Accepting the Request to Revoke the Charter of Incorporation of the Lower Sioux Indian Community in the State of Minnesota

Floor Speech

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Mr. TILLIS. As a matter of fact, I know you have been seeking this for--it has been 100 years since the event they have memorialized, and you have been seeking this for quite some time. But you need to know that your leadership is playing a game that will ultimately force me to take a position on the modification.

I believe that the Wounded Knee Massacre Memorial is at a sacred site, and the act really does need to come into law--just not yet. The reason is, I have an issue with their Tribal leadership. I have an issue with the Sioux's leadership going after the Lumbee Tribe in Eastern North Carolina.

The Lumbee have been trying to seek recognition for years, and there is a long and sordid trail of racism, the Jim Crow era, and things that I will not talk about today, but I will in the coming weeks.

As many of my colleagues know, I have been working on the Lumbee Fairness Act--getting it passed into law--for quite some time. I acknowledge--I am going to go quicker on this. I am going to submit something for the Record, if I may.

Mr. President, the bottom line is, I am not going to get into the history of the Lumbee Tribe. What I am going to do is get into the history of the casino cartel that is trying to prevent the Lumbee Tribe from being recognized. First among them is the largest Indian Tribe east of the Mississippi River. It is the Eastern Band of the Cherokee in North Carolina.

These are my constituents. They are the same constituents where then- Speaker Thom Tillis made sure they were treated fairly, renegotiated their compact, and it was transformational to them, as a Republican leader, over the objections of a majority of my Republican members.

That is the only bill that I allowed to do--in my 4 years as speaker--to do the right thing for the Cherokee. My reward was to have them use some of the treasure that was gained from my support in the statehouse to pay lobbyists huge sums of money to discredit the application for recognition of the Lumbee Indians.

Now I am going to get into some specifics.

For years, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and their adviser Wilson Pipestem had led the efforts, the punitive efforts, directly against the Lumbee Tribe. Most recently, at the 81st NCAI Convention, a few weeks ago, UINO--sorry for these abbreviations--spread inflammatory information about the Lumbee Tribe. That was on November 1. The Eastern Band publicly thanked the UINO for the distribution of these materials. They were false. Since this stunt, the NCAI president has publicly condemned the distribution of those materials and issued an apology to the Lumbee Tribe.

Now I have been made aware that Eastern Band, Wilson Pipestem, and UINO have been hosting events on Capitol Hill, spending large sums of money to continue spreading those lies.

In the coming weeks and months, I am going to continue to highlight the individuals, the lobbyists, the Tribal leaders, and the groups that are part of this web that are preventing the Lumbee from getting the recognition they have deserved for nearly 130 years.

I want to reiterate to the Oglala Sioux and to the Cheyenne River Sioux: This is not about you. This is about your leaders, and this is about their underhanded, unfair treatment of a Tribal nation that deserves recognition and that this country needs to atone for over a century of racism and neglect.

For that reason, Mr. President, I do object to the modification.

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Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, Senator Rounds--I call him Mike--we are good friends. We came into the Senate together in 2014. We got to know each other before we even got here. He is a man of honor, and he is a man of his word. I have no doubt that he would not stand in the way should I allow this measure to go forward today.

The problem is, the Tribes that he represents will. They will continue to work to spread the misinformation to smear a Tribe that deserves recognition, and they want the respect that they have been entitled to for over 130 years when they first got recognition, short of Federal recognition.

So if I had a Senate and a Congress--if I had 535 Mike Rounds--I would not have objected to this today. If I had Tribal leaders who were not lying to constituents and misinforming them on the background of the Lumbee Tribe and knowing that they will continue to, I have no other option than what I did today. It gives me no pleasure to do it to one of my favorite people in the U.S. Senate.

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