By Seth Richardson
Colorado Attorney General John Suthers is on the warpath against abuses of Colorado’s payday lending law by companies claiming to be “protected” by the sovereign status of the Indian Nations. In a story in the Sunday, February 11, 2011 edition of the Denver Post, “Hiding behind a tribe,” reporter Alicia Caldwell describes how non-Indian out-of-state payday lenders are hiding behind two Indian tribes to evade Colorado’s new, and strict payday lending laws.
Members of the Santee Sioux and Oklahoma Miami Indian Nations are trying to give legal cover to several payday lending companies by claiming that the non-Indian businesses are “arms” of the “sovereign” Indian Nations.
This is not really anything new, casino gambling corporations have been camping out on Indian lands for decades now. But the payday lending scheme is different because the transactions don’t take place on Indian lands, they take place in cyberspace.
Suthers’ complaint has been wending its way through the courts, and the Colorado Supreme Court returned the matter to the trial court for more proceedings. Suthers is rightfully afraid that if loose associations with Indian tribes is sufficient to endow tribal sovereignty on any commercial business, the tribes will likely become “rent-a-tribes” allowing non-Indian businesses to escape state regulations. That cannot be permitted.
This is no idle threat. Federal law regarding the regulation of the Indian tribes is pretty exclusively vested in the Congress, although the states have won some ability to control Indian activities in places. Indian nations across the US use their state tax exempt status to sell everything from gasoline to cigarettes at prices far under what off-reservation commercial enterprises can.
Fair enough, if the transaction takes place on the reservation.
But the difference here is that the transaction does not take place “on the reservation,” it takes place, essentially, at the consumer’s home, on his computer. What the businesses, and the tribes want is to have their cake and eat it too. They want access to off-reservation markets and consumers without having to comply with off-reservation laws and regulations.
Sorry, not buying any today.
Because the transactions are not taking place solely on the reservation, they shouldn’t be subject to sovereign immunity…unless the Indians want FULL sovereign immunity.
And that would involve reservation border stations, immigration and customs inspection, trade and tariff agreements and other common international diplomatic and legal obstacles to unfettered trade.
It’s illegal, for example, for a payday lender in Mexico to solicit business in Colorado without complying with our laws, so why should Indian Nations be any different?
Short of making the Indian Nations fully sovereign, with all the diplomatic consequences thereof, there’s another way to quash this fraudulent scheme to evade our state laws.
The legislature should pass a law saying that no contract entered into with any Indian, Indian Nation, or company ostensibly owned by or protected by an Indian Nation’s sovereign status, can be legally enforced in any way outside of the boundaries of reservation property. Access to Colorado’s civil courts should be denied for contract disputes with Indian Nation-based businesses.
Colorado is under no obligation to enforce private contracts made with the Indian Tribes, particularly if the tribes are going to use their sovereign status to evade Colorado law.
If the Indian Nations want to enforce contracts they have entered into in violation of our laws, by claiming sovereign status, they will have to induce the parties to come to the reservation in order to serve them with legal process, and they will have to adjudicate the dispute on the reservation. If that means they can’t get a debtor to come to the reservation for trial, and they can’t get the Colorado courts to enforce a judgment, it’s just their tough luck. The same rules should be applied to gambling debts as well.
That’s what it really means to be a “sovereign nation.”
Payday borrowers should borrow whatever they can from tribally-protected payday lenders, and then stiff the lenders and the tribes, while making sure never to enter tribal reservations.
If the lender takes them to civil court anywhere outside the reservation, the borrower should simply claim the sovereign immunity of their status as a non-tribe-member citizen of the United States as justification for repudiating the debt.
If the payday lenders want sovereign tribal protection, they can get by with sovereign tribal enforcement, which should not be valid or enforceable anywhere but on their reservation.
© 2011 Altnews
free games hacks…
[...]Time to treat the Indian Nations to a dose of their own medicine – The Broadside : Colorado Springs Gazette, CO[...]…
Seth,
Your understanding is at best, suspect. For example, your statement that, “The transaction does not take place on the reservation, it takes place, essentially, at the consumer’s home, on his computer,” is nonsense. The only thing that takes place at the consumers’ homes is that they seek out and log onto the company website, wherever that server may be. If the money, similar to a book from Amazon, is sent from a destination in another state or country, your position is further diminished. Realistically, the interstate commerce clause prohibits states from regulating cross border business. Imagine, a Colorado resident visits a brothel while in Las Vegas. He returns to CO and is arrested for violating the prostitution laws of CO. Under your conditions, a citizen from CO should not participate in prostitution when out of state. Furthermore, were there any disclaimers offered? Did the Indian tribe warn that this loan was in compliance with the laws of the sovereign nation? Does personal responsibility for ones’ actions have any bearing on this condition? Or is the nanny state in full bloom? How many CO borrowers will attempt to escape paying down their loan claiming that the tribes do not have jurisdiction? This is the payday version of strategic defaults on mortgages, where buyers walk away from their mortgages because the home is worth less than the mortgage.
“It’s illegal, for example, for a payday lender in Mexico to solicit business in Colorado without complying with our laws, so why should Indian Nations be any different?”
