I respect their desire to maintain their sovereignty, but if you need the U.S. State Department to help you get a visa, you are doing exactly what people with U.S. passports do.

Preserving sovereignty is a worthwhile principle. Merely avoiding using a certain piece of paper is not. These people are doing everything someone dependent on the U.S. government for protection & safe passage would do.

It's like saying you are independent from the U.S. because you paid your federal taxes in pennies. Having the Secretary of State personally get you a visa is just a highly inefficient version of a U.S. passport.

Luanna Bear doesn't speak for the entire Muscogee Nation and she doesn't represent the tribe's official stance so quoting one individual who prefers to use a US passport hardly qualifies as "Native Americans" (plural) who disagree on the issue.

American history isn't 200 years old or 400 years old, it's tens of thousands of years old. These people have more than earned the right to have a say in their own identity. And after every broken treaty with every form of government—whether parochial, colonial, royal, municipal, provincial, federal, and on and on and on—that imposed itself on them...why should they give in and give up anymore.

why should they give in and give up anymore.

We all have in this new age. I'd love to not have to take off my shoes, be able to bring full water bottles and a Swiss army knife, etc. rather than submit to all the security theater at airports. But that's not going to happen. If the rest of us have to deal with rules, why should they be exempt?

If they're so keen on preserving their cultural history and not using modern passports, let them go ahead and paddle canoes across the Atlantic.

That's why I'm rooting for them. Of all the people who can take on the status quo and speak truth to power towards this byzantine government, it's them.

If they're so keen on preserving their cultural history and not using modern passports, let them go ahead and paddle canoes across the Atlantic.

Ba-Dum-Tish!...[crickets chirping]

I bet in their craziest, wildest, most far-fetched dreams they have the dignity of carrying modern, state-of-the-art, internationally recognized Native American passports given to them as a courtesy from the powers-that-be that had robbed them of so very, very much.

People from every country and background, regardless of what horrors their history may have held, have to use the new type of passport issued by a recognized nation that abides by international compacts. This isn't some sort of despicable betrayal of these people, it's a simple progression of border security and technology.

Agreed, the long-term solution is to have the State Department issue modern, state-of-the-art, internationally recognized Native American passports.

The problem is that they don't want them. Their thinkng is that they are sovereign and only they should issue their own passports. They can easily get American passports now but stubbornly refuse to do so. But as this incident proves, what one group considers acceptable identification is worthless if it does not meet the requirements of the international community. No country can unilaterally demand that every nation accept its travel documents. That has to be negotiated and agreed upon, and they haven't done that. If you want to be treated as a nation, you have to act like one.

Do they need a passport to travel off the reservation? To go to the local off-res stores? If they are a sovereign nation, then they should be asked for a passport, and submit to the same searches as incoming foreigners. Or.....just suck it up and deal w/ history as it is, not as it should be. We all feel bad for how a deceiptful, greedy US govt screwed them 100 years ago, but it is what it is now, and they need to deal w/ it.

You are not sovereign. Your a state of the federation the USA. If you want to be sovereign, you'll start having to pay for your own defense. Obtain your own visa rights through negotiation with the State Department. And resist any attempts to be invaded by military action of foreign countries. And figure out how you will survive when your landlocked, with a wall/barbwire and a CBP station to get off the reservation. You natives have it pretty good in the USA.

Walls and border crossings have really worked with mexico.

Wow yeah those Native Americans have had it sooo good. Casinos and tax-free cigarettes make up for hundreds of years of genocide and being cheated out of every treaty they've signed with the good old USA.

Who are they supposed to be afraid of being invaded by? Canada?

Prob negotiating your own international visas would help your sovereignity too, eh?

"Though the State Department offered to expedite U.S. issued passports for the team, the team manager said traveling with anything but their Haudenosaunee confederacy passports would be an insult to their culture."

Ah yes, the traditional Haudenosaunee confederacy passports. Somehow, almost magically, these existed before the conception of nation states was thrust upon native americans by white people. Vital to their culture in every aspect.