This is a confusing situation, as Aboriginal tribes/nations are sometimes considered separate political entities from the country within which they live and other times are not. The Iroquois nation apparently has been issuing their own passports, but now the British and US governments don’t want to honour them as they have in the recent past:
The Iroquois team, known as the Nationals, represents the six Indian nations that comprise the Iroquois Confederacy, which the Federation of International Lacrosse considers to be a full member nation, just like the United States or Canada. The Nationals enter this year’s tournament ranked fourth in the world.
The Nationals’ 50-person delegation had planned to travel to Manchester, England, on Sunday on their own tribal passports, as they have done for previous international competitions, team officials said.
But on Friday, the British consulate informed the team that it would only issue visas to the team upon receiving written assurance from the United States government that the Iroquois had been granted clearance to travel on their own documents and would be allowed back into the United States. Neither the State Department nor the Department of Homeland Security would offer any such promise.
If the US government has allowed the use of Iroquois travel documents before, why are they now pretending they’ve never encountered them before? Is it a formal change in policy or just a bureaucrat flexing his or her ability to cause inconvenience and delay on a whim?
Update, 14 July: The New York Times reports that the team has been allowed to travel on their Iroquois passports:
The State Department’s blessing ends a five-day standoff between the Iroquois team and the federal government over whether the players could travel on their own documents instead of United States passports, as they have done in past international competitions.
Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York, said in a statement that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally intervened in the case on Wednesday morning and that the team would be able to depart on Wednesday afternoon.
“I am extremely grateful to Secretary of State Clinton, who responded to this glitch promptly and efficiently,” Ms. Slaughter said. “Going forward, we must find a way to balance homeland security concerns with some common sense and a border policy that does not create unintended consequences.”
Part of the reason appears to have been technical: “The Iroquois passports are partly hand-written and do not include any of the security features that make United States passports resistant to counterfeiting.”
Earlier this year the coalition government announced details of a £32 billion ($52 billion) super-fast railway line from London to Manchester and Leeds via Birmingham (see map). Philip Hammond, the transport secretary, claims it will be a “fast track” to prosperity. If the project goes ahead—and there is still, just, time to reconsider—the final route, and Stoke’s transport fate, will not be decided until 2012 at the earliest. The first trains won’t reach Birmingham until 2026, and Leeds and Manchester until 2032-3.
