is a matter of jurisdiction.

GRANT CHRISTENSEN: Tribes are their own governments separate from states and separate from the United States.

HEGYI: Christensen says tribes aren't beholden to the U.S. bill of rights. Congress tried to build a workaround in 1968...

CHRISTENSEN: Called the Indian Civil Rights Act that extends most but not all of our constitutional protections onto tribal governments.

HEGYI: But here's the thing - enforcement of that 1968 law has been mostly struck down by the courts because, again, tribes are sovereign nations. However, there is an exception. Federal courts are allowed to intervene if someone is unlawfully detained by a tribe.

CHRISTENSEN: And so in that context, banishment runs into this interesting gray area in the law.

HEGYI: The federal courts are currently split over whether banishment is a form of unlawful detention. If the 10th Circuit decides to hear this case, Christensen says it could set up a fight that ends in the Supreme Court. For NPR News, I'm Nate Hegyi in Roosevelt, Utah.

KING: And Nate's story came to us from the Mountain West News Bureau.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE POLISH AMBASSADOR'S "CALL OF THE CANYON")