Maggie's Farm

Two tribes aren’t recognized federally. Yet members won $500 million in minority contracts.

Buried 22 paragraphs into the article: "In a statement, the SBA said the Ma-Chis continue to qualify for minority contracts under its regulations because of its (the tribal organization's) state recognition in Alabama."

Federal recognition or acknowledgement of a tribe indicates that the tribe is recognized as a sovereign government of a people and place for government to government relations.

It is also one of the several ways that various federal laws determine "who is an indian" for purposes where that matters in federal laws and programs – if the feds acknowledge the tribe, and the tribe says you are a member by whatever criteria they use, then for some purposes you are an Indian. For other purposes that's not enough and percent of blood from your genealogy is also a criteria. For yet other purposes, blood quanta alone is fine, and for others, being a member of a state-recognized tribal organization is enough.

The people in question claim to be descendants of Creek who escaped from the forced relocation to Oklahoma and remained in Alabama or nearby states and subsisted by blending-in with existing white-settler and free-African-American communities. In much of the 19th century if they were to be identified as "Indian" that would have subjected them to expulsion and many restrictions on property-ownership, intermarriage, and employment that existed in the racist laws of the time, so would not be entirely surprising that their families might not be "out" as people of Indian heritage until such heritage became cool around the 1970's, or that official documentation in historic county, church, and school records would not record them as "Indian" in post-expulsion decades.

As a contrast, the descendants of the Burt Lake Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians are well documented and unquestionably of a tribe recognized by historic federal-government treaty and the state government of Michigan, but the tribe is also not-federally-recognized since the early 20th century expropriation of their land and destruction of their village.

The LA Times started looking into abuse of state and federal minority-contracting programs thinking that they had a "gotcha" against Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) whose brother-in-law ran a company that had benefited from such programs. They've been continuing with a series of articles, using research by organizations that want the spoils for their own members and would benefit from such programs being more restrictive.

But regardless of the wisdom and benefit (or lack thereof) of such programs, what they've uncovered in this case looks like people who are by law entitled-to-participate, participating.