So taking your argument to its logical conclusion: Every jurisdiction on the globe should abide by the most restrictive Internet laws on the planet?
If they expect their rights to be enforced in a particular jurisdiction, then they must abide by the laws of that jurisdiction.
If a payday lender in Mexico takes business from Americans in Colorado, and gets stiffed, it can only enforce its rights under the laws of Mexico, not the United States or Colorado.
Why should the Indian Nations be treated any differently?
Indian culture, as I understand it, prohibits them from becoming citizens or dependents.
I think if the indian culture was still alive and kicking, we would still fear them to some extent. You wouldn’t be stiffing them on a loan because they would simply cross the border, stick a knife in you, ride on home and be done with it.
It says something about our culture that they no longer fear us.
“Indian culture, as I understand it, prohibits them from becoming citizens or dependents.”
Who cares what their cultural memes are? They are citizens of the United States anyway, and they have full rights as citizens off the reservation. I’m saying it’s time to remove the “sovereignty” of their reservations and make them full citizens like anyone else. For one thing, this would allow state police to investigate crimes on Indian reservations, something the FBI is supposed to do, but doesn’t do well, which is why rape and other forms of abuse are so commonplace on the rez.
“I think if the indian culture was still alive and kicking, we would still fear them to some extent. You wouldn’t be stiffing them on a loan because they would simply cross the border, stick a knife in you, ride on home and be done with it.”
No, if they did that, they would all be dead right now. You do realize that Indians were put on reservations to PROTECT THEM from everyone else, don’t you? If Andrew Jackson had his way, there wouldn’t be an Indian alive today. That was the opinion of a good many other non-Indians of the time too. That’s why things like the Sand Creek massacre happened. Without the protection of the United States government, Indians would have been wiped out completely, and they would never have been given reservations or “sovereignty.” Their culture would have been destroyed and suppressed, and only the meekest and most obedient of them would have survived.
“It says something about our culture that they no longer fear us.”
Yeah, that we’re really nice to them. Nicer than they deserve any more.
Some history on these social evolvements may be relevant: The Democrat Governor of Colorado Roy Romer was a voice in the wilderness against future abuses by legal gambling concerns. But Colorado voters, eager for the tax revenues overrode Romer. Now that he have developed a huge bureaucracy to oversee lottery and casino interests perhaps it’s time to re-vote on their continued existence. Lottery activities tend to bleed the incomes of lower earners, and we seem to have acquired more “Open Space” than is practical.
Also, Payola by pale-face hustlers tends to finance Revisionista history activists, such as the Sand Creek National Monument. Current reliable history discoveries indicate that 24 reputable Colorado Troopers died at Sand Creek on Nov. 29, 1864, and 51 were wounded, according to Greg Michno’s BATTLE AT SAND CREEK, The Military Perspective.
The first man shot dead by the indians was Pvt. George Pierce, F Company, 1st Colorado Volunteer Cavalry. The Cheyenne and Arapaho have never owned up to their part in starting the ruckus. The battle lasted some 7 hours over some 6 miles up Sand Creek and one to two miles on each side. The many assembled camps originally stretched at least a half-mile along the creek bank, and not in a small circle easily victimized by the alleged Whitey murderers.
Two years earlier, also during the Civil War, the Santee Sioux uprising in the Minnesota River Valley saw some 600 to 800 defenseless German immigrants and their families massacred over a three day period. Retaliation by the army carried clear across the Dakota Territories and in to the Teton Sioux turf in major battles such as Whitestone Hill and KillDeer Mountain. Also victimized by the Santee Sioux attacks were the spin-off losses by the Winnebago and Chippewa tribes in Minnesota who lost their reservations. The Indian Wars already were alive on the Northern Plains before the Sand Creek Battle. But the Colorado Legislature didn’t know that when tribal activists bunco’d them in to a Joint Resolution condeming
Sand Creek. Duh. Small wonder Congressional approval ratings have hovered at 13%.
Curt Neeley
Anybody who thinks that all Indians were peaceful, noble savages doesn’t know anything about Native American history.
Just ask the Crow what the Sioux did to them.
Many of the Indian tribes were every bit as venal, cruel and warlike as the settlers, and in some respects, even more so.
They violated as many treaties as the settlers did, which is why there were so many “Indian wars” and treaty after treaty after treaty. And when they violated a treaty, it often involved brutally killing whites, including women and children.
Nobody’s got the moral high road here. But the United States has done something that until recently, no other country has ever done, which is to not simply assimilate indigenous minority groups by extirpating their cultural identity and land rights.
History is filled with one ethnic population conquering and subjugating another, with not infrequent genocides to follow.
The US has always taken the somewhat dubiously prudent course of both acknowledging and protecting the indigenous tribes and their sovereignty, as much as was possible under the circumstances.
It may be a mistake to continue that system of racial separation, and it may be time to simply make Indians full US citizens and get them out from under the paternalistic thumb of the Congress.
Turn over the title of the reservation lands to the tribes, dissolve the BIA, repeal all treaties and laws that treat Indians differently from anyone else and throw them into the melting pot.
Let them preserve their culture if they wish, but let them do it as equal citizens, not as dependents of the US government.